The Production Of Goodfellas Film Studies Essay

Goodfellas is based on a book called Wiseguy written by Nicholas Pileggi. Martin Scorsese is the director to goodfellas and at the time never intended to create another gangster mafia film until he read a review of the book which in fact was the inspiration behind reading it in the first place. Scorsese was always fascinated by the mafia lifestyle and the book Wiseguy was in his opinion the most non-fictional representation of a mafia crew he had read. He knew what kind of approach he wanted to take after reading Pileggis book. He wanted to begin with an explosion of violence and have the movie get faster and more violent from then on. From his point of view, it was the only way possible to really sense the exhilaration of the fast passed lifestyle and also to portray the attraction allot of people find in that sort of lifestyle.

Scorsese was drawn to the idea of the book Wiseguy being written as a documentary. It gives you a sense of the day to day activities the mafia crew used to get up to. The way they operate, how they take over businesses and for what reasons.

It took twelve drafts to reach the ideal script which Scorsese and Pileggi both collaborated on. The script itself was put together like building blocks made up of sections of the book they both liked. The traditional narrative structure was not followed because Scorsese wanted to rather start in the middle of the film and move backwards and forwards. Another movie called Pulp fiction directed by Quentin Tarintino also uses this same sort of narrative structure. Scorsese wanted to deal with the gangster movie episode by episode. This is how the movie has been shot throughout. After watching the movie for about an hour, the viewer will realise why the director has done this. It is so the viewer can put the movie together in their heads. In the movie there is also a voice over to give a sense of documentary. To give a sense of one s own opinion and in this case it is Henri hill that is telling you what exactly happened.

Scorsese was able to secure the money to create the movie once actor Robert De Niro agreed to play Jimmy Conway in the movie. Robert De Niro was a very well know high ranking actor in Hollywood and this was a sense of security for the financiators. Scorsese casted actor Ray Liotta to play Henri Hill in the movie but only after he saw him in Something Wild directed by Jonathan Demme and thought he had allot of explosive energy in that movie. Liotta had read Wiseguy and was really intrigued by the realism of the book. A couple of years later it was brought to his attention that Scorsese was going to turn it into a film. Iiotta auditioned for the part of Henry Hill in 1988 and campaigned aggressively for the role in the film. It is rumoured that the studio wanted a well known actor instead.

To prepare for the Jimmy Conway role, De Niro researched material that had been discarded when the book was initially written. This was only done after De Niro consulted Pileggi first. De Niro also consulted the real Henri hill about the real Jimmy Burke. He wanted to know how Burke walked, talked, held his cigarette and so on. This type of research put in by De Niro let him give an exceptionally realistic portrayal of the real gangster Burke. Ray Liotta would listen to old FBI audio cassette tapes of Hill when practicing his character for the movie. He took note of the way the real Hill would speak and would listen and mimic the way he would speak to slowly condition his speech the same way Hills was. Lorraine Bracco who played Karren in the movie wanted and tried to get as close as possible to a real life mafia wife to get an idea of what that sort of character would be like. She was unfortunately unable to analyse any offer her real life subjects because they exist only in a very high tight-knit community. In her opinion it was better if the creation came from her. Paul Sorvino didn t have much of a problem when portraying his character Pauli in the movie. However it is said that he found it challenging to really show how cold hearted and ruthless the real life character could be. In his opinion this was only achievable when his own family were threatened.

The real Henry Hill was paid about five hundred thousand a couple of weeks before the actual filming for the movie took place. The film was shot in New York, queens, New Jersey and Long Island over a period of three months in the summer. Scorsese had a budget of twenty five million dollars to create the masterpiece but in those days it was still a mid level budget movie. The film was broken down into many different sequences and Scorsese storyboarded everything because of the complicated style throughout. It is considered that he wanted a lot of movement and wanted the gangster action to be throughout the whole picture. In the movie the style seems to break down at the end and gets out of control when approaching Henry Hill s last days as a wiseguy. It is also considered that the style of the film comes from the first two or three minutes of 1962 French film Jules and Jim directed by Francois Truffaut. The quick edits, freeze frames, extensive narration and local multiple shots are all tools used in the making of goodfellas. It was this reckless attitude towards the conventional sort of filming that encapsulated how hectic and frantic the characters lives within the movie were. When watching the movie from start to finish it is evident that Scorsese vision was to overwhelm the audience with as much information as possible. Gangster life is very rich so he put a lot of detail into each and every scene. Many times in the movie it would freeze and Liotta would voice over the freeze frame. He used these to highlight a point in Henrys life.

The scene where Joe Pesci kills spider for talking back to him was a hard scene to do in Pesci s opinion because he had a difficult time relating to the real person the character was based on. He had trouble justifying the action and the only way he could get around that was by not judging his character and putting himself in Tommy s shoes and making himself feel the same way his character felt. The scene where Lorraine Braco was about to shoot Henry Hill in the face on the bed was an emotional one. Many times in the movie her character is portrayed as an abused wife surrounded by crime and violence. Her portrayal of a gangster s wife was again a description of how seducing it can be by getting involved with a gangster like Henry Hill. It is said that if she did not make her work important then it would probably end up on the cutting room floor taking into account it was a male dominated cast.

During some of the rehearsals Scorsese let the actors do and say whatever they wanted to for that particular scene. He made transcripts of various sessions and then whenever an actor came up with a good line he would use it in his revised script that the whole cast worked on. An example of this is the what so funny scene where Tommy tells a story about getting beaten up by the cops and Henry responds by calling him funny. This scene was based on an actual event that Joe Pesci was involved in. The actors worked on it during the rehearsals and Scorsese took around four to five takes, one a little bit different to the other. He then rewrote both of theirs dialogue and inserted it into the script. All of this gives a very convincing portrayal of what gangsters were really like because at the point of shooting the scene, the actors are themselves the character they are acting. The lighting used in the scene is a little dark and mysterious. A lot of red lighting is used which almost gives a sense of danger which relates to the fact that the room is full of dangerous gangsters.

There was one long tracking shot that followed Liotta and Lorraine from outside the Copacabana nightclub and followed them right through the whole nightclub until their characters sat down. The shot was over three minutes long and captured many different aspects of Henry s life as a gangster. It shows how Henry has his whole life ahead of him and how much of an important figure he had already become. The scene does a great job at portraying Henry Hill as a celebrity and to highlight the respect people have for him. The scene is a metaphor on how seducing the high profile gangster life can be. Scorsese shot this scene about eight times because he wanted it to be exactly perfect. Near the end of the movie Scorsese wanted to properly show Henry Hills state of anxiety, paranoia and all the racing thoughts going through his head due to the amount of drugs in him like cocaine and amphetamines. It was a hard shoot to do because in real life Ray Liotta had never been under any of these influences. The scenes were shot perfectly and really encapsulate the hysteria behind his characters out of control life at the time. As if to show the characters life was spinning out of control and getting faster every step of the way until one day he hits a brick wall at full speed. The movie was ended with Henry regretting that he no longer was a gangster. Scorsese wanted the movie to end like this because he was trying to engage with the audience. He wanted the audience to get angry at the character and also at the system that allows this sort of thing.

The movie showed a cold, unfeeling and horrible view of the mafia life style where all the bad guys are good. That is why the name itself is called Goodfellas, another variation of wiseguys, mobsters and gangsters but at the end of the day their all the same meaning. The violence in the movie was depicted realistically as possible with the added detail of freeze frames and voice-overs. It was a documentary type of movie based on true events which is also highlighted right at the beginning of the movie. Scorsese s directors cut had so much blood in the uncut version of the movie that he had to remove around ten very short gruesome scenes just to ensure an R rating. Goodfellas was Scorsese s most expensive film to date which cost him twenty five million to make. It was shown a couple of times in California where some of the viewers got a little agitated by the portrayal of Hills last day as a gangster in the mafia because of the way it was shot. Thelma Schoonmaker was the editor for the movie and together she and Scorsese made the sequence faster and faster with a lot more jump cuts to convoy Henry s drug fuelled point of view. When Scorsese did a test screening, about forty people walked out in the very first ten minutes however the favourite scene for test audiences happened to be the what s so funny scene which later ended up being the most remember able scene of the movie.

The soundtrack was chosen by Scorsese and he really wanted to use the right kind of music that commented the scene or the character in an oblique way. He did have a rule for this and it was basically to use music that was around at that time. For example, if a scene is in nineteen seventy three then he could use any song or type of music that was current at the time or older. A lot of the non dialogue scenes were shot with just music or a particular song and he even had a song called Layla by Derek and the Dominos playing in the background of the actual shot when shooting the scene where all the dead bodies are discovered.

The premiere of Goodfellas was held at Venice Film Festival in 1990 where Scorsese deservingly was awarded the Silver Lion award for best director. It was then released all over the world starting in America and eventually grossing forty seven million which was almost double the amount of money he had put in. There was much critical acclaim to the movie where it scored top scores on review sites alike. Rotten Tomatoes is a movie review website and they gave this movie 97% also commenting on it calling it great cinema. When watching this movie you can t help but notice the outlaw energy vibrating off every second of the flick. When analysing this movie, it is considered to be one of the most picturesque portrayals of the mafia gangster life styles however in my opinion it comes second to the realism portrayal of the Godfather trilogy with the first one released in 1972.