Action.
They shot me.
Gotta get that apron on faster.
- Cut. - Cut.
0kay, good. That's gotta be done much faster...
It was so exhilarating...
talking with somebody, who's ten times more passionate than you are.
A smile, but not as long. All right? Try one more.
That's why he's so great.
He enjoys it, he doesn't put a cap on his own, and he doesn't put a cap on yours.
And that's what makes it a joyous experience, as opposed to just a job.
You, at least...
The credit belongs to Martin...
or this would have been just another mob movie.
We wanted to counter the romantic image of the Mafia...
and show not only what the pool is, but what that decision means.
And that was his goal in that movie.
...if you touch her again, you're dead.
This is what goes on. This is the dog-eat-dog struggles of these people.
Terrifying.
I just know it from what I saw in the streets...
and when I saw it, lived it, I always said, "That's the way it should be on film."
When we were in Chicago...
doing The Color of Money, there was an article...
in New York Magazine that was an excerpt from the book.
Having dealt with that world to a certain extent...
I felt I never really wanted to touch upon that world again.
I found that the style of the book was so interesting, I tried to say...
if I can make a film like the style of this book.
What's the point making another gangster picture?
There have been several books about mob bosses.
But it was like getting hold of a soldier in Napoleon's army.
That's who I wanted. I wanted to know how it worked inside.
Detail. Everything is detail.
I was interested in the minutia of how to live as a wiseguy.
I wanted to get into the frame of mind of a guy who works that way every day.
And you also had the voice of Henry.
So much of that book was just his telling of the story.
Then Marty called and he said. ;
"My name's Marty Scorsese," he said...
"I'm a film director." "Movie director," I think he said.
He said, "Do you know..." And I said, "I know who you are."
He said, "I'm calling because I just read your book.
"I've been looking for this book for years."
I said, "I've been waiting for this phone call all my life."
So he said, "I want to do it."
He wanted to write it with me, but he couldn't make a deal with me.
I said, "Don't worry. The deal with you is on the phone now.
"We will make this movie. Don't you worry about anything else."
All directors will work with writers and sort of make it their own.
But I think, particularly, in the case of Goodfellas...
it was so much about the world that he understood...
that he really wanted to put his stamp on it.
I hadn't put my name on a script since Mean Streets.
I wanted to create an exhilaration of that kind of life.
But he was stuck with somebody who didn't know anything.
So he really had to bring me along, I think, as far as film was concerned.
And I was a willing pupil because it was fascinating, and he's a great teacher.
Now, when you're working with Marty, of course, he already sees the movie.
I didn't, but it was all right. He brought me along.
I did most of the typing, but he writes longhand.
So I would type and it would come out and then...
he would scratch these little things on it. We would work on it.
And then the dialogue would be bounced back and forth between us.
So we would develop scene after scene.
In this scene, this is what's gonna happen, then this.
And he also said, "Put in the corner..."
And he would mention a piece of music, "I want that music here."
What really was important was the nature of the relationship...
between the main character and the audience.
And that's the experiment with voice-over.
To us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks...
and took the subway to work every day and worried about bills, were dead.
They were suckers. They had no balls.
I think it's a wonderful way to tell a story of a film.
But so many times, I think voice-over is used...
to patch a little crack in the script...
and it, sort of, doesn't work.
You need a body of material...
so that you have enough richness of character...
to be able to justify the voice-over.
Because the narrative at that point is not important. It's the language.
It's the web that he's spinning as a personality.
He's getting you to like him. And that's the danger of the character.
The other thing we did was a straight chronology.
And that's the way the first draft is written.
And then Marty was looking at it, "It's a little slow. We have to do...
"This is a movie. We gotta do something to hook them."
He always loved the idea of these guys driving around...
with the guy they think is dead in the back of the car, still alive.
Because the moment of Billy Batts'murder...
is where everything changes for them.
So rather than going from the young boy directly to the ending...
the rise and fall, which is a very traditional rise and fall...
we wanted to give it something extra.
So we took that out of the middle of the book, put it in the front...
and he says, "When they kill him, and they put the trunk down...
"then I'll freeze on Ray Liotta looking out, and then, bam, you're in the movie."
Marty was lucky in this case, he got to pick the person that was right for the role.
Bob and Joe Pesci were, sort of, obvious from the start.
And Ray just had the qualities, he was believable.
Goodfellas was my fourth movie. I had heard about the book.
I picked it up just by accident one day...
just to have something to read from New Jersey to LA.
Read it, really liked it. Heard they were gonna make the movie.
And I met Marty, and I would meet him every now and then.
But it was a long process. It was extremely nerve-wracking.
And then maybe eight or nine months later, I finally landed it.
Henry's character is somebody who grows up with these guys...
and is very much a part of them, but he is slightly outside of it.
That was part of the quality that Ray has always had.
That's why I think he was so perfectly cast.
You would never have bought the Bob De Niro character...
or the Joe Pesci character doing it, but you did buy Ray's character doing it.
You need Henry, not me, right?
He asked me to come and meet him.
And then he asked me to come up and read with Ray.
Just right from the beginning, I trusted her, she trusted me.
And we were kind of the new kids on the block.
And Marty always called us "the kids." "Bring the kids out."
It was always very cute.
I'll think about it. But it'll cost you, Hill. A lot.
So we had a commitment towards each other...
and something that we were both going through at the same time...
a newness to the situation.
Watch the suit.
You little prick.
Frank Vincent is part of the team. He's been in other movies since.
When I came to meet with him for this, he said, "What do you wanna play?"
And I said, "I wanna play Paul." He said, "Don't play Paul, play Billy Batts."
You don't argue with Marty, saying, "No, I wanna play this."
If he says to me, "Listen to me. Play Billy Batts."
"Okay, Marty, whatever you wanna do." And that's how I was cast.
At that moment, I did not know what Billy Batts was going to be.
So actually, it was really a gift.
Because everybody I know, that I ever see or meet, knows about it.
And I did 40 movies.
So that's gotta be the standout.
Sorvino, he was perfect for Paul, I wasn't.
I didn't think I could do it.
Because it was not the kind of role that I felt I really had an affinity for.
The externals were easy, middle-aged Italian man.
The difficulty was in the lethality that I felt I didn't possess.
So even though I wanted to do it, I was faking when I went to the meeting...
and giving Martin the impression I knew exactly what to do when I had no idea.
I wanted to be in a Scorsese movie, I guess he just figured I was capable of it.
I had done so much homework. I was just obsessed with it.
I remember I was at home in Jersey...
Nick Pileggi had tapes of Henry, and I remember putting in the cassettes...
in my mother's car and as I would drive to New York...
be listening to him tell stories as he chomped on potato chips.
And my dad was like, "Stop studying. Get out and do something."
I knew it was a great opportunity...
and I did not wanna be a week or so into it, and you know...
Marty says, "Come to the trailer."
I just wanted to play make-believe with these guys.
And not mess up.
I believed I could be Karen, and do Karen justice.
...you are nothing but a whore!
Is this the superintendent?
I knew the motivation of jealousy...
and wanting to hold on to her man. I understood those things.
Keep them coming.
Jimmy was one of the most feared guys in the city.
The author, Nick Pileggi, had a lot of information...
research material that he had discarded from the book...
and I also would talk to...
people who I thought would have some connection...
or some relevance to this particular character.
He wanted to talk to me about the Jimmy Conway character.
There were some mornings when we talked four, five times.
He'd be in his trailer before he'd go in front of the camera...
get me on the phone...
- He'd call you four, five times a day? - In the mornings, before he worked.
How does Jimmy hold the cigarette, how you think he reacted...
when he'd seen Johnny Roastbeef pull up with the Cadillac?
And how he held the shot glass, what kind of a face he made.
All these crazy, I mean, I thought they were crazy questions at the time.
Then I started to get the hang of it. I knew what he was requesting.
And I was able to participate.
And it was rewarding. I got paid for it.
And it was about two months...
in preparation to try to get this quality that I knew it called for.
I was kind of agonizing over it for a couple of months.
I was thinking, "I'm gonna ruin this movie."
I was looking for something to get out of it...
till two days before we started production...
by virtue of constantly searching...
to find that kind of quality that killers have.
I was preparing to go out one night...
passed by the mirror to check for spinach in the teeth...
and I jumped back. I literally frightened myself.
I saw a look in my eyes that frightened me.
"Who was that?" I said, "That's Paulie."
Once I found it, it all became just a duck in water.
It was just so easy to do.
What Paulie and the 0rganization does...
is offer protection for people who can't go to the cops. That's it.
That's all it is. They're like the police department for wiseguys.
So much of what Scorsese does, is in the way he directs.
And so you see something entirely different up on the screen...
often than is in that script.
If I felt the scene could be opened up...
I usually did that with the actors in rehearsal.
So we would rehearse 35, 40 minutes a scene.
They were all improvisations. They were loosely around the script.
They were just sort of what was happening...
not improvising by writing the lines.
I mean, improvising behaviorally.
He always says, "Don't act like these people, behave like them."
I would like to help you out.
Sonny, tell him what we talked about.
He gave me fabulous direction for Karen.
He said, "She's the movie star. She's the star. You know, Henry's life."
He knows so well what actors need, and how to help them.
And then he'll see something he likes, he'll come over and say:
"You know what you said... Why don't you say that?"
0r, "Let him have it."
Now go home and get your fucking shine box.
Motherfucking mutt!
You fucking piece of shit!
He uses the power of the verb. Acting is doing something.
I threaten, I charm, I beg.
And what Martin does in the improvisation...
is encourage the doing of things.
What that really means is stay with the other fellow...
and deal with what he's giving you.
What are you, stupid?
- What's the matter with you? - I apologize.
- I'm sorry. - What the fuck is the matter with you?
You feel like you're a real collaborator. And in a sense you are because...
you're giving all the good things that you have.
You see anybody fucking around with this shit you're gonna tell me, right?
That means anybody.
He knows what he wants to do, but you really feel like...
you're creating and he's letting you go...
to do what you've come up with.
It's just the way he is.
He's very open to a lot of ideas from anybody.
For an actor, that was like the jackpot.
So even during the improv, once we had the improv, then we had to lock it.
You don't improvise on camera when we're shooting.
They all think that Marty just doesn't do anything.
That he says, "0kay, go ahead," and he sits there like this...
and enjoys it. That's not true.
It's so crazy to think you can go in there and make a movie like that.
It has to be structured. You're still saying a script.
I said, "0kay, go fuck your mother."
Probably the most memorable improvisation I've ever seen...
was the Joe Pesci-Ray Liotta improvisation at the nightclub.
But, I'm funny, how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you?
Which is something that actually happened to Joe, years ago, in reality.
And so Marty said, "We must put that in the film."
I make you laugh? I'm here to fucking amuse you?
And that was very carefully worked on.
Within our rehearsal period, I was able, as the co-writer, to record...
several takes, maybe four to five takes between Ray and Joe of this dialogue.
I took that and rewrote it, which was inserted into the script.
Funny how? What's funny about it?
It was interesting how he shot that sequence.
He's shooting it in a medium shot, not in a close-up.
The reason that I always tell film students that it's very important...
first, he knew the scene was powerful enough that he did not need close-ups.
And secondly, what he really wanted to show was...
how the people around Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta were gradually...
changing the looks on their faces as the sense of dread...
began to creep into what was supposed to be a casual conversation...
and suddenly... It is wonderful how you see their faces change.
And he was very adamant that that's how he wanted to shoot it.
Anthony.
He's a big boy. He knows what he said. What did you say?
Funny, how?
You just watch his body language, and you know it's dead serious.
And he could turn on it in a split second. Hard to cut.
Marty and I spent a long time figuring out how long to wait...
until Ray Liotta actually says, "Come on, Tommy."
What the fuck is so funny about me?
Tell me what's funny.
Get the fuck out of here, Tommy.
Motherfucker! I almost had him!
You stuttering prick, you!
Frankie, was he shaking?
All that laughter you hear on the track is me and them.
'Cause we had to create the atmosphere of that kind of a moment on the set.
When something accidental happens...
delightful, that an actor does, you'll burst out laughing as an audience.
And it's a wonderful thing to see. Very refreshing.
Good.
You can thrill him, by giving him a good performance.
And to watch someone...
be thrilled while you're doing something, is the best thing for an actor.
He has an amazing sensitivity to body language...
and how an actor is conveying a certain idea...
with just a slight flicker of an eye.
0r something very subtle, and he's reacting to it all the time.
And he goes like this.
Give me more.
No. Easy.
And then when you do it, after the take, he'd say, "Good. That was good."
Good. That was good.
I think Marty is probably one of the most prepared directors I've worked with.
In the case of Goodfellas, he was working with Michael Ballhaus...
who's also incredibly prepared.
The good thing about Marty is that really he has this movie in his head already.
So the way we worked together, is that I looked at his shortlist.
Then we look at the locations together.
And we figure out if his shots would work on the locations like this or that.
So there's no discussion, actually, on the set anymore.
We talk about shots, but it's not like we're trying to figure out what it'll be.
So we know what it's gonna be.
There were many times that we didn't do any coverage at all.
- Thank you, sir. - Bye, see you later, thanks.
What're you doing? You're leaving your car?
I never even knew when we were making it, what that scene was.
I never knew. I was clueless.
I had never even seen a Steadicam.
And that doesn't exist in the book.
But it does, in just a couple of lines.
Except a couple of lines in the book, in the hands of the director...
that's where you begin to see...
a nonfiction book in detail really blossom into a kind of art.
How are you doing? What's up? Here you go.
The whole idea is that it has to be done in one take...
so you don't feel that it was a series of cuts...
or there was a separation between him and the world he was trying to get into.
The camera flowed through them and just glided through this world.
All the doors opened to him, and everything just slipped away.
It was like heaven. And then to emerge like a king and queen...
this was the highest he could aspire to.
It was kind of tricky also to get all the extras right.
Because Marty is so very accurate about every single timing.
What the people do in the kitchen.
The guy with the table comes at the right time and brings the table over.
All these things are very important.
But as far as I remember, we shot the scene only eight times...
and it was not even a full day.
But we wanted it really in one shot and we got it in one shot.
Take my wife, please.
And he really knows every second of what you're doing.
He'd send you back from the set if he didn't like the tie.
He sees every detail.
The kid doesn't look like a gangster yet. He has to look...
His shoes have to be shined.
- Got a pinkie ring, kid? - Yeah.
Yeah, that's better. I would like just a little bit...
You don't have any stays in the collar?
No stays, Kristi?
Every little nuance in it means something.
He made sure it was registering right.
That's the thing with Marty, because...
his films really have a sense of reality.
And he understands it so well. He knows when something is real and when it isn't.
Marty would say, "No, that doesn't feel right. That feel right to you?"
The only way to be truthful about it is to really not be inhibited by anything.
What do you mean?
I think it explains what the world is really like.
And part of what's so interesting is that it starts out as a lot of fun.
We're as bad as they are. We're happy to see the postman go in the oven.
And all of a sudden when Spider gets shot, it at all turns and it changes.
Now he's moving.
He shoots that poor kid in the foot.
You should know then, this is not the way to live.
Don't be sucked in by these guys, 'cause it's only gonna end one way.
Before the Witness Protection Program, it only ended one way. ; death.
It was very frightening. I was out of my body for a minute.
I had to put myself in a frame of mind to really kill someone.
I made them put full loads in the gun...
in the.45, because I wanted to hear the echo.
I wanted to feel the gun really kick like a real.45.
The silence after the last shot rang out was more deafening than the gun.
Now you're going to dig the hole. I got no fucking lime.
I'll dig the hole. I don't give a fuck.
These are very intense individuals. This is what happened.
They lived a very violent life. And it was just part of their lifestyle.
- You gonna pay? - Give us the fucking money!
I can't.
Marty wants you to figure things out yourself.
He wants you to come to the film, and you to look at it...
and decide how you feel about it. He doesn't want to tell you what to think.
He wants you to experience it.
What do you want, fucko? You want something?
This is, in my view, the most violent scene I ever shot.
There were no cuts in it, and there was no tricks, nothing.
You felt the violence right there.
I think in Marty's movie there is an intensity which is very similar to Marty.
I don't know if it's necessarily violence, but you never know what's gonna happen.
Believe it or not, some guys really think you're the real deal.
I remember one guy said to me:
"How could you let that little guy beat you up like that?"
And he says, "What is with that language?
"What kind of talking is this? The effing this and effing that."
This guy must have killed 25 people that we know about.
That's how real people think it is.
We'll get a shovel at my mother's house.
I had a woman say to me, and this was a schoolteacher.
Educated woman said to me:
"When they were in the house eating, how could you breathe in the trunk?"
This is actually what she asked me.
I said, "I had a little straw and I put a hole."
I learnt that it's very claustrophobic in trunks. I don't get in trunks.
I love watching Marty directing and being with the actors and with the crew.
It's wonderful. But first of all, I don't have time to be there.
And secondly, it does prejudice my eyes.
I like to experience a film as it's being born, and watch it every day with Marty.
And then, my job is to help him, sort of, make sure that, that all...
ends up on screen the way he wants it.
When he's in the editing room, he can then relax and sit.
And just with complete and utter control, finish making his movie.
And a great deal of Marty's movies are made in the editing room.
Particularly, the "last day as a wiseguy" as we call it.
"Last day as a wiseguy"is a sequence that, I think, came together...
particularly in the editing room, because we found that we could...
express the state of mind that Ray Liotta was in at that time...
being coked up and completely out of control.
It was written in a lot of small montages.
But it was never really visualized on the script...
the way you see it on film.
For example, when Ray Liotta...
plonks the gun, as the camera swish-pans up to him.
I just enjoy all the strange jump-cutting that we did.
You know, Ray Liotta making veal cutlets.
And how we just jumped around, and just experimented...
and just had a hell of a lot of fun violating every rule there is.
During previews, the audience got annoyed...
so I made it faster, more relentless.
We can make it more jagged, we can make it more fractured.
And so we started doing more jump cuts.
What I love about it is the annoyance at having to go bring the guns to Jimmy...
knowing damn well Jimmy's not going to buy.
Stop the drugs. They're making your mind into mush!
That should make you think, "What am I doing?"
He's annoyed. "He'll make me bring this round...
"he's not gonna want them, put them back, go stir the sauce.
"I swear this helicopter's following me. I think it is. No, it isn't."
Picking up his brother. Drugs, coke, girlfriends, hiding guns.
It goes on like that. Everything seemed to be of the same importance.
All at the same level, he could not differentiate at that point.
Total madness.
That's Henry's life.
I know he's stoned, and this is his vision of it. But that was Henry's life.
We did our jobs, we had great makeup, they made us look all whacked-out.
But talk about music and editing.
Let's go shopping.
Marty had such great ideas about how to put music to some of those images.
Some of it he had already pre-planned.
Some of it, he put into the film in the editing room.
He has a deep sense of how music should go with the film.
And by that I don't mean that it should go easily.
Sometimes it's a shocking choice, but it works like crazy.
I see everything with music.
Especially the juxtaposition of the music you're listening to...
to the images you see out the window.
That's the way music should be in a movie.
Henry, shut the door.
That was the first time I had ever seen anyone shot.
Do you remember where you ever heard...
I remember when I first heard that music.
You were with your mother in a butcher's shop.
He'd carry those pieces of music around for years.
And then suddenly find exactly the right place for that piece.
Each shot was designed to certain bars ofLayla.
We had the music already played on the set to get the right rhythm...
for the movement or for the length of the scene.
In the editing room, I had to make sure I was trying to get exactly what he wanted.
He was very specific about how he wanted the music to cut.
Let's try this.
- It's really on the way. - Yeah.
Right here, the starting.
Goodfellas was one of those films, that I felt...
we rode like a horse.
It was so beautifully scripted...
and shaped by Nick Pileggi and Marty...
that it had its own energy, it had its own drive.
As Marty was laying it down, it just had an incredible feeling to it.
We were writing it, and trying to stay on top of it, and ahead of it, if we could.
But it was so strong, it had such a rhythm.
You broke your cherry.
The movie has such an effect on people that no one expected.
It's just such a grip.
What I've found in my experience is that there are certain films you don't preview.
And certainly this is one. And that's when we got our head handed to us.
When we took this in front of audiences, we got killed.
The audience got really, in some cases, almost violent.
We had maybe 40 walk-outs in the first 10 or 15 minutes.
When they were giving their cards back, they were throwing their cards.
And writing profanities on them.
The people who saw it from the studio at first...
they could see how incredibly entertaining it was, what an amazing film it was.
But they were nervous about the drugs.
We had problems with them, they wanted to cut out the violence...
...which was impossible, because that's what the movie was about.
So he did have to fight very hard for that.
And it was remarkable to watch him, his courage, and his conviction.
And the fact that he would never give up...
but was very good at explaining why it was important to retain the material.
And we were able to get the film that Marty wanted on the screen.
You're working on something like this, trying to make it as good as you can.
And even in the end, neither of us were totally satisfied.
And I remember, literally, at the opening of the movie...
I think it was at Ziegfield or somewhere...
I'm sitting next to him, they got us in tuxedos.
Thing goes up, and all of a sudden, I get this elbow...
and he says, "I told you, I should've..."
And he started talking about editing. You'd think he was in the editing room.
I said, "Marty, forget it, it's over, it's too late." He laughed.
Even watching it on opening night, there are still things you can tweak, deal with.
I don't think he's ever gonna say. ;
"I've finally done it, this is perfect." You'll never hear that from him.
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