At this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Robert De Niro hosted friend and collaborator Martin Scorsese for a freewheeling conversation about the director’s career. They discussed his titles ranging from their 1982 flop The King of Comedy (and how it was resuscitated by film culture) to Scorsese’s massive success with Leonardo DiCaprio in 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street. 

Seated at the Beacon Theatre, the duo tie their latest project, The Irishman, into Scorsese’s oeuvre of operatic scoundrels. De Niro introduced the book I Heard You Paint Houses to Scorsese, which the director chose as the feature film to follow his 2016 religious epic Silence. “You profoundly feel the heart of this character and the situation. It’s a universal story that happens to be set in that world,” Scorsese said of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran’s story, played by De Niro. Scorsese’s other Irishman tidbit is the movie borrows musical themes from other films, à la Casino.