Martin Scorsese Plans To Make Silence His Next Film (Probably)

Don’t toy with my emotions, Marty. Between you and Guillermo del Toro, my cinematic life is a series of ups and downs, from the depths of despair to the heights of hope.

At least, that’s my reaction to this latest news about Martin Scorsese’s next project. He’s promised that his next film will be Silence, and we’re holding him to that because … because I want to see the damn movie.

If you missed it, over the summer Scorsese got into a bit of a legal tiff with Cecchi Gori Pictures, the production company behind Silence, after he’d promised to make the film following Hugo and instead made The Wolf of Wall Street first. Now he’s renewed his promise to take it on next.

Silence is an adaptation of Shusako Endo’s novel about 17^th Century Jesuit priests traveling to Japan to find their mentor. They face violence and persecution on the way – in a Scorsese movie? No! – but that’s OK, because they’re spreading Christianity. The plot sounds good, but what makes this more exciting (to me at least) is that Daniel Day-Lewis, Benicio Del Toro and Gael Garcia Bernal have all been linked to the production. Any of the above will make me happy to sit through a movie about Jesuit priests.

For those of you not quite as excited about Silence as I am, there’s more news about one of Scorsese’s other projects: The Irishman, the movie that reunites the director with his once favorite star Robert De Niro. Scorsese recently held a table read at the Tribeca Film Center to get investors interested in the film. De Niro will play World War II veteran Frank Sheehan, a man who rose high in the Teamsters while also being a hitman. With Al Pacino in the pipeline to play Jimmy Hoffa and Joe Pesci attached to the project, it sounds like old Italian actors week here at the Scorsese ranch.

So that’s the Scorsese news: two films gathering steam, another (The Wolf of Wall Street) just wrapped. We’ll have to wait and see what comes of all this planning. Scorsese has also been talking about that Frank Sinatra biopic for awhile now, so there’s not really any saying what will happen. I’m rooting for Silence, but honestly, anything that Martin Scorsese wants to direct automatically has my attention.