Jackson in “Captain Marvel.”īut for “The Irishman,” Helman and his team needed to figure out a way to de-age De Niro, as well as costars Al Pacino (who plays union leader Jimmy Hoffa) and Joe Pesci (who plays crime boss Russell Bufalino) without resorting to such elaborate and obtrusive performance-capture tech. Skilled makeup work, combined with tracking dots and the use of younger actors filmed in key scenes for visual effects artists to use as a sort of digital paintbox in postproduction, is an approach used to create younger versions of Kurt Russell in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. That work may not only yield a slew of Oscar nominations but, in a very real sense, change the face of acting forever.įor years, visual effects artists have been refining the ability to “de-age” actors by digitally mapping their performances with dots placed on their faces, often capturing the data with head-mounted cameras and then manipulating the performance using advanced software. The effort involved years of collaborative work from some of the industry’s top visual-effects artists, costume designers, makeup artists and even sound editors. To portray the hitman Frank Sheeran in Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic “The Irishman” - a role that spans more than five decades, from Sheeran’s service in World War II to his death in 2003 - the 76-year-old De Niro was put into a time machine unlike any seen in film history. The extreme gain temporarily wrecked his health, but for his trouble he won his second Oscar - and the awed respect of every actor on the planet.īut not even the protean De Niro can reverse the relentless march of time. For 1980’s “Raging Bull,” the actor, then in his mid-30s, famously put on 20 pounds of muscle to play boxing champ Jake LaMotta then, over the course of several weeks, he packed on 60 pounds of fat to play the fighter as a bloated, washed-up older man. Few actors have undergone more dramatic physical transformations onscreen than Robert De Niro.
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