'We Were All Nervous': How The Irishman's Visual Effects Team Got the Job Done

In the fall of 2015, celebrated visual effects whiz Pablo Helman was in Taiwan celebrating Thanksgiving with Martin Scorsese. The 24-year veteran of Industrial Light & Magic, the company founded by George Lucas at the onset of the Star Wars franchise, was midway through production on the director's Jesuit missionary saga, Silence, for which Helman had to digitally re-create the enormity of St. Paul's College of Macau. But over holiday dinner, Scorsese began pitching Helman on a different film entirely. It was another adaption, this one based on I Heard You Paint Houses, Charles Brandt's biography of mob hit man and supposed Jimmy Hoffa murderer Frank Sheeran. Much like Silence, the story was expansive, though instead of spanning geography (Portugal to Japan), the movie would stretch across years (approximately seven decades).