He may be 68 but he’s making movies like a jubliant lad. Martin Scorsese is experiencing a highly successful time, what with his Oscar for The Departed, the huge financial success of Shutter Island, as well as TV series Boardwalk Empire, which will be seeing at least one more season on HBO. But this week’s news gives details of not one but two projects the director is going to rush into.

The latter film is getting the most buzz at the moment, with Deadline Hollywood reporting that Scorsese is going to direct recent collaborator Leonard Di Caprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, an adaptation of Jordan Belfont’s memoirs. Belfont was a drug addict and ran an illegal sales trade flogging worthless stock. Think Goodfellas for economists. More details on the film are to come at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The other project will probably be filmed first. Years in development, Scorsese is finally ready to make Silence, an adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s account of a Portuguese Jesuit missionary who travels to 17th Century Japan and discovers violence religious intolerance. Years ago Daniel Day Lewis was attached, but recent rumours have Benicio Del Toro (a needed career boost for the actor) playing the lead.

This news does mean that the planned reunion of Scorsese, De Niro and Pesci, called The Irishman, will probably see a few years to emerge. But Scorsese fans do have another film to look forward to: his 3D children’s movie The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which will hit cinemas this Christmas. Indeed, Scorsese is a busy boy, though it’s hard not to see him as a sort of uber-hack, flirting with styles and genres but failing to reach the previous heights of films like Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy.