Nicholson shines with intensity in ‘The Departed’
NEW YORK – When Jack Nicholson learned of the role of a brutal Boston crime boss in director Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed,” he read the script and told the director that his cinematic stew contained plenty of punch but desperately needed one element: A little spice. Nicholson had the idea to transform the 70-year-old Irish villain at the center of the R-rated picture into a sexually driven beast, a self-destructive kingpin with no intention of giving up his illegal operations, toning down his violent behavior or cutting back on his carnal conquests.
“The Departed,” which opens Oct. 6, is an adaptation of the critically acclaimed Hong Kong crime thriller “Infernal Affairs” (2000). The plot follows the opposite paths of two smart and tough young police operatives, one (Leonardo DiCaprio, 31, of “Titanic”) working undercover as a spy on the mob and the other (Matt Damon, 36, of “The Bourne Identity”) feeding a gang kingpin key information about investigations and impending arrests.
At a news conference (which Nicholson was unable to attend due to illness), Scorsese, DiCaprio and Damon gathered to discuss the film. The participants, particularly Damon, seemed extremely pleased to watch Nicholson create a psychotic criminal.
“Jack really brought this incredible new element, new layer to his character,” Damon said. “He made him more obscene, basically, but in a way that felt authentic.
“Guys like his character would sublimate sex into violence and violence into sex. I don’t know how much research Jack did, or whether it (his performance) was just intuitive, or what his process was exactly, but I found him really committed to making the character believable and pushing the envelope.
“There’s a lot of stuff that didn’t make the final version, but as Jack said, ‘I want to give too much in all of these scenes and then let Marty figure out the level that’s right for his film.’ It was impressive to see how much work he put into it and how obscene he was willing to be in order to be believable and real.”
For DiCaprio, working with Nicholson provided the level of intensity he had anticipated.
“As far as Jack was concerned, I expected the unexpected,” DiCaprio said. “We knew that having Jack Nicholson sign up to play a gangster for Martin Scorsese was something I think a lot of movie fans have been waiting for.
“For me, there were a number of different scenes with Nicholson where I had no idea what was going to happen. In one (an intense segment in which the mob boss sadistically manhandles DiCaprio’s character to learn if he’s working undercover), Jack told Marty that he didn’t feel he was intimidating enough. It was one of the most memorable experiences of my life as far as being an actor is concerned.
“But the next day, I came in (to redo the scene), and a prop guy said to me, ‘Be careful. He (Nicholson) has a fire extinguisher, a gun, some matches and a bottle of whiskey.’ Some of those things (in the reshot scene) are in the final film, and some of them aren’t.
“For me as an actor, I wasn’t really afraid, because we’re all professionals here and all playing roles. But for me playing a guy who has to relate to the audience that he’s having a 24-hour-a-day panic attack because he’s surrounded by people who would blow his head off if they knew who he was, and that’s coupled with the fact that I’m sitting across the table from a homicidal maniac, I thought maybe he was going to light me on fire.
“That creates a whole new dynamic. We all knew if Nicholson came on board he would have to let this character be free-falling and we all worked (expecting that anything could happen) that way each day on the set.”
Scorsese is known for working closely with his actors, particularly Robert De Niro in “Mean Streets,” “Taxi Driver,” “New York, New York,” “Raging Bull,” “The King of Comedy,” “GoodFellas,” “Cape Fear” and “Casino” and DiCaprio in “Gangs of New York,” “The Aviator” and now “The Departed.” The acclaimed 63-year-old director enjoyed creating a character with Nicholson but declined to give details on their process.
“Nicholson and I worked in a different way, but that is kind of a private situation,” Scorsese said. “We developed the character and decided the power of this man and the occurrence of his slowly falling apart – losing his mind. We went in that direction (with the mobster self-destructing).”
In recent years, Scorsese, an Italian American, has become fascinated with Irish culture, which is reflected in his films.
“I’ve always felt a close affinity with the Irish, particularly coming out of the same area of New York City, though by the 1920s and early 1930s most of the Irish had moved out of the neighborhood where I came from,” the filmmaker said. “My interest goes back to ‘Gangs of New York’ and stories about the way the Irish helped create New York and America.
“And don’t forget, I have a very strong love for Hollywood cinema, and some of the greatest filmmakers to come out of Hollywood were Irishmen such as John Ford (“The Searchers”), Raoul Walsh (“White Heat”) and others.
“You can talk about the family structure in Ford’s ‘How Green Was My Valley,’ which is about Welsh miners but was directed by an Irishman. The film has this warmth and this family culture of the Irish that we (Italians when he was growing up) felt very close to.”
Although “The Departed” is based on the Asian hit “Infernal Affairs,” Scorsese made it clear that he wasn’t trying to recreate the Hong Kong title and is highly impressed by the work that has come from that region of China.
“I never thought about ‘The Departed’ as related to Hong Kong,” Scorsese said. “I just related to the story as in the script.
“In terms of Hong Kong cinema, once I saw John Woo’s ‘The Killer,’ I knew I couldn’t go near that. There’s a whole other thing going on.
“You have to appreciate (Hong Kong) movies as a filmmaker, and you get inspiration from them, because you see new ways of making narrative film.”
With “The Departed,” Scorsese creates a brutal world where bloody beatings, gunshot wounds and shattered bones are continually inflicted by the Irish gang members willing to sell anything – including military armaments that could fall into the hands of enemies of the United States – for the right price.
For DiCaprio, preparing for the film’s grisly elements was as easy as turning on his DVD player.
“I guess I prepared by watching Martin Scorsese movies,” DiCaprio said with a laugh. “That form of immediate violence is not familiar to me, but that’s what you do as an actor.
“This is a tightly woven, highly complex ensemble piece that’s a gangster thriller. It’s very rare in this business where a script lands on your lap and it’s ready to go. This was one of those rare occurrences where you have duplicitous characters, information, disinformation and plot twists all coming to a satisfying ending.
“I think I got the script around the time Marty got it. We just talked to each other. He wanted to do it, I wanted to do it, and for the lack of a better term, the rest is history.”