Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Daniel Day-Lewis and Liam Neeson; directed by Martin Scorsese (Miramax, December 21)

Director Scorsese still remembers the moment - on New Year´s Eve, 1970 - when he pulled Herbert Ashbury´s 1928 nonfiction book from a friend´s shelf. The tales of a lengthy war throughout the 1840s between the Irish and earlier immigrants, in an area known as the Five Points, triggered memories of the stories he´d heard growing up on the Lower East Side.

Working first with writer Jay Cocks (The Age of Innocence), as well as Steven Zaillian (Hannibal) and Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count On Me), Scorsese spent two decades seeking a narrative spine on which to hang this world of warring factions.

He finally found it in the fictional tale of Amsterdam Vallon (a bulked-up DiCaprio, whose work Scorsese deems "in the tradition" of Robert De Niro). After seeing his father (Neeson) killed by Bill "the butcher" Poole (Day-Lewis), Vallon leaves for reform school and discovers a different Five Points scene - which now includes the enticing, gun-wielding pickpocket Jenny (Diaz).

"America keeps changing", Scorsese says, "and he keeps changing, and how do you take revenge in a case like that? It was a new America; many people were just trying to survive. I tried to cover that (historical) richness and still keep a personal story there, where a boy has to come of age."

Red Light, Green Light: Before he could start filming, Scorsese needed permission from Warner Bros., which still awaits his Dean Martin biopic. Then, after sets of old New York were built in Rome, the shoot went to consume far more time and money than planned (budgeted at $76 million, it topped out at $ 96). "It´s been a long haul, "Scorsese says, " a 20-year saga".