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But over holiday dinner, Scorsese began pitching Helman on a different film entirely.
Helman read the 170-page script forThe Irishmanin one sitting soon after.
And we all knew what the stakes were.
How exactly do you make old men young again?
The question has bedeviled Hollywood since aging actors sagging features first began flickering across 30-foot theater screens.
Its also been included on the Oscars short listfor Best Visual Effects.
In the early going, it seemed like no one could crack the scripts old-to-young-and-back-again timeline issues.
After ten weeks, we computed all the information we had and put it together, Helman recalls.
The results were conclusive: De Niro had been miraculously de-aged to a credible facsimile of his 46-year-old self.
We made him look like he does inGoodFellas and that got the movie green-lit, Helman says.
However, in a surprise move in February 2017, Paramount sold North American distribution rights toThe Irishmanto Netflix.
Thankfully, a streaming platform with deep pockets was willing to take the risk.
Over that year and change, Helman and his crew became increasingly convinced they were onto something groundbreaking.
Because we didnt have markers.
Now, the quality is much better.
You are not tied to the resolution of 200 points.
Now, you have millions of pixels that you’ve got the option to go into.
And hed move it a certain way.
I realized it was like a benediction of some kind.
Its something that becomes a ritual, Helman says.
After a regular, non-visual-effects movie, after a setup is done, you move on really quickly.
But we couldnt move on; we had to stay put for 30 seconds.
And there was a silence.
Everybody was ritualistically quiet.
And the computer program would spew out frames that were similar to the ones we rendered.
[The frames] didnt end up in the movie, he explains.
But it was a sanity check for us.
Because there are some times an actor doesnt look like himself or herself …
It depends on the lighting, the location, the camera angle.
So we will use a program to look for what we call behavioral likeness.
The actors look the way and behave the way that we recognize them as such.
We were always going to deliver when we delivered, he says.
Its not that we were slowing down anything.
Martys design of the characters was tailor made for the movie, Helman says.
Same thing with Pesci.
Pesci at 53 years old was never that thin as an actor.
He had a little more weight on him, but in the movie hes really thin.
That was by design.
That I dont have to spend two hours in makeup?
That I dont have to sit through a bunch of calibration cameras?
Those are the kind of things that are important.
And thats where were going.
