If N.Y. Post writer Reed Tucker quotes Departed star Leonardo DiCaprio yelling, in a manner of speaking, “Table on fire!”, does that mean there was one, particularly if a quote in a Time magazine transcript disputes this?
One one hand we have a bull session between Time‘s Josh Tyrangien and the Departed guys — Martin Scorsese, DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson. But it contains a slight problem for Tucker, who included an apparent wrongo in an interview piece with Nicholson that ran on 10.1.
Tucker writes that “before one scene in which [Nicholson’s] Costello interrogates [DiCaprio’s] Costigan to figure out if he’s a rat, Nicholson reportedly told Scorsese, ‘I don’t think [DiCaprio] is scared enough of me. I have to be scarier.’ So scary he got. Jocelyn-Wildenstein-in-the-morning scary.
“‘I came in the next day,” DiCaprio recalls, ‘and Jack’s hair was all over the place. He was muttering to himself and the prop guy tipped me off that he had a fire extinguisher, a bottle of whiskey, some matches and a handgun somewhere. So I sat down at the table not knowing what to expect, and he set the table on fire after pouring whiskey all over the place and stuck a gun in my face.'”
That scene, Tucker writes, “turned out to be one of the most chilling in the movie.” Except there’s no whiskey table fire in the movie. At all. To anyone’s recollection.
Tyrangien’s q & a transcript tells a different story:
“Scorsese: So we shoot the scene, and all of a sudden you hear a thunk. And I’m thinking, I better say cut. And, thank God, I didn’t. Jack picks up a gun and points it at Leo, and he didn’t know at that point that there was a gun there. So what you see from Leo is real. I love that.
“Nicholson: But the prop man told him, goddammit!
“Dicaprio: He said, “All I know is Jack has a handgun, a bottle of whiskey and a fire extinguisher.’
“Time: Why a fire extinguisher?
“Nicholson: I was going to set the table on fire with bourbon out of my mouth, but I forgot they didn’t give me real bourbon.
“Dicaprio: [Laughing] It’s hard to light Diet Coke.”
