Updated with video.
Martin Scorsese has made some of the most critically acclaimed movies of all time. From Taxi Driver to The Irishman, we’re used to seeing the director films getting Oscar nominations, Scorsese’s talents are clear, but apparently, sometimes the thing that Martin Scorsese is best at is recognizing when his actors have great ideas. Apparently, the most iconic scene in Goodfellas was initially the creation of Joe Pesci.
I don’t even have to tell you what scene I’m talking about. Even if you’ve never seen Goodfellas, you know the scene I’m talking about. It’s Joe Pesci’s big scene where he asks “How am I funny?” It’s the scene that is so well known that it’s been parodied countless times. Scorsese recently told Deadline that the scene wasn’t in the script for Goodfellas. It came from an idea Pesci had that the director then refined on set into the scene we know today. The director said…
Some things were spontaneous. Like, Joe Pesci would come in and say, ‘I wanna do this scene…’ With that whole movie, we were like, ‘Just do it.’ We did it in rehearsal, rewrote it from rehearsal. … He said, ‘something happened to me.’ We were in a restaurant. I said, ‘Tell me.’ He goes, ‘I can’t tell you here.’ I said, well, let’s go to my place. So we did. He says, ‘I’m gonna act it out.’ And he did it. I said, ‘I know just where to put it.’ It’s not even in the script. I didn’t write it in. Said, we’re gonna squeeze it in on one day shooting. And Mark Canton had a couple of the other guys from Warner Brothers with him that day, and we hear laughter off camera. It was them.
When he heard the WB execs laughing Scorsese probably knew he was on to something. The director actually says that he knew during production that Goodfellas was something special. It would go on to receive six Oscar nominations. While it would only win one on Oscar night, that one belonged to Joe Pesci for Best Supporting Actor. It’s difficult to imagine that this one scene went a long way toward earning the award.
It sounds like Martin Scorsese’s upcoming movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, has a lot in common with this Goodfellas scene. The director says they “discovered it as we went along,” indicating that even more of the movie was perhaps found on set rather than on the page. Whether that will be quite as successful this time around is certainly a question.
Everything we know about Killers of the Flower Moon indicates a complex, if not troubled, production. The movie has made headlines for its significant runtime, a budget that made Netflix flinch, and the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio ended up switching roles in the film, a certainly unusual thing to see. But Scorsese movies are almost always worth experiencing if only to see what ends up on the screen.
