Exclusive: Mark Wahlberg talks The Departed
( 26 July 2005)
Those of you with Scorsese on the brain will remember that the last time we sat down to chat with Mark Wahlberg, he let slip a few details on The Departed, Marty’s loose remake of Chinese thriller Infernal Affairs.
Specifically, he informed us that his character — a Boston police officer with command over the two moles played by Leonardo diCaprio and Matt Damon — is “a crazy fucking psycho” who “starts killing people left, right and centre.”
Well, all that time spent with George ‘Prankster’ Clooney has obviously given Wahlberg a taste for hijinks. When we caught up with the Boogie Nights star over the weekend in New York, he had a slightly different take on the character to offer. And by ‘slightly’, we mean ‘completely’.
“No, I don’t play a bad guy,” Wahlberg grinned. “In fact, I’m the only good guy in it. And I’m the only guy left in the end. I don’t know if Marty will get a little upset at me giving away plot points.” Having left the polygraph machine behind in Empire Towers, we can only rely on guesswork to untangle Wahlberg’s labyrinthine web of secrets and lies. In the original Infernal Affairs, the supervising cop played by Anthony Wong was firmly in the ‘good’ camp. Then again, he doesn’t make it to the end, meeting a nasty end courtesy of Mob goons and a long drop from a tall building.
And, as Wahlberg emphasises, The Departed is far from a point-by-point remake.
“You could say it’s an adaptation of Infernal Affairs,” he told us. “But it’s just as much based on the Whitey Bulger story.” James “Whitey” Bulger, for those not steeped in American crime lore, was a powerful Irish-American gangster who served time in Alcatraz, is alleged to have provided weapons for the IRA, and who remains on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for a series of violent murders in the 1970s.
Wahlberg is currently finishing his last couple of shooting days on The Departed, before moving straight onto Invincible, an American football flick in production at Disney. For news on both films, keep an eye on future issues of Empire.
( Sources: http://www.empireonline.co.uk/site/news/newsstory.asp?news_id=16982 )
->On a donc des précisions, le film s´inspire sans être un remake fidèle, on peut s´attendre a quelque chose de mieux que prévu. Maintenant cette sale manie de s´inspirer de film asiatique qui ont la cote leur fait + de mauvaise publicité que de bonne, ils feraient mieux de nous parler du film avant de nous dire de quoi il s´inspire si c´est pour en faire quelque chose de très différent au final.