EXTRA! Robert DeNiro, Martin Scorsese. Al Pacino

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Life is for living. Let's partner for all of it. Learn more at edwardjones.com. I'm Jane Pauley, and this is our very first Sunday Morning Extra, a podcast featuring a memorable story from our latest show. For our inaugural outing, three cinematic superstars team up for the first time. Nowadays, young people, they don't know who Jimmy Hoffa was. They don't have a clue.

I mean, maybe they know that he disappeared or something, but that's about it. That's The Irishman, the big name, big budget Netflix movie coming out next month. The film centers around the life and sins of Frank Sheeran, a mobster who claims to have killed a number of people, including Jimmy Hoffa, the teamsters leader who famously disappeared in 1975. It's an epic story in every way, including its cast and director. Robert De Niro plays Sheeran, Al Pacino is Jimmy Hoffa, and Martin Scorsese is the director. The three have never worked together until now. There's going to be some interview.

We're all out of our heads. Our Lee Cowan sat down with De Niro, Pacino, and Scorsese to talk movies, friendships, and more. Well, congratulations, you guys, on the movie.

It's amazing, especially after 12 years of trying to get it made, right? Yeah, it took a while. It was very hard for different reasons to people, schedules, my schedule, all this sort of thing. It became a problem in terms of, on the one hand, a problem with playing younger, because the film intercuts over 50 years, and on the other hand, and on the other hand, I must say, not much interest in us making this movie in the Hollywood of that time. Now, there would be no interest at all. Why? Because it was too expensive?

Because of the scale? Just like that anymore. At the end of the day, do you believe him? Frank Sheeran? Yeah. I do. Yeah? You think he did it? I do. That's me. I do. Do you ever wonder what he would think of the film?

Oh, God. I don't know if I want to know. I mean, you can't... Whatever you would think, it would be understandable. It's not like with Jake. We did Raging Bull. We spun it through the way we feel about things, how we interpreted it, and Jake was great about everything, the script. You take an actual person, but you can't make a film about an actual person. We take from that person in his or her milieu, and their lives, and things they've experienced, and we create something from that, as a character.

They're the actors, and they create something from that, inspired their from. You've said that it's a movie about organized crime, and yet that's not really what it's about. It's really just the context for it.

The organized crime is the milieu. It's the board in which everything is played out as a game, in a sense. Not only a game in a light sense, but the nature of who they are, and the world they're in. It's about love. It's about betrayal, ultimately. It's about forgiveness, or the lack thereof. It's about what a human being is.

What is that part of our soul, so to speak, that is evil, and that is good? Do you think the three of you could have made this same movie 30 years ago, 40 years ago? Or does this sort of life experience that you all have really contribute to how, because it's a very reflective film, right? It's looking back over a long life, and looking through that lens. Well, I wouldn't think so.

I don't know, just off the top of my head. I think that part of the... Well, my reaction when I saw it is that I thought this was made... Running throughout it is this kind of river of wisdom that somehow escapes the film and reaches you. I think 30 or 40 years ago, I don't think that insight would be ready. What was it like? Everyone's made such a... I think fans have been waiting for the three of you to do something forever. Why did it take so long? You didn't want to work with me, right? I didn't want to work with you. That makes sense.

Who would? Yeah, it just came to me one day. I don't think I want to work with that guy. What has that experience been like that you're now finally sort of the three of you together? I think it's the other nature of what we do, because we start things sometimes and they go off in different directions. Marty and I had started a few things in the past that almost got there, and then things happened.

Same thing with Bob and I. We've missed a few of them. You did Heat. We did Heat. Oh, that's true.

I never even worked with you. That's right. But Heat was a killer.

There's something there. Oh, Heat. Yeah, we did Heat together. We did another movie, Righteous Kill together. And we were in The Godfather II, which Bob got an Oscar for. So, I mean, we weren't on screen together. He played.

He never worked together. He's your younger father. Yeah, he's my younger father. He plays my father. He plays your father. It's wonderful. That's all I can say.

It's about time. What was it like working with him? Did you know what to expect? I came up with something earlier.

I thought, you know, how can you say you work with someone like Marty? I mean, it's another thing. And I thought, you know what it is? It's tantamount of being, you're without a net, and you don't care. It's like going on a wire without a net. I think that would say it, because you can do anything, because you know somehow he's the net. He will take care of it, whatever you do. Go in this direction, that direction.

You're safe. And that's, I can't, I couldn't say it consciously at the time. I would embarrass myself and him, too, but I didn't know it. And I thought that if I did just do that, I could do anything. Did you improvise a lot?

Yeah, sometimes I did. I drove them nuts. But at the same time, it was only one time where you were doing the speech in front of the, it was so funny because I had a touch of asthma that day, and we were in the back, but there were like a couple of hundred extras, right? And they're all yelling, ha-ha-ha-ha. And it was you making the speech about if you have pencils, if you have chairs, if you have anything, your oil for your industries and everything, a truck brought it to you. The minute our trucks stop, America stops.

And big business and government is trying to tear the union apart. Interesting, that alone. Beautiful reading. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. But in any event, I was way in the back. And I just said, just do a few takes in one. And the audit, by that point, the extras are really revved up, and he did a second time. They were even louder and everything. But then I wanted him to stop. And I kept yelling, cut, cut, cut. I couldn't breathe.

I said, finally, people ran down there to stop because he was going. Was it hard though? Because the two of you sort of almost have this unspoken language. You've worked together so much. Did you feel that at all? I think I'm getting between them.

It's great to work with such an ease and such a, as I said, they're the net. I mean, they make it. And you tell this guy something, anything. He just goes with anything. You just say anything.

He's there. Is that right? Yes. I mean, I try to, because if you work with somebody, you don't want to get in the way and edit or stop their creative thing, whatever it is.

So like in life, you've got to go and what's with you. I remember once I was doing a movie with Brando. The one movie I did is called The Score. And the director asked me, Frank, I'm thinking of Marlon for that. And I said, I said, yeah, I mean, you know what it'll be, but you know, it's okay. And he came in and Marlon, I don't even know if he read the script. He just went where he wanted to go and everybody, you know, you just go with him.

What else are you going to do? You just had to keep up with it? Yeah. I mean, it's okay. You make sense of it. They'll make sense of it.

It'll all come together. It's okay. I mean, he wasn't doing that. I'm just saying, but you just don't, you try, you just got to accept whoever's there, whatever's there, the situation, unless it's just totally, and then Marty would say, well, we got to make these adjustments.

That's what he did. Well, I told Marty and he understood it too, because I, I did come in on a, when I said a moving train, they had started over. You guys have been shooting for a while. And I said, yes. I said, excuse me, Marty. I'm just, you know, I am. And again, I'm always used to rehearsing.

And, and, cause again, in the early city lament films, I mean, I rehearsed. It's three weeks. There you go. That's it. And you go in and you do one take. That's it.

Yeah. As a director, how are they different as actors? It's, you know, I'm not a trained like director.

I haven't taken acting courses or, or, you know, I don't know about technique, you know, but it's, it's, it's really the school of Kazan and Cassavetes. It's what I experienced from that. So, so in a way, I feel that I don't want to limit your accomplishments here, the who you are, but they also are part of that time, 1950 on, with the big change from Lee J. Cobb and Death of a Salesman and Brando and Streetcar.

So that was speaking to a post-war new generation and that changed acting in a way. And we come from that. Bob and I, we know each other actually for many, many years. And he knows how I grew up. He knows where I grew up and what it was like.

He was part of it to a certain extent. And I just always found them when I first worked with him, that if he said he wanted to try something and I said, Oh, all right, go ahead. And I liked it. So next time he said he wanted to try something, I said, huh? And he goes, I'll show you. I said, no, no, no, don't show me.

I mean, don't tell me, show me. And I shot it. And we were talking then about really fast schedules. And it was that energy, you know, and invariably we kind of thought the same way.

So Al stepping into that, and I forgot, it was like halfway, a third of the way through. And when I say we didn't rehearse it, I don't mean to denigrate rehearsal in a way. Rehearsal is very, very important, but it didn't need, it didn't have to. What's it like for you to, with the de-aging thing, and I don't want to go into all the, all the, all the aspects of it, but what's it like to look at yourselves on screen and see yourselves 20 or 30 years younger?

Well, I used to joke, you know, to land 30 years to my career. But is it, is it sort of unsettling a bit or is it? Oh, happy, happy. We can do it. Do you feel like collectively that this is one of the best things you guys have ever done?

I feel okay with it. Meaning, I mean, yeah, well, I mean, I feel it isn't over. It's still with me and it'll always be with, I mean, a lot of the work I've done over the years, it's part of who you are and it's, it's life.

It's not just, it's not work. It goes beyond being a movie, you know, so it is definitely something that is helping. I think me personally at this stage of my life. How about you guys? Yeah, I mean, I feel I, it took so long for you to bring this. Yeah, we, I mean, I always knew that it would be a special thing no matter what happened as far as the reaction to it, that we would be, create something, do something together, all of us that would be special and the experience was worth it, the endeavor, the time, the sacrifice or whatever you, whatever it took, it was going to be special no matter what.

You can't take that away from us. I would like to see it. I know I said this and I don't know if I should say it, but I know this is going to be on Netflix and I'm very happy with Netflix and happy that they've done it. It'd be great on a big screen though. But I would hope. Yeah, people see it in the theater.

Well, even if when it's on Netflix, I mean, everybody doesn't have Netflix, do they, or? No. But I was thinking, we were talking about it the other day, if it would be an interesting thing in some of the cities that they had a movie, a movie, a film house playing. I think they will be doing that. I think that's it.

They do it for three weeks. Well, no, they, no, they're going to continue while it's on Netflix and continue in theaters. Roma's still playing around the world. Wow. I mean, it's a whole new ball. It's a whole new game out there. We don't know where this is going to go. The fact is that this film is made by Netflix. They stepped up, no interference, none allowed us to experiment with the CGI, all of that sort of thing. And if they hadn't, it never would have gotten, no, never would have gotten made because they're not making, they don't want to make the pictures I want to make out there. It's over, it's finished. It would be wonderful to experience on a bigger, in a big screen and to experience, I try to shoot it for both actually.

I was going to say, yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing about it is at home, you know, it's two things. One is to it on a, on a big screen at home. It's great to concentrate on it, not to take calls, not to get up, whatever, if you can. Some people who can afford to have a little private screening room at home, better yet, they're going to look at a movie.

Okay. And to steel yourself and understand that the picture has a pace and a time that you have to invest in. The picture is about an accumulation of detail and accumulation of feelings. And it needs that pace. It needs that investment of time, which is highly irregular in our society today. Nobody wants to put time into anything.

You've got to talk real fast, invest in me. You know what I'm saying? So we can't think, soundbite, soundbite, soundbite. Take your time and think about who we are as human beings. Think about our lives, our friends, our loves, and our mortality also.

Was this one of the longest? It just makes it a little easier for that to happen when you're in a theater because it's, it's putting a little, and I think it's, that's a conversation to have one day about that very thing. And it's a fact, because the mere fact that somewhere within you, you know, that you're going to, you can stop it at any time you wish to, or if the phone rings. Yeah. You can get up and down.

It's a different thing. I have a little, Ford have a little screening room in my house and I get that. You know, look, there's, where are the theaters going? The theaters are going now for the, the big, what are they called? Tentpole films. Superheroes.

Yeah, the superheroes. It's a different, not only a different Hollywood, it's a different, almost art form industry. They no longer making the films that we came out of.

They just aren't. Now look at when that, the Avengers open, which is, you know, a lot of, by the way, some of those people making those pictures, great work, beautiful work, but the movies have become, you go to a theater to see them, you're going to an amusement park and it's really a theme park ride movie. That's what you got. And when I saw that the Avengers, a photo in the Times, I think it showed a theater, a multiplex showing 12 screens and every one of them is showing, I think for one screen, 11 screens at the Avengers, that's not fair. So what you're doing is basically cutting off cinema. You're stopping it from being made. Well, there's independent cinema. Yeah, they'll give you that.

It's almost like a bone they throw. It has to be shown in a theater. It doesn't mean you can't see it at home, you know, but you're going to see it more and more at home if you can't get to a theater that's not showing it. Or if you go to a theater that's showing it, that's like a little box and the stairs, the chairs are broken and it's dirty and people are yelling. Who's going to go? You go to the next door to see the Avengers.

Is there anything about this film that says something about our current times, you think? You know, no one is above the law. No one is above the law. And I'm not talking about the law of the land. I'm talking about law. Now it doesn't mean all these, you know, the Illuminati nonsense and the conspiracy theories.

I'm talking about basic things where they work. They were getting a lot of money. The darker forces of our culture and society were doing very well. And he comes back, rightly so, and wants his union. And so in a way, he oversteps his line because he got involved with the wrong people. And he had to, because the nature of labor at the time and the nature of government and big business coming in and destroying it. And it made him behave, understandably, almost like they do.

So you got involved with them. It's all about power. It's not about money, it's not about sex, it's about power.

And somebody is not going to relinquish that power if other people are going to go, how should I put it, above the law in a sense. Yet there is a ceiling there, isn't there? Yeah.

There is a ceiling. It's about getting older and what's happening with us and even the thing you don't know about getting older until you get there. Until you get there is a line, remember? Yeah, that's great. Do you think we'll ever see the three of you together again? It'd be great, but who knows? I'm just happy we got this.

This is The Takeout with Major Garrett. This week, Stephen Law, ally of Mitch McConnell and one of Washington's biggest midterm money men. List for me the two Senate races where you think Republicans have the best chance of taking a Democratic seat away. Nevada, New Hampshire. Not Georgia. Well, Georgia's right up there, but New Hampshire is a surprise. In New Hampshire, people really just kind of don't like Maggie Hassan. For more from this week's conversation, follow The Takeout with Major Garrett on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.