'We wanted to make it real': How Goodfellas reinvented the gangster film

Martin Scorsese's crime epic was released 35 years ago. In 1990, the director and his stars, Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta, revealed its secrets to the BBC.

There was some trepidation when Martin Scorsese unveiled Goodfellas at the Venice International Film Festival on 9 September 1990. The director's previous film, The Last Temptation of Christ, had generated no small amount of controversy when shown at the same festival two years previously. A crowd of 25,000 Christians had protested outside Universal Studios in Los Angeles when it opened in the US, a Paris cinema where it was playing had been set on fire, and Scorsese himself had received death threats.

Initially, the signs for Goodfellas had not been promising, either. Warner Bros' test screenings had gone badly, with reports of multiple people walking out during the film's violent opening sequence, in which actor Joe Pesci's vicious and unstable character repeatedly stabs a wounded gangster with a kitchen knife.

But Scorsese needn't have worried. Goodfellas opened to huge critical acclaim, and he picked up the festival's Silver Lion award for best director. The film went on to earn six Oscar nominations, with Pesci's terrifying turn as Tommy DeVito, based on real-life gangster Thomas DeSimone, winning him the Academy Award for best supporting actor. Goodfellas is now widely recognised as a cinematic masterpiece. Just a decade after it was released, it was selected by the US Library of Congress for inclusion in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".

The film is based on Nicholas Pileggi's 1985 bestseller, Wiseguy, and anchored by a charismatic central performance from Ray Liotta. It chronicles the true story of Irish-Italian Henry Hill's rise and fall in the world of organised crime. Starting as an eager-to-please teenager who runs errands for local gangsters in Brooklyn, New York, Hill works his way up through the criminal ranks with the aid of his mentor Jimmy Conway (played by Robert De Niro, and based on real-life mobster James Burke) and his friend, Pesci's volatile DeVito.

Hill goes from selling stolen goods and committing arson to hijacking and being involved in brutal murders. His mob career culminates with the Lufthansa heist at John F Kennedy airport in 1978, where $5m (£3.7m) in cash and $875,000 (£652,226) worth of jewels were stolen, before Hill begins to descend into drug dealing and cocaine-fuelled paranoia. To avoid jail or murder, he eventually decides to become an FBI informant, testifying against his former criminal compatriots and entering, along with his family, the federal witness protection programme. This latter part of Hill's story is the inspiration for the comedy My Blue Heaven, written by Pileggi's wife Nora Ephron, which also came out in 1990.

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Scorsese had made his name with 1973's Mean Streets, his electrifying portrayal of the criminal life he witnessed growing up in New York's Little Italy district, and he told the BBC's Barry Norman in October 1990 that he was initially wary of revisiting the "gangster subculture".

"Mean Streets was one particular thing that was very important to me. It was myself and my old friends, a lifestyle I grew up in," he said. But he found that Hill's "recollections or his stories [or] whatever you want to call this incredible marathon narrative that Nick Pileggi put together, with all these tapes that he had, had such a wonderful honesty about it".

As authentic as possible 

What appealed to Scorsese was that in his book, Pileggi, who would end up co-writing the script, gave such a vivid and authentic depiction of what it was to be part of that world. "[It gave] a really accurate look at the spirit of the lifestyle. [How] they dress and what they eat, the ritual of eating, all of this adds up to a film that approaches them as human beings."

Scorsese wanted the film to feel as true as possible, even casting a real US Attorney, Edward McDonald, to play himself. He is seen having the same conversation with Liotta as he had with the real Hill. "We all had the same dilemma, there was a movie that was presented to us that we were going to do, and we wanted to make it real," Liotta told Norman.

The seductive side of the criminal lifestyle – the money, power and special treatment that drew Hill in – is on full display early in the film. This is especially true during the bravura three-minute-long single-camera shot that follows Hill and his future wife Karen (played by Lorraine Bracco) from the street and through the kitchens of the Copacabana nightclub to a table that is arranged especially for them in front of the stage. "You know the gangster has always been, sort of in some subtle way, glamourised because they defy authority," De Niro told Norman.

To ensure his performance was true to the way mobsters actually behaved, De Niro spoke regularly on the phone to Hill, who was still in hiding at the time. "I was talking to Henry Hill a lot. He used to call me from places, he would call me in my camper. I mean, I never knew where he was, and I never wanted to know, and I'd ask him about this, and I'd go over the script with him. It was very helpful."

But while Goodfellas presents the surface glamour of the Mafia life, it does not shy away from showing its savage and unpredictable violence. The film is, by turns, funny and horrifying. Midway through, DeVito is shown borrowing the large kitchen knife used in the notorious opening scene, from his mother (played in the film by Scorsese's own mother Catherine) while she is cooking a meal for him. In its "Funny How?" scene – where the mood switches from humour to dread, to being funny again as DeVito appears to take exception to something Hill has said – the camerawork makes the viewer feel like an onlooker sitting at the table as it unfolds. That scene wasn't in Pileggi's book, Scorsese told the BBC's Ali Plumb in 2019, but he had it written into the script after Pesci recounted an incident that happened to him as a young man while working as a waiter.

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Goodfellas barrels along at a breathless pace. Its fluid, often dizzying camerawork uses everything from quick zooms to handheld shots in order to follow the action. Scorsese had painstakingly worked out how he wanted to film each scene, capturing the feeling of giddy excitement but also showing how quickly events can spiral out of control. Often the camera follows the characters as they talk. "In certain cases, like the Christmas party at the end, I knew that when Henry came in to ask about Stacks [a member of the heist crew played by Samuel L Jackson] being killed, it started with him at the door and the camera went with him to the end of the bar where they were talking and into the next room," said Scorsese.

"So, I had the moves of the shots worked out and then applied the locations. And in certain cases [with] the locations I couldn't get the shots I wanted so we changed locations."

The film's drama is heightened by its editing by Scorsese's longtime collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker, who uses freeze frames to illustrate pivotal moments in Hill's story. As the film races towards its conclusion, its editing becomes increasingly jumpy and fast-paced, its rapid cuts mirroring Hill's chaotic state of mind due to his spiralling drug use and manic fear that the police are following him in a helicopter.

The importance of music

"We found that when we were working on it that we could keep going faster and faster because of the cocaine-induced state that he is in," Schoonmaker said on the BBC's Film Programme in 2017. "We started jump-cutting shots to give the jagged feeling of what's going on in his brain. Marty, of course, had thought out very carefully all the framing and camera moves on the shots. There is not much improvisation there, but he had very clear ideas how to give the paranoid feeling."

The music Scorsese used was key. He set himself a rule that the songs for each scene must have been possible to hear at the time the action is set, helping to locate the audience in a particular time and place. "Marty had certain music that he knew he was going to use," Schoonmaker told the BBC. Scorsese had composed the shots in his head to particular songs before he started filming. He would often play music on set so he could synchronise the scene perfectly to the musical beats. "The sequences where De Niro is knocking off everybody who has participated in the heist with him, he shot with [Eric Clapton's Derek and the Dominos song] Layla playing on the set over a speaker so that he could get the camera moves exactly to fit the bars of music he intended." 

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The songs often serve to reflect a character's state of mind in a scene. As the film opens, Tony Bennett's Rags to Riches is heard as Hill begins to tell the shaggy dog story of his life of crime; Then He Kissed Me by The Crystals plays over the long tracking shot of Hill's big date with Karen at the Copacabana, emphasising their youthful romance; while The Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter soundtracks Hill's desperate cocaine use in the apartment of the woman he is having an affair with. Even as the film ends, with Hill rueing the dull suburban life he is now confined to as part of the witness protection scheme, Sid Vicious' punk cover of Frank Sinatra's My Way hints that Hill doesn't regret his criminal past. The real-life Hill would struggle to adjust to life as an average citizen and ended up getting expelled from the witness protection programme in the early 1990s after being arrested on drugs charges.

While Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films of the 1970s focus on the men at the top of the Mafia power structure, bringing a stately gravitas to the gangster mythology, Goodfellas' frenetic, street-level view of those hustling further down the criminal food chain serves to show how ruthless it is. As the film progresses, the earlier glamour of the criminal lifestyle comes to seem illusory, while its violence seems terrifyingly real. By the end, the majority of its characters are either dead, in prison or unhappy with the life they are living.

"Ultimately it is an empty life that they lead," Scorsese told the BBC in 1990. "A shockingly empty one, that is just of destruction and not construction." 

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