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The Departed
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 The Departed Production NotesTagline: Cops or criminals. When you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?
Based on the Chinese-linguage Hong Kong gangster film of the same name ("Wu jian dao"), "Infernal Affairs" will be reset in Boston amid Irish-American mobsters and the cops who are their nemeses. The film was written by William Monahan.
Damon would play a gangster who has infiltrated the Boston police department as part of its cadet class and has been steadily rising through the ranks. DiCaprio will play a cop who's been deep undercover inside the mob and is starting to come unglued. Each side works feverishly to flush the mole out, with deadly consequences.
"The Departed" is set in South Boston, where the state police force is waging war on organized crime.Young undercover cop Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) is assigned to infiltrate the mob syndicate run by gangland chief Costello (Jack Nicholson).
While Billy is quickly gaining Costello's confidence, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), a hardened young criminal who has infiltrated the police department as an informer for the syndicate, is rising to a position of power in the Special Investigation Unit.
Each man becomes deeply consumed by his double life, gathering information about the plans and counter-plans of the operations he has penetrated. But when it becomes clear to both the gangsters and the police that there's a mole in their midst, Billy and Colin are suddenly in danger of being caught and exposed to the enemy – and each must race to uncover the identity of the other man in time to save himself.
Hong Kong to Boston
“The Departed,” the gritty crime drama from director Martin Scorsese, takes us into the lives of two cops: Colin Sullivan, smart and unabashedly ambitious, appears to be on the fast track in the Massachusetts State Police Department’s elite Special Investigations Unit, whose prime target is powerful Irish mob boss Frank Costello.
Billy Costigan, street-smart and tough, is purported to have a violent temper that costs him his badge and eventually lands him back on the rough streets of South Boston, where he is recruited into Costello’s ranks. But neither man is what he seems and, as they work at cross purposes, they are plunged into a dangerous game of cat and mouse in which the stakes could not be higher.
The story of “The Departed” is based on the 2002 crime thriller out of Hong Kong called “Infernal Affairs,” which achieved great success in Asia before coming to U.S. shores in 2004. An American version was soon in the works, with William Monahan writing the screenplay.
The screenwriter recalls, “I hadn’t seen ‘Infernal Affairs,’ and I didn’t want to watch it before adapting the story. I worked from a translation of the Chinese script. There was a great central story around which I could create new characters. I loved the duplicity of the characters in the Chinese film, but my adaptation, thematically, is all about the engine of tragedy that is started when people depart from what they really should be doing with their lives.”
“‘Infernal Affairs’ is a very good example of why I love the Hong Kong cinema, but ‘The Departed’ is not a remake of that film,” states Martin Scorsese. “It was inspired by ‘Infernal Affairs’ because of the nature of the story; however the world William Monahan created is very different from the Hong Kong film. When I received the script, it took me quite a while to read through it because I began visualizing the action and getting into the nature of the story and the characters. One of the things that hit me was that the depiction of the characters and their attitudes toward the world in which they live was so uncompromising. That’s what really got me interested in directing the movie.”
Producer Graham King notes, “You could say ‘The Departed’ takes Martin Scorsese back to his days of ‘GoodFellas’ and ‘Mean Streets,’ which is a genre he has been identified with in the past. But in this film, he’s taking that genre and turning it into something new and different and original. That’s what Marty does.”
“Working with Martin Scorsese was extraordinary,” Monahan says. “It was a privilege to see him put the film together in his mind as we were discussing the script. It’s like having years of film school packed into each and every day.”
Monahan relates that he set “The Departed” in a world with which he was very familiar. “The project came about at a time when I was thinking about Boston, where I came from, and about the people I had lost in my own life. So it allowed me to explore themes that were very personal to me.”
Thomas B. Duffy, a 30-year veteran of the Massachusetts State Police, who served as a technical consultant for the film, reveals that the screenwriter’s decision to center the film on the battle between the “Staties” and Boston’s Irish mob has its basis in reality. “Certainly in ‘Southie,’ the Irish mob dominated and controlled the city’s underworld, at least from the early 1970s until just a few years ago. They were the pinnacle of the criminal world there.”
Collaborating for the third time with Scorsese, actor Leonardo DiCaprio comments, “As much as it is a gangster movie, ‘The Departed’ is unlike anything Marty has ever done. It deals with a very different set of circumstances—not just that it involves the Irish underworld, but also the fact that it deals with the police force and the corruption there, as well. It is also set in a completely different environment, being Boston, not New York. Although, as we went on, we saw it more as a story of America and the corruption of certain systems in our country as a whole.”
It is a story, Scorsese says, of “how two young men are shaped by the forces in their lives: the institution of the police and a crime group headed by a figure named Frank Costello. Costello takes Colin as a young boy and makes him into a seeming pillar of the community so he can rise up in the hierarchy of the state police. But, in reality, he is Costello’s inside man. At the same time, Billy is the perfect material for the police to send undercover, because he comes from the working-class element of South Boston. He is put in the position to join Costello’s crew, but he has really been set up to rat on Costello. It’s like Billy and Colin are running on parallel tracks…but they will ultimately end up on a collision course.”
Cops or Criminals...
Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Billy Costigan, a promising cadet at the Massachusetts State Police Academy, who is selected for a dangerous undercover assignment before he has even had a chance to pin on a badge. The actor says that the role represented more than an opportunity to work again with Scorsese. “I read the script and immediately wanted to be a part of it. I just couldn’t put it down, and I said ‘yes’ without any deliberation or hesitation. I thought it was a really intense story with multifaceted and very compelling characters.”
Billy Costigan came up from the streets of Boston, and DiCaprio remarks that his character’s motivation to become a police officer is rooted in his desire to escape his upbringing. “Billy comes from an underworld background and has all the chips stacked against him in a lot of ways. I think he joins the police force because he has no other options, and he wants to do things differently than his family did. Ironically, he is asked to go undercover and pretend to be the very thing he was determined not to become. At the heart of it, I think Billy is ultimately trying to redeem himself and not just be a product of his environment, but he ends up deep in a situation that is extremely dangerous and deceitful. There are moments when he could so easily be caught—all the arrows are pointing in his direction as the ‘rat,’ and everything begins to cave in around him.”
Scorsese notes, “As an actor, I knew Leo would convey the conflict of a young man who has gotten himself into a bad situation and then wonders what the hell he is doing there. You can see it in his face; you can see it in his eyes. That’s one of the reasons I like working with Leo; he knows how to express emotional impact without saying a word. It just emanates from him. It is quite extraordinary to watch.”
Colin Sullivan is another member of the Massachusetts State Police Force with roots in South Boston who is also leading a double life, although Colin’s is the mirror opposite of Billy’s. A native of Boston himself, Matt Damon stars in the role of Colin, a young hotshot in the department, who has quickly risen to the rank of sergeant in the elite Special Investigations Unit while his Academy classmates are still in uniform. However, despite what he has led his superiors to believe, there is only one authority to whom Colin actually reports: mob boss Frank Costello.
“Matt brought a lot to the part of Colin,” states Scorsese. “I love that you can see his mind working as Colin is trying to figure his way out of his latest predicament and save himself, even as he gets himself in deeper and deeper over his head. In a way, Colin is an even more tragic character than Billy, because he truly believes he will get away with everything and that, by aligning himself with evil, he has created an inroad to redemption, so to speak, represented by the upper class society of Beacon Hill and the State House—that golden dome he keeps staring at. In the beginning of the picture, you see Costello teaching Colin a false set of values and, by a certain point in time, Colin has no values at all.”
Damon offers, “In Colin’s neighborhood, the character of Frank Costello is bigger than life. Everybody knows who he is and is terrified of him. The first time Colin comes in contact with him, Colin is about 12 years old, and that kind of interaction would be incredibly meaningful to a kid from that neighborhood. Costello is even more powerful than a father figure in Colin’s mind, and you see the relationship develop from the very beginning.”
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Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed.
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