Liam Neeson opens up on working with ‘intimidating’ Martin Scorsese

However, the Hollywood actor has finally revealed the reason behind his weight loss at the Los Cabos Film Festival in Mexico, where he looked much healthier. At the time, his representative insisted the 63 year old was in fine health and now Neeson explains Scorsese required him and co-stars Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield to lose weight for the movie, about two 17th-century Jesuit priests who are violently persecuted in Japan. Let’s not forget that Robert De Niro famously gained 60 pounds for his part in Raging Bull. Well, it turns out that Liam Neeson went in the opposite direction in that regard for his part in Silence, and actually dropped a full 20 pounds for his role in the period piece. He was like something out of Auschwitz.

Martin Scorsese’s Silence has become one of those projects that you not-so-secretly thought would never get made, strung up by scheduling conflicts, production woes, and other sorts of hesitations and hiccups for years. “He’s intimidating. He requires absolute silence on the set – if he hears one tiny sound, it shatters it for him”. He commands that silence and especially for this film it was necessary’.

“The question in the film is: Is there a god?”

The actor was unrecognisable as he walked through the streets of NY, his clothes hanging off his frail frame, his facial features sunken.

Silence was shot on 35mm, and while it doesn’t have an official release date as of yet, Collider’s report notes that they’re targeting a premiere at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.