He may be one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of our time, but Martin Scorsese seems to have a lot of fair weather fans.

When he does a crowd-pleasing, crime-laced efforts like “The Wolf Of The Wall Street” or “The Departed,” people turn up in droves. But when he decides to try some more serious-minded and challenging fare, like last year’s critically acclaimed “Silence,” they don’t.

So when his long-gestating “The Irishman” was announced as his next project and greenlit by Netflix the other week, there was rejoicing from those thinking that this will effectively be another “Goodfellas”. Scorsese tells The Independent that it is just not the case:

“I think this is different, I think it is. I admit that there are – you know, ‘Goodfellas’ and ‘Casino’ have a certain style that I created for them – it’s on the page in the script actually. Putting ‘Goodfellas’ together was almost like an afterthought, at times I was kind of rushing, I felt I’d already done it because I’d played it all out in terms of the camera moves and the editing and that sort of thing. The style of the picture, the cuts, the freeze-frames, all of this was planned way in advance, but here it’s a little different. The people are also older in ‘The Irishman,’ it’s certainly more about looking back, a retrospective so to speak of a man’s life and the choices that he’s had to make.”

That certainly sounds like a more contemplative, introspective tone than those hoping for another “Goodfellas” might like. The film will star Robert De Niro as Frank Sheeran, a high-ranking officer in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters with rumoured ties to the deaths of President Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa.

Shooting begins in August ahead of a 2019 release date.