Martin Scorsese still gets chills recalling the moment Jack Nicholson pulled a real gun on Leonardo DiCaprio during filming of “The Departed.”
Nicholson, 89, devised the surprise on the spot for a reshoot of the bar confrontation between his mob boss Frank Costello and DiCaprio’s undercover cop Billy Costigan. The scene, which premiered 20 years ago on September 26, 2006, originally contained no weapon at all. Nicholson revealed in an interview that he asked the prop master to hide a gun on the set and to bring a fire extinguisher as well. “The look on his face when I asked for that fire extinguisher was priceless,” he said.
The gun was a working prop, but Nicholson’s use of it was entirely unscripted and concealed from the director. Scorsese, who had no advance warning, later described the filming in Richard Schickel’s book “Conversations With Scorsese.” “The first thing Jack did was sniff the glass and say, ‘I smell a rat’… And then he pulled a gun on him,” the director recalled.
DiCaprio’s visible shock in the final cut was genuine. “He didn’t tell me he had a gun. It was great… We took a lot out, but Leo’s reaction is real-time… I still get chills… It’s so real to me,” Scorsese said.
The improvisation capped a character that almost never existed. Nicholson initially rejected the role of Costello outright because the part barely appeared in the original source material. “I actually turned the movie down the first time it came to me,” he explained, “because the character didn’t really exist. But Leo and Marty talked me into it. I guess you can say I was attracted to the company.”
“The Departed” is Scorsese’s remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller “Infernal Affairs,” in which the equivalent crime boss figure had minimal screen time. Once Nicholson signed on, the three men constructed Costello from nothing through collaborative sessions. “Marty is very free with his ideas, and very receptive to yours. We built this character layer by layer, until we had something that fit inside a great genre film, but also pushed the envelope until the movie becomes almost operatic,” Nicholson added.
The risk paid off with critics. Variety’s Todd McCarthy called the performance “theatrical in an entertaining way,” while the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mike LaSalle described it as “a psychologically detailed portrait of a twisted, old murderer.”