Getting Made: The Making of 'GoodFellas'

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.