The Irishman: What’s Your Character’s “Thing”?
The Irishman: What’s Your Character’s “Thing”?
This week we’re going to look at The Irishman, written by Steven Zaillian and directed by Martin Scorsese.
Let’s set aside for a moment the all-star cast. Let’s also set aside whether the age-enhancement technology was distracting or valuable. Let’s set aside the pacing of the film and whether it should have been shorter or starts too slow. And let’s set aside thoughts about where this fits in the Scorsese canon. Let’s even set aside any questions about whether this is the true story or not.
Instead, I want to focus on what this film can teach you as a screenwriter.
At slightly more than three-and-a-half hours long, we could probably teach a 15-hour podcast on this film and still not mine all the value in it for you as a screenwriter.
I want to focus on one very important aspect that’s going to give you the most value as you watch or rewatch the film and look at how Steven Zaillian’s script is powering these extraordinary performances.
The Irishman is a primer on how to write a script to attract an A-list actor and create an unforgettable character.
This script is a primer on how to adapt an extremely complicated true story with a man at the center who doesn’t seem like the kind of character you would build a movie around. It’s a primer on how to take that story and create something compelling, to ask a profound question and build it around this vast array of characters we need to fully understand.
I’m going to talk about how Steven Zaillian does that, then take you on a deep dive into what I consider to be the seminal scene in the film. I want to show you how Zaillian’s script allowed the actors to take that scene and push it to an even higher level.
We’re going to talk about adaptation, rewriting, and the whole process a film goes through not just by ending at the finished page, but by how it’s transformed and shaped into becoming something even better on the screen.
It’s important to understand that Frank Sheeran, the character at the center of The Irishman, is an extraordinarily challenging character to build a movie around.
This is not Goodfellas, a fun film built around a tragically flawed and open book of a human being. This is a film built around a man who seems like ice and whose primary characteristic is that he doesn’t share his emotions. He doesn’t allow anyone to see what he’s feeling; he’s not actually connected to anyone. He’s the kind of man who can murder anyone for any reason and not even feel bad about or regret it.
This is an extraordinarily challenging character.
Typically, when we think about a character, we think about an arc. We think about a character who’s going to go on a journey of change, usually a positive journey of change.
Even if we’re building a movie like Goodfellas, we’re going to watch a character fall into the vortex. We’re going to take a relatively good guy and push him off the edge into the ocean.
What’s happening in The Irishman is something much more challenging and complicated. You have a character at the center who is not going to change.
There might be a tiny glimmer of change toward the very end of the film, but this character is never going to have that cathartic moment you’re waiting for. This character is so busy protecting something he doesn’t even fully understand that he’s never going to be able to see himself or step into the kind of change we would normally see.
The question then becomes, how do you build around a character like that? How do you make that character compelling?
In a traditional film, you would carefully build the relationship between Frank Sheeran and his daughter Peggy, for example. You would build that relationship because you would know that ultimately — and there’s a tiny spoiler here — Peggy is going to stop talking to her father.
Using traditional structure,