At 74 years old, Martin Scorsese seems to busier and have more projects on his plate than filmmakers half his age. With “Silence” finally finished, the director is hoping to turn to “The Irishman” next, with tentative plans to start lensing in February, but he’s also got a filing cabinet filled with developing projects, and at least one of them is still being actively looked at.
Over a year ago, it was announced that Scorsese would reteam with Leonardo DiCaprio on the adaptation of Erik Larson‘s great non-fiction book “The Devil In The White City: Murder, Magic And Madness At The Fair That Changed America.” It tells the story of doctor Henry H. Holmes who used the chaos of the 1893 Chicago’s World Fair to kill a string of young women in his monument to death, the “World’s Fair Hotel,” which housed an array of equipment to help him dispatch his victims. So far, Graham Moore (“The Imitation Game“) and Billy Ray (“Shattered Glass,” “Captain Phillips“) have tackled the script, but Scorsese says there’s still work to be done.
“One of the things that I had to stop for the past six month was my meetings on that script. They want me to start again in January and see if we can find a way because it’s an extraordinary story,” the director told The Toronto Sun.
Hopefully, they can crack the material, because it truly is a remarkable — and chilling — tale. However, following “Silence,” Scorsese seems to be returning to films about killers and men with cracked moral codes (“The Irishman” centers on an aging hitman). And as he admits to The Sunday Times’ Culture magazine (via The Hamilton Spectator), going down that road can be difficult, and he’s candid about the struggles he had with his Oscar winning movie “The Departed” in that regard.
“Moral Ground Zero, I call it. All the characters killed at the end, basically everyone, and there was no place to go, after that. You know, I hardly did any press for that film. I was tired of it. I felt it was maddening,” Scorsese said. “I mean, I like the picture, but the process of making it, particularly in the post-production, was highly unpleasant. I said, I don’t care how much I’m being paid, it’ll kill me. I’ll die. Very simply.”
Well, it sounds like “Silence” really got made at the right time for the filmmaker, allowing him to tackle much more weighty issues than his past few movies, and likely allow him to return to more genre oriented fare feeling a bit fresher about it.
“Silence” opens on December 23rd.