Goodfellas is a 1990 American biographical crime film directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Nicholas Pileggi and Scorsese, and produced by Irwin Winkler. It is a film adaptation of the 1985 nonfiction book Wiseguy by Pileggi. Starring Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco and Paul Sorvino, the film narrates the rise and fall of mob associate Henry Hill and his friends and family from 1955 to 1980.
The film was shot on location in Queens, New York state, New Jersey, and parts of Long Island during the spring and summer of 1989, with a budget of $25 million. Scorsese broke the film down into sequences and storyboarded everything because of the complicated style throughout. The filmmaker stated, “[I] wanted lots of movement and I wanted it to be throughout the whole picture, and I wanted the style to kind of break down by the end, so that by [Henry’s] last day as a wise guy, it’s as if the whole picture would be out of control, give the impression he's just going to spin off the edge and fly out.” He added that the film’s style comes from the first two or three minutes of Jules and Jim (1962): extensive narration, quick edits, freeze frames, and multiple locale switches. It was this reckless attitude towards convention that mirrored the attitude of many of the gangsters in the film. Scorsese remarked, “So if you do the movie, you say, ‘I don’t care if there’s too much narration. Too many quick cuts?—That’s too bad.’ It’s that kind of really punk attitude we’re trying to show.” He adopted a frenetic style to almost overwhelm the audience with images and information. He also put plenty of detail in every frame because he believed the gangster life is so rich. Freeze-frames were used because Scorsese wanted images that stopped “because a point was being reached” in Henry’s life.
Joe Pesci did not judge his character but found the scene where he kills Spider for talking back to his character hard to do, because he had trouble justifying the action until he forced himself to feel the way Tommy did. Bracco found the shoot to be an emotionally difficult one because it was such a male-dominated cast, and she realized if she did not make her “work important, it would probably end up on the cutting room floor.” When it came to the relationship between Henry and Karen, Bracco saw no difference between an abused wife and her character.
According to Pesci, improvisation and ad-libbing came out of rehearsals wherein Scorsese let the actors do whatever they wanted. He made transcripts of these sessions, took the lines the actors came up with that he liked best, and put them into a revised script that the cast worked from during principal photography. For example, the scene where Tommy tells a story and Henry is responding to him—the “Funny how? Do I amuse you?” scene—is based on an actual event that Pesci experienced. Pesci was working as a waiter when he thought he was making a compliment to a mobster by saying he was “funny”; however, the comment was not taken well. It was worked on in rehearsals where he and Liotta improvised, and Scorsese recorded four to five takes, rewrote their dialogue, and inserted it into the script. The dinner scene with Tommy’s mother was largely improvised. Her painting of the bearded man with the dogs was based on a photograph from National Geographic magazine. The cast did not meet Henry Hill until a few weeks before the film’s premiere. Liotta met him in an undisclosed city; Hill had seen the film and told the actor that he loved it.
The long tracking shot through the Copacabana nightclub came about because of a practical problem: the filmmakers could not get permission to go in the short way, and this forced them to go round the back. Scorsese decided to film the sequence in one unbroken shot in order to symbolize that Henry’s entire life was ahead of him, commenting, “It’s his seduction of her [Karen] and it’s also the lifestyle seducing him.” This sequence was shot eight times.
Henry’s last day as a wise guy was the hardest part of the film for Scorsese to shoot because he wanted to properly show Henry's state of anxiety, paranoia, and racing thoughts caused by cocaine and amphetamines intoxication. In an interview with movie critic Mark Cousins, Scorsese explained the reason for Pesci shooting at the camera at the end of the film, “well that’s a reference right to the end of The Great Train Robbery, that’s the way that ends, that film, and basically the plot of this picture is very similar to The Great Train Robbery. It hasn’t changed, 90 years later, it’s the same story, the gun shots will always be there, he's always going to look behind his back, he’s gotta have eyes behind his back, because they’re gonna get him someday.” The director ended the film with Henry regretting that he is no longer a wise guy, about which Scorsese said, “I think the audience should get angry at him and I would hope they do—and maybe with the system which allows this.”
Scorsese wanted to depict the film’s violence realistically, “cold, unfeeling and horrible. Almost incidental.” However, he had to remove 10 frames of blood to ensure an R rating from the MPAA. With a budget of $25 million, Goodfellas was Scorsese’s most expensive film to that point but still only a medium-sized budget by Hollywood standards. It was also the first time he was obliged by Warner Bros. to preview the film. It was shown twice in California, and a lot of audiences were “agitated” by Henry’s last day as a wise guy sequence. Scorsese argued that was the point of the scene. Scorsese and the film’s editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, made this sequence faster with more jump cuts to convey Henry’s drug-addled point of view. In the first test screening there were 40 walkouts in the first ten minutes. One of the favorite scenes for test audiences was the “Funny Like a clown? Do I amuse you?” scene.
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