Robert De Niro sports massive shoes to look taller than Al Pacino on 'Irishman' set
The men behind some of Hollywood's greatest ever gangster films — Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci — are currently working on brand new movie The Irishman.
And De Niro, 74, has been spotted wearing huge platform shoes during filming in the Bronx area of New York City alongside his 77-year-old co-star Pacino.
Despite being an inch taller than Pacino, who stands at 5-foot-7, De Niro had to rely on specially designed shoe lifts to appear to tower over him for the role of the titular 6-foot-4 hitman, Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran.
Back in 2015, De Niro confirmed to Digital Spy that the long-planned Scorsese collaboration was happening, with the name back then being I Heard You Paint Houses (like the 2004 Charles Brandt book it's based on).
"We are doing it... We should be doing it sometime next year," he told us then. "We're slowly, slowly getting it in place."
The Irishman is a gangster drama which follows tough mob killer Sheeran (De Niro), who's apparently carried out over 25 murders, and Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino), a Teamster labor union chief who famously went missing during the summer of 1975.
Pesci's role will be mafia boss Russell Bufalino, who is suspected of helping Hoffa disappear.
The film also stars Jack Huston, Bobby Cannavale and Ray Romano.
And if that cast wasn't enough, Oscar-winning Schindler's List writer Steven Zaillian is behind the script.
Early this year, Scorsese told The Independent that the new Netflix film is very different from any of the other gangster epics he has made before.
"This is different, I think it is," Scorsese said. "I admit that there are — you know, Goodfellas and Casino have a certain style that I created for them — it's on the page in the script, actually.
"Putting Goodfellas together was almost like an afterthought, at times I was kind of rushing. I felt I'd already done it because I'd played it all out in terms of the camera moves and the editing and that sort of thing.
"The style of the picture, the cuts, the freeze-frames, all of this was planned way in advance, but here it's a little different."
The Irishman is set to be released in 2019.
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