Martin Scorsese says the studio behind 'The Departed' wanted either Leonardo DiCaprio or Matt Damon's character to live so they could make a franchise

• Martin Scorsese says Warner Bros. wanted a "The Departed 2."
• He said executives wanted either Leonarda DiCaprio's or Matt Damon's character to survive.

If it were up to Warner Bros., 2006's "The Departed" would have been the launch of a gritty police-drama franchise. Martin Scorsese had different plans.

Scorsese was still recovering from the grueling process of making his 2004 Howard Hughes biopic, "The Aviator," starring Leonardo DiCaprio, for Warner Bros. when the studio came calling again. They'd nabbed the remake rights to the hit 2002 Hong Kong movie "Infernal Affairs" and wanted Scorsese to take on the project.

After Scorsese accepted and began making the movie, with DiCaprio and Matt Damon attached to play Massachusetts State Police officers toeing the line between the law and Boston mob corruption, the director said the studio came to him with a request: Could one of them live?

"What they wanted was a franchise," Scorsese told GQ. "It wasn't about a moral issue of a person living or dying."

Scorsese wasn't into it, and he stuck to his guns, killing both Damon and DiCaprio's characters by the film's end. The shock of the ending made audiences at test screenings "ecstatic," Scorsese said. But not the suits at Warner Bros.

"Then the studio guys walked out and they were very sad, because they just didn't want that movie. They wanted the franchise," Scorsese said. "Which means: I can't work here anymore."

(Insider contacted Warner Bros. for comment but didn't get an immediate response.)

"The Departed" is a milestone for Scorsese not just because it nabbed him his first-ever Best Director Oscar but also because it marked the last time he would work for Warner Bros., the studio that, along with "The Aviator," also released "Goodfellas" and his breakout movie, "Mean Streets."

Scorsese's most recent films have been made with independent financing and released via a studio or streamer. His latest, "Killers of the Flower Moon," is set to be released theatrically through Paramount and then made available to stream through Apple TV+.

The studios, Scorsese told GQ, weren't "interested any longer in supporting individual voices that express their personal feelings or their personal thoughts and personal ideas and feelings on a big budget. And what's happened now is that they've pigeonholed it to what they call indies."

"The danger there is what it's doing to our culture," Scorsese said of studios focusing on franchises. "Because there are going to be generations now that think movies are only those — that's what movies are."