Things are heating up when it comes to Martin Scorsese’s much-anticipated “The Irishman.”
We were the first to report the supposed November 27th release date the film had on its schedule. It is set to world premiere at the New York Film Festival in early October. However, today we can add another film festival to its itinerary, none other than The BFI London Film Festival, which will have the film premiere just two days after its New York homecoming.
According to ScreenDaily, the BFI London Film Festival will screen “The Irishman” as the event’s closing night film on October 13: “This picture was many years in the making,” said Scorsese. “It’s a project that Robert De Niro and I started talking about a long time ago, and we wanted to make it the way it needed to be made. It’s also a picture that all of us could only have made at this point in our lives.”
There have been rumblings here and there about the film’s familiarity, this being Scorsese tackling similar themes from his past classics film, and yet, here we are and absolutely everyone wants to watch this film. Our nostalgia-obsessed culture has rendered “The Irishman” a must-see, but it should be a must-see regardless of nostalgic fervor, mostly because it’s Scorsese, a filmmaker that has given us one of the great filmographies of the cinematic era. And, yes, it so happens that the New York born writer-director’s best movies also happen to involved De Niro (“Mean Streets,” “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “The King of Comedy,” “Goodfellas” and “Casino”). Add in Joe Pesci, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel and you have a cinematic wet-dream.
Edward Berger seems to have settled on what comes next. His Lance Armstrong biopic, starring Austin Butler, is now holding casting calls, with production eyed for January.