Goodfellas (1990) on Netflix

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Goodfellas (1990)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

• Warner Bros. wanted a name actor for Henry Hill and Ray Liotta had to campaign for months; Martin Scorsese cast him only after Robert De Niro saw him in Something Wild. John Malkovich was considered for Jimmy Conway, and Tom Cruise, Sean Penn and Val Kilmer for Hill.
• The "Funny how? Do I amuse you?" scene grew out of something that happened to Joe Pesci when he was a waiter: he told a mobster he was funny and the compliment was not taken well. Pesci and Liotta improvised it in rehearsal and Scorsese rewrote their dialogue into the script.
• The famous unbroken shot through the Copacabana began as a problem: the crew could not get permission to enter the short way and had to go round the back. Scorsese turned the detour into a single take and shot it eight times because comedian Henny Youngman kept fluffing his lines.
• The dinner scene at Tommy's mother's house was improvised apart from one scripted line, and the mother was played by Scorsese's own mother Catherine. The painting of the bearded man with the dogs was made by writer Nicholas Pileggi's mother, copied from a National Geographic photograph of November 1978.
• Scorsese wanted the violence to feel cold and incidental, but had to cut ten frames of blood out of the film to secure an R rating from the MPAA.
• Warner Bros. obliged Scorsese to preview the film for the first time in his career, and the California test screenings went badly: forty people walked out in the first ten minutes of the first one, and audiences were agitated by the sequence covering Henry Hill's last day as a gangster.
• The real Henry Hill, the gangster whose life the film tells, was paid $480,000 two weeks before shooting began.
• David Chase has said Goodfellas is why he made The Sopranos, calling it very funny and brutal and the first mob film in which Scorsese dealt with a crew rather than a dynasty.