Where to watch The Departed (2006)

Trivia & production notes

• Warner Bros. acquired the remake rights to Infernal Affairs for $1.75 million in January 2003, with Brad Pitt initially set to star as Sullivan before he chose to produce instead.
• Brad Pitt turned down the role of Sullivan, believing a younger actor should play the part.
• Jack Nicholson's character Frank Costello was based on Irish-American gangster Whitey Bulger, a real criminal who received a wide-ranging agreement from the FBI in exchange for information on other mobsters.
• Robert De Niro declined to play Queenan in order to direct The Good Shepherd instead.
• Ray Liotta was approached for a role but turned it down due to a prior commitment.
• Tom Duffy, a Boston Police Department veteran who spent three decades as an undercover detective investigating the Irish mob, served as a technical consultant on the film.
• Many interior scenes were shot in New York City rather than Boston because New York offered tax incentives that Boston did not have at the time.
• Howard Shore's guitar-based score drew inspiration from Murder by Contract and The Third Man, with Shore describing the music as a dangerous and lethal tango.
• The film quotes significantly from Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor, with Frank Costello listening to the famous sextet from Act 2 and using its theme as his phone ringtone.
• Scorsese uses an X motif throughout the film to foreshadow death, appearing in locations like cross-beam supports in an airport walkway, a lighted X on Sullivan's office wall, and taped windows before characters meet their end.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article The Departed, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.