Robert De Niro has confirmed that he is planning to reunite with director Martin Scorsese on a gangster film in the near future.

Speaking at a press conference in London for his latest film The Family, a gangster comedy directed by Luc Besson, De Niro said: "I have another gangster film I'm gonna do with Scorsese and it's a very interesting one ... We're preparing it. We have a script and Marty has another film he's doing before so it won't be for a while."

De Niro and Scorsese, of course, were paired together on a string of crime and gangster films including Mean Streets, GoodFellas and Cape Fear, and their reunion as been much speculated on since their most recent film together, 1995's Casino.

There is no word as to whether De Niro is referring to The Irishman, a long-mooted biopic of mafia hitman Frank Sheeran, adapted from Charles Brandt's 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses. Al Pacino was supposedly in line for a role alongside De Niro, as well as Scorsese veterans Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel.

Scorsese apparently held a script reading for The Irishman earlier this year with De Niro, Pacino and Pesci, but is aiming to follow The Wolf of Wall Street with an adaptation of Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo's Silence, about a Jesuit missionary in 17th-century Japan.

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