Scorsese wanted Goodfellas to feel like a two-and-a-half-hour trailer
When Martin Scorsese cold-called Nicholas Pileggi to say he had waited his whole life for the reporter's mob book, Pileggi answered that he had waited his whole life for that call. Their film, cut fast and loose like the French New Wave, became one of the most admired gangster movies ever made.
Scorsese had not planned another Mafia picture. While shooting The Color of Money in 1986 he read a review of Wiseguy, Pileggi's nonfiction account of Brooklyn mob associate Henry Hill, and judged it the most honest portrait of gangsters he had come across. What drew him was the everyday texture: the tedium, the way crews took over nightclubs, the fact that it was all about money. He called the result a mob home movie and saw it as the third part of an accidental trilogy about Italian-American lives. The project waited while he made The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988.
Writer and director went through 12 drafts, treating chunks of the book like building blocks and abandoning straight chronology. Scorsese wanted to open with the jolt of a gunshot and keep accelerating, with voice-over inspired by Truffaut's Jules and Jim. Rehearsals were loose; he had them transcribed, kept the best improvised lines, and folded them into a revised script. Real names changed: Jimmy Burke became Jimmy Conway, Paul Vario became Paulie Cicero. The original title, Wise Guy, was dropped because a Brian De Palma comedy and a TV series had used similar names.
Robert De Niro's agreement to play Conway unlocked the financing. He phoned Hill repeatedly to ask how Burke walked or held a cigarette, and Ray Liotta, cast as Hill after De Niro saw him in Something Wild, drove to set listening to FBI tapes of Hill's voice. Warner Bros. had wanted a bigger star; Liotta joked that the studio would have preferred Eddie Murphy. Lorraine Bracco chose not to meet the real Karen Hill. Former prosecutor Edward McDonald, idly offering to play himself while his office was being scouted, got the part an hour later and improvised his scene.
The film opened at Venice on 9 September 1990, winning Scorsese the Silver Lion, and earned $47 million on a $25 million budget. Joe Pesci took the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, the film collected five BAFTAs, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2000.
Source: Goodfellas
