"So that’s how I met everybody. I met Thelma [Schoonmaker], Michael Powell was there. It was insane. They were all sitting there in the dark, and they’re like, “Well, let’s hear it.” So I did my scream, and they all laughed and applauded. They said, “That’s horrible! How do you do that?” I said, “I work for a publicist. It’s pretty easy.”":D :D :D
Low: I did come up with my own lines of, "What am I, a schmuck on wheels?" "I've been bleeding for this caper." "Jimmy is being an unconscionable ball-breaker!" During a break, one of the Mob guys in the movie comes to me and he says, "What is this 'ball-breaker' thing that you're saying, the 'unconscionable?' " I said, "You know, in the Caribbean there's conch shells; you can't break 'em." They all give me like the thumbs-up: "Oh, I get it. 'Unconscionable!' "I predict Low would eventually wind up getting whacked by his mob pals if were really in the mob.
Douglas: I said to Marty, "I think you know that Dances with Wolves is going to win Best Picture, and you're going to win Best Director." I even got him a little table where he would put his Oscar. We were romantically involved at the time. When he lost, that was again like a condemnation of the film. I remember him saying, "They put me in the front row with my mother, and then I didn't win," which is such an Italian thing to say. He came home: "They don't like me. They really, really don't like me."Ha! Scorcese is the anti-Sally Field!
Chase: The sequence in GoodFellas—moving the cocaine, making the Sunday gravy, and taking care of the brother in the wheelchair, and dodging helicopters—the way music and film are used there, so that you actually feel you're high on coke? I don't think anybody's ever done that before or since. It's beautiful filmmaking.Worth every penny. More a sequence than a scene, and more like the sequence. Probably my all-time favourite cinematic crescendo of a sequence ever. Unravels Henry's whole world in a couple of taut, tightly edited minutes. Absolute note-perfect portrayal of the psyche of deep paranoia - you totally feel Henry's stress and delirium just ratcheting and ratcheting and ratcheting upward. God, the editing, the way shit keeps moving in and out of the frame or it's just a liittle overlit? You're in Henry's mind in that sequence. And the music is the binding, the shifting rhythm that holds it together.
Corrigan: He samples like fifty different pieces of music in a minute. George Harrison and the Rolling Stones. Muddy Waters. The Who.
Brooks: Ooh, that was an expensive scene.
I took GoodFellas to be a direct response to, and refutation of, the Godfather films, in that, contrary to the gangster world being this operatic saga, it was composed of a bunch of thugs who were barely in control of themselves even at the best of times
For us to live any other way was nuts. Uh, to us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day and worried about their bills were dead. I mean they were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something, we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again.posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:45 AM on September 23, 2010
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