The Irishman (2019) long take

July 1.

Year : 2019
Director: Martin Scorsese
Country: United States (Netflix)
Cinematographer: Rodrigo Prieto (ASC, AMC - The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, Killers of the Flower Moon)
Steadicam operator: P. Scott Sakamoto (same operator as The Revenant - already in this collection)
VFX Supervisor: Pablo Helman (ILM)
Camera rig: "Three-Headed Monster" - Red Helium 8K (main camera) + 2 × ARRI Alexa Mini (infrared "witness" cameras for facial capture)
Steadicam rig adapted: 2-camera version (the 3rd camera was too heavy and was placed on a separate tripod)
Optics: Cooke Panchro Classic (vintage look, low contrast)
Film stock (non-de-aging scenes): 35mm Kodak
De-aging software: FLUX (developed by ILM, facial capture without markers, without a helmet)
Music: “In the Still of the Night” by The Five Satins (1956)
Opening sequence duration: ~2 minutes 30
Film duration: 209 minutes (3h29)
VFX de-aging shots: 1,750 (out of 2.5 hours of footage, "the equivalent of two films in one")
Budget: $159 million
Filming: 108 days, New York metropolitan area

A nursing home corridor. Beige tiles. Fluorescent lighting. Open bedroom doors on either side. The Five Satins' "In the Still of the Night" begins, a soft, slow, melancholic 1956 doo-wop. The Steadicam camera moves down the corridor. Slowly. It passes residents in wheelchairs, nurses, half-open doors to identical rooms. It doesn't hurry. It glides with that slightly imperfect fluidity that Prieto described as a "craftsman's quality." The cameraman's footsteps are almost perceptible in the rhythm of the shot. At the end of the corridor, in a common room, an old man sits in a wheelchair. It's Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro). 83 years old. Alone. He looks at the camera, he looks at you, and he begins to speak: "I hear you paint houses."

Why this scene is iconic

The Film Stage opened its interview with Prieto with this scene: "The Irishman opens with a tracking shot set to vintage music, territory not exactly unfamiliar to Scorsese. But it surprised and excited me because there's an instability at play: you can detect the footsteps of the person holding the camera, which gives this sequence a handcrafted quality." Prieto replied: "It's interesting you should say that, because cinematographers have complained to me about that—well, one cinematographer."

Imperfection is the subject. Scorsese shot the Copa Shot in Goodfellas (1990), the smoothest, most elegant, most exhilarating Steadicam shot in the history of cinema. Twenty-nine years later, he opens The Irishman with a Steadicam that wavers. That hesitates. That walks instead of dancing. The Copa Shot was the tracking shot of a 30-year-old man entering the world through the front door. The nursing home is the tracking shot of an 83-year-old man awaiting death in a beige corridor. Same tool. Same director. Same actor (De Niro). But the movement has changed because the character has changed.

Prieto explained that Scorsese had the music in mind before filming: "He was probably listening to the song while we were shooting." The shot's slow, metronomic, inexorable rhythm is set to the tempo of "In the Still of the Night." The tracking shot moves forward like time moves forward in The Irishman: without stopping, without going back, without speeding up. You are in the corridor with Frank. And the corridor leads nowhere.

How they filmed it

The opening shot presented a unique technical challenge: the Steadicam had to carry the "Three-Headed Monster," the three-camera rig invented by ILM for de-aging. The standard rig included a Red Helium 8K (main camera) flanked by two ARRI Alexa Mini cameras (witness cameras equipped with infrared lights to capture facial geometry in 3D). ILM needed the triangulation of the three cameras to create the FLUX technology, which is de-aging without facial markers and was developed over two years as "a NASA-worthy scientific project," according to Helman.

The problem: the three-camera rig was too heavy for the Steadicam. Prieto described the solution in ASC Magazine: "For the Steadicam, we ended up using a two-camera version of the rig, and the third camera was positioned outside the rig on a tripod to capture facial information that the two Steadicam cameras couldn't see." Sakamoto therefore carried two cameras on the Steadicam (the Red Helium plus an Alexa Mini), while a third Alexa Mini followed on a separate mount. Prieto worked closely with Helman to ensure the rig was "light enough for the operator to use any type of remote head or Steadicam.".

P. Scott Sakamoto, the same Steadicam operator as on The Revenant (2015), who has already contributed two articles to this collection, executed the shot. Prieto noted that maintaining the horizon and stability in a straight corridor is paradoxically more difficult than in a complex space: "When it's a very linear shot, like the entire opening in the corridor, it's very difficult to maintain the horizon and all those things." The instability that The Film Stage noticed was "not entirely intentional," according to Prieto, but Scorsese kept it because it served the tone.

The Cooke Panchro Classic lenses (vintage low-contrast glass) gave the image a nostalgic softness. Prieto had developed a system of "looks" for each era: Kodachrome for the 1950s (via an ENR process), Ektachrome for the 1960s and 70s, and a gradual desaturation for the present. The opening shot, the nursing home, the present, is the most desaturated in the entire film. Prieto: "For me, it's the loss of color and hope. Frank has all these feelings about what it all meant, the guilt and all that. The color disappears."

The $159 million budget, the highest of Scorsese's career, is largely explained by the de-aging technology: 1,750 VFX shots for 2 hours and 30 minutes of footage, processed over 9 months by ILM. But the opening shot contains no de-aging whatsoever. Frank is old. De Niro is old. The shot is simple: a Steadicam in a hallway. And it's the most expensive shot in the film, because it encapsulates the entire movie in 2 minutes and 30 seconds.

What to observe when reviewing it

The cameraman's footsteps (the entire shot). Listen. Beneath the music, beneath the ambient noises of the nursing home, you can hear the rhythm of Sakamoto's footsteps behind the Steadicam. Prieto said a cinematographer complained about it. Scorsese kept it. These footsteps are the heartbeat of the shot, slow, steady, human.
Desaturation (the entire shot): Compare the colors in this shot with scenes from the 1960s or 1970s later in the film. The nursing home is drained of color: beige, gray, white. Prieto: "The color disappears. It's the loss of hope." The saddest shot in the film is also the least colorful.
De Niro's gaze towards the camera (end of shot). Frank turns to face the camera and speaks directly to the viewer. This is the only moment in the shot where the camera ceases to be a ghost moving down a corridor and becomes a conversational partner. Frank looks at you and begins to tell his life story. You are sitting on the bench opposite. You are the last person who wants to listen to him.

Did you know that?

This shot completes the Scorsese/Steadicam triptych in this collection, the longest directorial arc on the site:

Goodfellas (1990, McConkey) The Copa Shot. Henry Hill enters the Copacabana through the back door, crosses the kitchen, arrives at his table, the Steadicam like ecstasy. The world opens up.
Casino (1995, Garrett Brown) The skim plan. The money flows through the casino from the counting room to the taxi, the Steadicam like an autopsy. The machine is running.
The Irishman (2019, Sakamoto) The retirement home. Frank waits in a beige corridor, the Steadicam as an elegy. The world closes in.

Twenty-nine years. Three camera operators. The same director, the same lead actor, the same equipment. And the camera movement tells the whole story: in 1990, she dances in a restaurant. In 1995, she glides through a casino. In 2019, she walks down a nursing home corridor. The camera's trajectory is the trajectory of life, from celebration to the machine to solitude.

Sakamoto is also the Steadicam operator for The Revenant (2015), the Arikara ambush, already featured in this collection. The same man who carried a camera amidst 200 extras in a snow battle now carries a camera in an empty nursing home corridor. And the empty corridor is more terrifying than the battle because the battle, at least, has an end.

Scorsese had prepared a de-aging test to convince De Niro: a scene from Goodfellas where De Niro's face was digitally de-aged. When De Niro saw the result, he said, "I thought I could extend my career by 30 years." The irony: The Irishman is a film about a man who CANNOT turn back time. Technology can de-age De Niro's face, but the opening shot shows his real face. The 76-year-old face. The face that technology cannot save.

Sources

Rodrigo Prieto - The Film Stage, "Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto on the Visual Storytelling of The Irishman" (November 2023)
Rodrigo Prieto - ASC Magazine, "Wages of Sin: The Irishman" (December 2023)
Rodrigo Prieto - Variety, "The Irishman DP Shares How He Mixed Media to Define the Movie's Different Eras" (November 2019)
Rodrigo Prieto - Gold Derby, "How The Irishman DP Rodrigo Prieto Portrayed Memory Onscreen" (November 2019)
Rodrigo Prieto - Studio Daily, "Rodrigo Prieto Gives The Irishman His All" (January 2020)
Pablo Helman / ILM - IndieWire, "How ILM's Innovative De-Aging VFX Rescued The Irishman" (January 2020)
Pablo Helman / ILM - No Film School, "Here's How ILM De-Aged The Irishman Cast" (December 2019)
Martin Scorsese - No Film School / NYFF, "Scorsese Reveals How The Irishman Finally Got Made" (October 2019)
Wikipedia - The Irishman