Director Adam Sacks Wants To Erase The Rat From 'The Departed'

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We can all agree that director and filmmaker Martin Scorsese is a genius. His films like “Taxi Driver,” “Goodfellas,” and “Wolf of Wall Street” made him a household name, and he’s still going strong with his career. But it was 2006’s “The Departed” that won him four Academy Awards, including Best Director. It was a classic, a fan favorite except for one tiny, squeaky detail. The rat.

This is what Director Adam Sacks sets out to fix. A fan of Scorsese and “The Departed,” Sacks created a Kickstarter campaign two days ago in order to fix that one cheesy detail of an otherwise perfect movie. The film takes place in Boston, where a mob boss (Jack Nicholson) plants a mole (Matt Damon) in the Massachusetts state police force. At the same time, the police force plants their own undercover agent (Leonardo Di Caprio) in the mob. Once both sides realize their predicament, it’s a race against time to learn the identity of the other side’s rat first, before their own man is caught. Hence the symbolism of the actual rat scurrying across the shot at the end, which you can watch here:

“It’s always bothered me that a movie as good as The Departed has such a cheesy ending, and I recently realized it could be fixed by digitally erasing the rat from the last shot,” Sacks wrote on the front page of his Kickstarter. According to the numbers, he wasn’t the only one that found the rat a problem. In the two days since the campaign was posted, Sacks’ goal of $4,000 has already been reached. But according to Twitter account Eyes On Cinema, it looks like the deed has already been done by one Mark LaCroix.

Sacks is not satisfied, however. “[It] is a nice pre-visualization for what I’m setting out to do, [but] It’s well documented that Martin Scorsese is a strong believer in shooting movies on film and preserving the art of making movies on film,” Sacks told Gizmodo when questioned about LaCroix’s video. “Therefore, I think erasing the rat in his movie, and claiming that you’re done without also putting it onto 35mm film, is disrespectful to Mr. Scorsese’s legacy.”

Sacks has the money, he has the plan, and he certainly has a long way to go ahead of him to honor Scorsese’s legacy while still getting rid of “this gnawing, teething, fucking rat” (as Nicholson so aptly puts it in the movie). With his whole game plan laid out on his Kickstarter page, Sacks hopes to get the final blue-ray product done and out by November.