By Robert Scucci
| Published
Some people don’t like knowing how the sausage is made, but when it comes to Hollywood insider stuff, I’m always a fan of when the curtain is pulled back in order to explain how certain iconic movie scenes came to be. After recently rewatching Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, I fell down a rabbit hole that led me to an interview Matt Damon had on What a Joke, a Netflix is a Joke radio show hosted by comedian Tom Papa, describing what it was like working with Jack Nicholson, laying out in great detail just how involved the Shining actor was in rewriting one of the more disturbing sequences in the 2006 crime thriller.
According to Damon, he was sitting alone with Jack Nicholson, who, unprompted, told him that “I never would’ve made this far in this career if I wasn’t a great f*cking writer” during a pre-production meeting for The Departed. The discussion in question was about the iconic “she fell funny” sequence involving an execution – a simple scene with no dialogue – that Jack Nicholson added his flare to in the form of increasingly morbid humor that led to the final cut that we know and love today.
“She Fell Funny”
Coming from the Roger Corman School, Jack Nicholson’s method for this scene in The Departed involved leaving the camera rolling so he could ad-lib a number of lines that Scorsese would then have final say on what actually made it into the final cut, giving the legendary director a number of options to work with. The original scene, as written, involved Nicholson’s Frank Costello executing a man kneeling in the marshes without a single line of dialogue, or anybody else in his company for that matter.
Jack Nicholson, the great writer that he is, took a number of creative liberties because he “thought he could make it better” without adding to The Departed’s runtime or budget, like executing a woman instead of a man, and then turning to Ray Winstone’s Frenchie, who’s holding an axe to dismember her corpse after she unceremoniously meets her fate.
“But If You Leave The Camera Rolling …”
Wanting to illustrate in no uncertain terms just how twisted of an individual Costello actually is in The Departed, Jack Nicholson lays out his ideas in order, always ending with “now you could end the scene there, but if you leave the camera rolling…”
What started as a simple passing scene in The Departed became the stuff of legend because Jack Nicholson decided that not only would he shoot the woman in the back of the head, he’d say “jeez, she fell funny,” turn to Frenchie, who’s holding an axe, mention that he’d like to violate her corpse, only to laugh it off before Frenchie says, “Francis, you really should see somebody.”
Each and every escalating line of dialogue Jack Nicholson proposed for this scene in The Departed paints a vivid picture of Costello’s bleak worldview, and how these executions are such a regular part of his life that he’s unphased by the whole incident to the point of making light of the situation, causing his partner in crime to be concerned about his mental state.
The final cut of The Departed that we’re familiar with includes the execution, the now-classic “jeez, she fell funny” line, and Frenchie’s response, while the other exchanges found themselves on the cutting room floor. But because of Jack Nicholson’s willingness to punch up the script, and Martin Scorsese’s instinct as a director to work with what Nicholson gave him when they left the camera rolling, Costello’s character is elevated to a level that we’d never have a chance to see if he performed the scene as written.
