The five-part docuseries Mr. Scorsese — which premiered at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 4 and begins streaming Oct. 17 on Apple TV+ — does a tremendous job explaining the magic and mystery of Martin Scorsese, arguably the most influential living American film director. When he approaches a movie (excuse us, a “picture”), he’s got a vision of it all mapped out in his head. But he’s also ready to change on a dime if someone comes to him with a good idea.
There are several examples of this in Rebecca Miller’s documentary, like how Margot Robbie, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Scorsese stayed up until 2 a.m. one night upping the stakes of the breakup scene from The Wolf of Wall Street, then shot it the next day. But the best story has to be how one of the most memorable — and certainly the most quoted — scene in GoodFellas wasn’t in the original script.
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Miller sets it up by first speaking to Nicholas Pileggi, the author of the nonfiction book Wiseguy that Scorsese and he later adapted into the GoodFellas script. Pileggi recalls with awe how the quintessential New York director already had music cues in mind when they were first tapping out the dialogue, barking “put in Cream! Put in Cream!” while Pileggi was at a keyboard. (He later realized this meant Scorsese wanted to use the song “Sunshine of Your Love” for the scene when Robert De Niro decides to bump off his own crew.)
There was, however, one “starburst” of improvisation in the movie — and it came directly from the actor Joe Pesci.
Pesci, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in Scorsese’s earlier triumph Raging Bull, was initially resistant to appearing in another true mob story.
“I asked Joe Pesci to be in the movie and he didn’t want to be in it,” Scorsese says in the documentary. “But eventually he said, ‘I’ll be in it if you do this one scene with me.’ And he acted out the scene. I said, ‘That’s terrific,’ because it actually happened to him. I said, ‘I know exactly where to put it.’ So it’s not in the script, but I knew where to put it.”
The scene, of course, is the “funny how?” scene, in which Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill and a bunch of other goons are listening to Pesci’s Tommy D. tell a coarse story with great bravado — but then Tommy throws ice water on everyone by pretending to be offended when told he’s a funny guy.
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Scorsese’s explanation leads to one big question: exactly how did this actually happen to Joe Pesci?
Well, unfortunately, he doesn’t get too specific. (Those who know, don’t say, and those who say, don’t know, we suppose.)
It is true, however, that Pesci is famously shy in person, which explains why his Oscar acceptance speech for GoodFellas was about as brief as getting whacked in a basement. (Less publicized was when he won for The Irishman at the 2020 New York Film Critics Circle gala, where he would only go onstage if his director and costars went with him.)
Scorsese explains, however, that “one of the reasons Joe doesn’t do these interviews and things is that nobody would understand his background and how he grew up. He was marked much more than me in that world, hanging around with the Mafia guys.”
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Since Mr. Scorsese is a cinephile’s delight, Miller gave the great director a moment to share why the sequence works as well as it does.
“On set,” he explains, “I decided [that scene] there would be no close-ups. Because as the tone of the piece changes, you need to see the people around them — their body language change, and their eyes become more alarmed. We did, like, two or three takes and that was it.”
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Watching the scene with a crowd is an incredible example of audience manipulation. One can listen to the laughter suddenly drop away as the tone turns serious — knowing that at any moment violence may break out. Pesci mirrors this scene twice more, and both times it turns bloody.
Here’s a look at the precise moment things get weird for Henry Hill.
