“There is no ‘mob romance’ with the Villa di Roma,” says the designer, who also created the New Jersey environs for the popular HBO series The Sopranos.

The biggest and most important set was the Villa di Roma, a Philadelphia eatery that serves as Bufalino’s “office” where many a deal is struck over dinner. Many of the interiors, such as restaurants and hotel rooms, were built on a soundstage at the Marcy Avenue Armory in Brooklyn. Set in different periods ranging from 1949 to 2000, various locations in New York and New Jersey doubled as Philadelphia, Miami, Washington, D.C., Ohio, and Michigan, and perhaps the numbers say it all: This movie has 309 scenes, and 295 different sets and locations were used over three-and-a-half months of shooting.įor the timeworn Villa di Roma, Shaw concentrated on authenticity, from cracked ceiling tiles to layers of dust on the air conditioning vents. Stylistically different from the previous films in the Scorsese gangster genre, The Irishman is less violent than Goodfellas (1990) and less ostentatious than the Vegas-fueled designs of Casino (1995). It’s the mindset of the times…you keep your head down and try not to be noticed.” “For all the moral compromise they make, they don’t get much in exchange for it.

“He said the film needed to look more or less like ‘nothing,’ meaning these are very ordinary people and they don’t lead a rarified life, they lead a compromised one,” says Shaw. Two-time Emmy-nominated production designer Bob Shaw, who worked with Scorsese on The Wolf of Wall Street and the pilots for HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (for which he won an Emmy) and Vinyl, met with the famed director over two-and-a-half years ago to discuss the film’s designs.

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