ANNOUNCER: Writer/Director Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: It all started from a newspaper article about Lefty Rosenthal's car exploding.
And then it says in the article
that he was friends with Tony Spilotro, his wife,
there was a triangle, a romantic triangle, and somehow, all of this
was just the tip of the iceberg, this was the culmination
of an extraordinary history
of what Las Vegas had become and was no longer.
SAM: When you love someone, you've gotta trust them.
There's no other way.
ANNQOUNCER: Editor Thelma Schoonmaker.
SCHOONMAKER: I think Marty just always knew
with his wonderful gut instinct for cinema
that to begin the film with an explosion was a great idea
and then leave it as a mystery for people whether he lived or died.
But the explosion, of course, the great Saul Bass and his wife Elaine
when they were asked to do the titles, of course, they took that explosion
and made this beautiful title sequence
of our main character falling slowly into hell.
It was such a great idea, and beautifully realized.
They showed it to us. It was perfect.
We didn't change a thing,
(LAUGHS)
as usual with them.
It was one of those great artistic collaborations that Marty has,
similar to the one he had with Elmer Bernstein.
They just understood each other immediately.
They both knew the entire history of film.
And Marty was well aware of Saul's work with Hitchcock, of course.
So they were just at a common understanding immediately.
There wasn't much need to talk.
And as usual, they just brought us the title sequence, and it was perfect.
I mean, one hardly had to say,
"Maybe could we move that name eatrlier," or something like that.
But it was just perfect.
They came to Las Vegas, shot all the Las Vegas lights
and went away and just came back with a little masterpiece.
ANNQOUNCER: Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: The use of the Bach music, the Saint Matthew Passion
which is over the top.
Originally, the film was gonna open with the music I used at the end.
The Animals' version of House of the Rising Sun.
And that's where the body was going to be flying in the air. That was designed.
It's in the script.
The script is very close to what the picture became,
the design of De Niro's character Rothstein flying in the air.
And then Saul and Elaine Bass put that title sequence together.
I thought it'd be more interesting to blast it and have the sense of the music
that is sacred music, in a sense.
Sacred music, Saint Matthew Passion.
Sacred music, which is the soundtrack
for a story about people who are profane
because the idea is that, in Christian thinking, there is no such thing.
Every person is worth God's love.
Every person is worth the value of their life.
Is everyone irredeemable? Those are my thoughts.
I don't say that to the actor.
But this goes on in my mind, "Why shouldn't they have their paradise?”
It's like the gods... Okay, they are a step down, certainly
in a sense or scale of who is God.
In a sense, these are the pagan gods, which give them a pagan paradise, in a way.
But these guys in Chicago...
But it's interesting that given that, too,
these characters sin further and lose that paradise.
So in any event, the way I could remember it
when I did The Last Temptation of Christ at Universal...
Actually it was an independent film picked up by Universal.
Mike Ovitz at CAA worked out a deal
between myself and Universal with Tom Pollock
to be under contract at Universal.
And that led to working on a number of projects at Universal,
one of which was Cape Fear.
Then I went off to do Age of Innocence.
Universal was in the bidding on that.
But they wanted to give us less in the budget
and Columbia Pictures wanted fo give us more, so we went with Columbia.
And then I owed a film to Universal.
SAM: But it's in the desert where lots of the town's problems are solved.
NICKY: Got a lot of holes in the desert
and a lot of problems are buried in those holes.
Except you gotta do it right.
You gotta have the hole already dug
before you show up with a package in the trunk.
ANNQOUNCER: Producer Barbara De Fina.
DE FINA: We were developing Clockers.
And my recollection is that after developing it and working with Richard Price,
Marty decided that maybe it wasn't something that he should direct,
you know, in a way, it wasn't his neighborhooq,
it wasn't his thing.
So he felt that ultimately Spike should do it,
which turned out to be great, and it was a great collaboration.
Meanwhile, of course, he always had that wonderful relationship with Nick Pileggi
since Goodfellas.
Nick hadn't actually finished writing the book.
So it was a much different process developing Casino
because with Goodfellas, he had the book finished
and it was an easier process adapting from a book, which had a real structure.
And in this case, it was like a pile of notes.
And they were trying to write the script when the book
hadn't really become formed yet.
By the time the movie was finished, the book was finished.
So if you look at the credits, it says, "Based on the book."”
But actually, they wrote the screenplay before the book was done.
ANNOUNCER: Author/Screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi.
PILEGGI: Originally I started writing this as a book.
I was working on Goodfellas at the time
and once that was pretty much out of the way,
Marty knew I was doing this book on the casino business
and I was just telling these bizarre stories, the skim, and explained this stuff to him.
He knew some of it.
He had always been interested in the casino world
because, if you think, in Marty's case, he wanted...
It's like a trilogy, I think.
Mean Streets.
Just kids, really street punks.
I mean, he's selling Jap adapters.
I mean, you can't be lower than that.
And then we go to Goodfellas.
But Goodfellas came along quite a few years later
and Marty was interested in the kids from Mean Streets growing up.
This is who they were, and he knew who they were better than anybody.
And he understood that while they lived big and they could go to the Copacabana,
it was still not...
It was all coming down. It all crashed.
And that was the second level, sort of the middle-class mob.
But he was also fascinated by the top of the mob world.
And that, of course, is the casinos.
Where is the mob better situated in those days
than Las Vegas and the casinos?
'Cause they, through their connections, actually own the casinos.
Their names couldn't be on them because they were crooked.
But they own the casinos and skim them of millions of dollars.
NICKY: They'd even take cash right out of the drop-boxes.
And it was up to this guy right here,
standing in front of $2 million...
ANNQOUNCER: Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: The whole film was really carefully planned out.
It was restructured in the editing, for a number of reasons.
We often do that. We couldn't do it in this film.
A number of others, Raging Bull.
The Temptation of Christ, we didn't.
But sometimes you take a sequence...
Also, the style of a picture, you could move things around
if you stay within certain time periods.
One of the things is the documentary aspect of the movie,
how things work in Vegas, we found we had to move that up earlier.
I had it in the middle of the film.
One sequence about a fellow coming out of a cab, going inside,
putting the money in a bag and going out, as simple as that. That's the way it was.
NICKY: Now, that suitcase was going straight to one place,
right to Kansas City, which was as close
to Las Vegas as the Midwest bosses could go...
ANNOUNCER: Thelma Schoonmaker.
SCHOONMAKER: We did do some restructuring in Casino
and we rewrote a lot in that.
And that happened again in Kundun
where we were able to restructure a lot
because it was a court
and everybody was always wearing the same clothes.
(LAUGHS)
They were always dressed like monks.
And the Lord Chamberlain always wore the same clothes
and the court always looked basically the same until they go into exile.
So we have done a lot of restructuring and rewriting
in some of the films recently.
But it's always fascinating, our conversations in the editing room.
They're often about life or things that Marty is worried about.
So it's a constant rich thing for me
that our discussions there are so wide-ranging
or we'll talk about history or archaeology
or remark on films that are on TCM with no sound running.
I'll look over and see a great shot, and Marty will talk to me about that.
It's been the way a friendship develops over a long period of time.
NICKY: ...the oulffit's top boss.
You got a round figure on it?
NICKY: Definitely the most important guy in this room.
ANNQUNCER: Barbara De Fina.
DE FINA: The movie, it does have a lot of information in it.
Especially at the beginning, there's a lot of back-story,
a lot of explanation
about how the casino works and how they were skimming the money.
I think, to get through all that, it needed a lot of energy.
It needed something to keep you moving.
And so the camera is moving all the time,
and hopefully seamlessly moving,
and keeping you constantly interested and showing you different things
and hopefully you're absorbing everything without getting bored
and overwhelmed, and then there's voiceover.
So there's just a lot of energy,
sort of wheeling you through to get all the information that you need
to get into the real narrative.
ANNOUNCER: Thelma Schoonmaker.
SCHOONMAKER: I think Marty had hoped that we could show
what was going on, how the skim was happening in Las Vegas.
But we found after some screenings
that we probably had to say a little more in voiceover than we thought.
So that became a big part of making the movie,
writing, rewriting the voiceover to get it just right
so it had a personal flavor, but was still telling the story.
And, of course, Nick Pileggi was working constantly with us on that.
And we had to re-record over and over again the actors,
which happened also on Age of Innocence
with the voiceover, we kept rewriting, re-recording it as the film went on.
So we ended up with a lot more voiceover in the beginning of the film
than was originally intended.
But it's filled with such flavor, you know.
(LAUGHS)
Particularly Joe Pesci's lines are...
They're so surprising. I mean, the way he describes things.
Just this kind of slap in the face, a good slap in the face.
So that became a big part of the film, making the voiceover work right.
ANNQOUNCER: Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: In terms of revisiting
in a sense, "a gangster genre”
and deal with it, in my mind, you've got these extraordinary characters
who are given paradise by the gods in Chicago.
This group of men who rule over Chicago,
Zeus and the others, they're given paradise.
And they sin. They sin and they lose paradise.
And paradise then crumbles and collapses all around them.
NICKY: They wanted him because Ace ate, slept and breathed gambling.
ANNOUNCER: Nicholas Pileggi.
PILEGGI: They were given four Las Vegas casinos to run.
All these casinos do is churn out millions of dollars a day.
And they screwed it up.
That's because these guys are always gonna screw it up.
They are so willful and so in need of immediate gratlification.
And so blind as to what the consequences of their acts are
that in the end, they screw it up and it's so,
I guess you could call it biblical, or you can call it Darwinian.
But whatever it is, it makes for great drama.
And I think Marty agrees. I think it makes for great drama,
that makes for pretty good movies, if you can get it right.
ANNQOUNCER: Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: It's sort of the devouring of all material objects.
This extraordinary need for accumulation of wealth,
accumulation of objects, accumulation of, what, everything physical.
And ultimately, there's never enough.
And the Vegas of the '70s in this film was...
That's what the main impulse was about.
Never enough for anybody, the greed.
It's part of the human condition.
They're not the only greedy ones. We see it all around,
especially in governments, and certainly in big business,
even much more so than organized crime.
Particularly, it's been proven in American society recently.
Over and over again in American society, and also other cultures around the world.
But in any event, how much is enough? When do you get enough in this life,
especially in a society that is
more and more ruled by materialism, consumerism?
And then, let's say there's a spiritual side to America. There's faith.
Well, faith is one thing. Faith is very good.
But the Dalai Lama had said, "It's good to have faith,
"but you also have to have spiritual development.”
And that doesn't necessarily mean
that anybody with faith has spiritual development.
What is spiritual development?
In my mind, it's thinking beyond yourself.
I'm not saying I could do it. I'm saying that's what interests me.
And I made pictures like that about characters like the Dalai Lama,
The Last Temptation of Christ.
Even in Mean Streets, there are certain aspects about what you give,
are you your brother's keeper?
And in this film, too, in Casino,
they are friends, all three of them are friends.
They're close friends.
They're irritable with each other.
Joe Pesci's character.
One has one way of doing things. The other has the other way.
And so there's a relationship there
and they do give to each other in different ways.
But ultimately it spins out of control because there, there are no limits.
You see, once they take over as the gods of this place,
and what makes them gods? They make the place run.
And what does that mean? It means more money being made for the wiseguys.
More money being made for organized crime.
That means they're successes.
And when they get that, they could do anything they want.
In a sense, they're given the sinners' paradise.
But they lose that because they become even worse sinners. That's right.
(LAUGHS)
And I thought, you know, that was the idea.
As you see them, they may have had souls when they starteq,
something of a soul,
but as the film progresses, they start to lose those souls.
Ace, tell him the line on the Bears game.
- Eight. - If he don't know, nobody knows.
ANNQOUNCER: Actor Frank Vincent.
VINCENT: Raging Bull, Marty, he took Joe and I out of a little small film
and saw what we had together and utilized it.
So his gift is actually casting and working with the actors,
the technical stuff, and he's very knowledgeable.
You can sit down and discuss this with him and go over it
and say, "How do you like this idea?" And bring something to him.
'Cause I think that a lot of stuff that Joe did in Goodfellas
was stuff that he brought to Marty, you know.
And there's a scene in Casino that we did
at the bar with Bob, Joe, and l, when the guy with the pencil...
That was all thought of on the set.
And we were rehearsing it and talking about it
and that came out of an improv,
Marty had the sense of seeing it right away and saying, "Yeah, that's good. Keep that."”
Nicky, take it easy.
(MAN WHIMPERING)
SAM: While I tried to figure out why the guy said what he said
Nicky just hit him.
No matter how big a guy might be...
ANNOUNCER: Nicholas Pileggi.
PILEGGI: Never again would wiseguys be able to control
a casino in Las Vegas to this day.
Now they no longer do. That ended it for them.
And the only reason it ended, by the way,
is that as a result of that trial and that case,
the Teamsters' Pension Fund was taken over by the Federal Government.
The mob could no longer control
where the pension fund lent money.
That's the way they controlled the casinos.
They controlled members on the trustees
of the central state's pension fund.
They were all controlled by mob guys.
And, not all but, I think, six out of eight or four out of six,
l can't remember, but the majority.
And therefore, they were able to lend $62 million
to Ace's friends
who then bought the casino,
propped a guy up there as the legitimate owner
and brought Ace in to run it because that guy didn't know how to run a casino.
And Ace didn't even wanna do it, he didn't wanna go.
But he wound up going 'cause you don't say no to those guys that often.
But if you wind up just covering
the financial manipulations of the Teamster Pension Fund
and the skim and all that stuff done abstractly
like a business report, there's no way into a movie there.
There's hardly a way into a book. It becomes basically a treatise.
It becomes something you might read in a business school.
Why this didn't work? Well it didn't work because we...
But once you can humanize the people
because all of this is being done by people.
It may be numbers, but it's numbers being written by people,
being accumulated by people.
Once you see the people who are involved
and then you find that they have unbelievable soap-opera lives...
And it's these soap-opera lives, this insanity
that brings down a $200 million apparatus.
It's just fascinating.
And it's the story, the narrative, the human story
that gets you into the big story.
It makes the boringness of actuarial numbers
and the business stuff, it makes that stuff fascinating.
That's the key. You gotta get in with the real story and real people.
And I talked to these guys.
I got their language. I got them on tape.
I have the way they sound, and you can't write that
in film school in Malibu, at the side of a mountain,
no matter how many hallucinogens you take, you can't write
the way a guy out of the Chicago gangs reports.
Or a gambler in New York, you can't...
So when you've got that body of dialogue, which it is,
it's just all that language, how can you not use it?
Because he is telling you the story.
It's priceless.
So to then put it all in trumped-up dialogue
and try to make it fit,
there's no reason to do that, you've got such a natural expression.
It's not me, I didn't write that. The guy... l re-typed it, I cleaned it up.
I abridged stuff, l took out the stuff about his mother-in-law.
And Marty and l, we made it
So that it was a part of the narrative.
You're hearing those guys talk. When they talk, you are hearing...
You may have never met a gangster, but when you hear Henry Hill talk
or when you hear Ace talk or the Joe Pesci character talk,
that's the way they talk.
SAM: But I knew the trick with whales like Ichikawa
was that they can't bet small for long.
He didn't think of it as winning $10,000,
he thought of it as losing $90,000.
So, he upped his bets.
ANNOUNCER: Thelma Schoonmaker.
SCHOONMAKER: Casino, particularly, is a film that Marty
had thought out very carefully,
all of those montages, and all his camera moves he had designed
so they would cut together. They were very specific, very extreme,
very hard to do. But a lot of that,
particularly the opening montages, were thought out almost like
he did the Raging Bull fight sequences
So that basically for me it was a matter of cutting them together
and then just finessing, a little bit, the cut.
But the structure of them was already thought out by him.
One example I use sometimes because it's the easiest to understand
is when he has the montage where he shows
how everybody is watching everybody.
And that I really, literally, only had to cut off the head and the tail,
stick it together and it worked already. Because he'd already planned out
how he was going to go from the dealer to the boxman and to the pit boss to the...
They were all swish pans and all I had to do
was cut off the end of it, stick it together, and it worked beautifully.
So that's really good directing when you're thinking like that
and imagining a whole sequence and then carrying it out beautifully.
ANNQUNCER: Barbara De Fina.
DE FINA: Nick worked a lot with the real Ace,
I don't know that he ever actually really came to the set
or was close during the filming.
I think it was more in the script stage and the book stage.
Because, again, this ultimately was a book
that the movie was based on.
So Nick did most of his research and worked with the real Ace.
And the story
I think the highlights of it are true.
Of course it's hard sometimes to...
You need to always have things happen that are truthful
and that the character might do.
It's hard to sometimes always stick totally to the truth
because it's just not cinematic and sometimes it's what happened on Tuesday
but in our movie it's gonna have to happen on Friday.
And some people will actually be very offended by that. And upset by it.
It was Nick's job
to make him understand and to get him to approve.
Because he did read the script and he did have to approve the script.
Which always makes studios very nervous and writers very nervous.
But it was sort of Nick's job to do that.
And he did it. He's a great writer and a great storyteller.
And I think if the story felt truthful
and that's what was important to him.
And I think legally to simplify it...
A lot of people were dead
which means that there was no issue getting releases.
Anyone that's been convicted of a crime
you really don't need to get a release from them.
So it sort of narrows down who...
But all the names were changed.
Anybody that's... Like somebody's wife for example,
we always have to be very careful to portray them in a way that's respectful
and not to involve them in the crime if they weren't really involved in the crime.
Or to even suggest that they might have known what was going on.
But that's what the studio legal department does
and all the names were changed for that reason.
ANNQOUNCER: Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: There's no doubt about it that it was kind of a sequel
to Goodfellas.
Not a direct sequel but it deals with that world, but only at a bigger scale.
And it's a film of excess. A world of excess.
Excess voiceover, excess color.
Excess music.
Excess music constantly. Constant music throughout.
I had a big chart on the wall
of which piece of music I'd use. Some music I've used before in pictures.
Robbie Robertson helped me. At times he suggested... Even the music from
Le Mépris, he gave it to me.
I said, "Why not? Why can't we just take music from Le Mépris?
"Why can't we just take Jimmy Smith doing Elmer Bernstein's Walk on the Wild Side?"
Because, in sense, this is a world without limits
in Vegas, there's these characters.
We can take music, and this music is part of their world.
They could take it, snatch it, throw it away, do what they want with it,
consume it, burn it, anything.
And so the wall-to-wall music was very special, especially
between Le Mépris and Devo's version of Satisfaction.
That was very interesting.
And with Goodfellas and Casino, l was playing around with the idea of
movies that are not just
dramatic narrative but also have documentary aspects to them.
A lot of people do that, but
some people say that it's just a magazine story, just journalism.
Not necessarily.
In Goodfellas, Pauline Kael said
that it's Scarface without Scarface. l said, "That's the point.
"It's the lifestyle.
"You're gonna now live with these people. It's not just one, there are many."
And the same thing here.
That was generally the idea
and also to make a very fast three-hour film.
(CHUCKLES)
We think it's fast. There are some scenes in the middle where people stop and talk
but other than that, it seems to be moving a lot.
Nick and I took that style we developed
in Goodfellas, Wiseguy, the book he wrote
and took it to another level here.
And took also the depiction of the American underworld
to a bigger level, as I said.
And it's based on riffs, in a way,
a man talking, telling stories,
going off on tangents and digressions.
And how far could you go off on a digression and still bring it in
back in it.
Cut it to a certain point, fast, and bring it back into the main line of the narrative.
Some people have agreed that that happened in the film,
others said that's one of the problems with the film, that it didn't happen.
That's the nature, the way I wanted it the way I am speaking now.
Give you an example, pull it from here, pull it from there.
Go back on to the narrative straight, straight line.
SAM: But one thing I didn't understand...
ANNQUNCER: Barbara De Fina.
DE FINA: Marty hates the word "act.”
He refused to talk about acts, and Casino is very sprawling.
Part of it, I think, really had to do with them not having
a finished book.
And so it sort of developed...
It's not episodic, I think.
You would think it might become episodic.
I don't feel that it's episodic, but it does have a very loose structure.
If you think of acts as a beginning, a middle, and an end,
it has that. Whether they all start and begin in the right place,
l don't know, but
he and Nick worked really closely together, they really do write together.
Nick would write pages and fax them to Marty
and Marty would make notes and fax them back.
Or sometimes they would just be in a room together.
They really did write everything together.
ANNOUNCER: Nicholas Pileggi.
PILEGGI: We'd meet at the old Drake Hotel, or the...
And we had a suite and I had my computer, we had a printer there.
We just moved all that stuff in.
It's just two of us, nobody else. And sometimes Marty's dog.
That was basically it.
t had already outlined the book to some degree,
Marty had gone over the outline.
And we did this with Goodfellas as well, Wiseguy, the book.
We try to say, "What is the narrative storyline, here?”
I'll come up with a version, and he'll come up with a version
and we kind of move it around until we have the structure.
I think the structure in Casino
was not my book structure, it was a movie structure.
And the structure in Casino was, l would say, 95% Marty's.
He just had a vision.
ANNQOUNCER: Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: As one great filmmaker, whom I love, told me,
he said it's like watching...
Riding a chariot and six wild horses
always threatening to go out of control at any given time.
Trying to keep it together and always living on the edge.
The horses are gonna just run rampant,
the chariot's gonna go flying, everything's gonna come crashing down.
And as the film... That was the idea
of shaping it with many asides
taken through the narrative
by the device of the use of voiceover again
which we developed in a number of my movies. I like voiceover a lot
and Goodfellas has that.
It's like just
a street kid telling a story on a street corner, in a way.
They are great actors.
Often, your life depends on it, on the street to be a good actor.
So we just took that idea and pushed it further to its nth degree
particularly at certain points when Joe Pesci's character
starts to speak on the voiceover track.
And they seem to argue or conltradict each other.
ANNOUNCER: Nicholas Pileggi.
PILEGGI: The part played by Frank Vincent is actually
the guy we were using as a technical advisor, his real name is Frank Cullofta.
He had testified and gone into the witness program.
I knew him and he had been
really smart and very knowledgeable and had changed his life.
Frank was the first one who talked, and I got unbelievable stuff from him.
And also, he was like that with Nicky.
So I got a lot of the early Nicky stuff,
what Nicky said here, what Nicky said there, l got that from
the early Frank stuff.
But then Ace started talking.
And then I wound up
with tape recordings, long tapes of Nicky talking
FBI stuff that came out in court.
And people who really knew Nicky started explaining to me what he said
and when he said it. So you begin to build...
The original early draft we used, the voiceover was the guy I had.
But as I got more voices, as these people began to open up a little
then I was able to go to the different voiceovers.
In the end
we had one voiceover, then we realized we had a couple.
We had used a couple of voiceovers in Goodfellas.
A lot of people think, "You can have only one voiceover.”
But in Goodfellas you have Henry and you also have his wife.
And because I got Henry's wife Karen
to tell us everything. She said, "He gave me the gun
“and it was heavy and it turned me on.”
You can't make that up. That was Karen, actually.
That was the key to their relationship.
The fact that he was a gangster and he had beaten up this guy
who had brutalized her and that he gave her the gun to put in a milk box.
I could never think that somebody would give a gun
to a girl from the Five Towns or Four Towns
and she's gonna put it in a milk box and get turned on by it.
Who could think that up?
So, that's what the point is, if you do the journalism
and get these people who are the subjects of your narrative,
get them to open up and tell you what's in their hearts
and what they were really thinking, what turned them on.
How can you not put that in their voice in the movie?
It's so revealing.
They sometimes tell you these things and they don't know how legitimate it is.
You're taking notes, you don't know how revealing it is.
Until you dress it all in the screenplay
and in the scenes.
The scenes are all talk and it's all
people revealing themselves.
And I had been working on the book
but hadn't finished it. It was only when
we decided to work on the mood and Marty had a window
that we could work on the movie and suddenly Bob was interested in it.
That's the thing that made the book work because that's what opened up
all of these people who had been distant.
Not at all as forthcoming as I needed them to be.
I would have probably had to spend another two years doing it
and I still don't think I would've gotten what I got in this book.
Whether it's good or bad or what, l wouldn't have got the access to people
that I got once it was announced that it was a movie.
And that Bob De Niro was in the movie. It's idiotic.
Who gets the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, Bob De Niro
or the writer? I don't know. It's ludicrous.
But that is where we are today in society and life.
And the reality was
when the movie was announced
suddenly it became easier to get information for the book.
Everybody was interested
in meeting Bob, or Marty, or Sharon Stone. Oh, my God.
And people who would slam doors on my face and wouldn't talk to me,
hung up, had their lawyers threaten me,
all of a sudden are calling me up to meet Bob De Niro,
Sharon Stone, Joe Pesci, Marty Scorsese.
I'm the writer, I'm there, and all of a sudden they'd open up
so I immediately started doing all of the material we had for the book.
Put it into the movie.
The minute I finished working on the movie, l immediately went back to the book.
I was typing a minute every minute
and my editor,
Michael Korda was unbelievably helpful
because he was really murderous.
I tried and had to get the book out before the movie.
It's hard, you know, they're already shooting the movie in Las Vegas
when I was still typing the book in Las Vegas.
The publisher wanted the book to come out a year before the movie.
So they get a nice ride with the book.
What happens when you bring out a book at the same time as the movie,
people pay $10 or $20 with your girlfriend, you go see the movie
Casino, with Bob De Niro and it's written by the same guy who wrote the book,
why would you spend $30 for the book?
They already saw that. "What, am l in the business of giving Pileggi money?”
I go see the movie.
So the publisher is sitting there with thousands of copies of the book,
they know people are not gonna duplicate.
The movie sells millions of dollars worth of tickets and nobody's gonna buy a book.
That's why they'd like you to read the book first for a year
until it's so bored, there is not a sale left.
They've wrung America's pockets dry.
And then the paperback comes out with the movie.
And you get the second kick with the paperback.
They have the picture, instead of just a normal book cover.
Now you have the movie star on the cover of the paperback.
The lawyers work all that out in advance
and that helps sell the paperback.
SAM: ...looking for weak dealers,
the way lions look for weak antelope.
Operator, this is Mr. R.
Get me Armstrong and Friday over to Pit 2.
ANNQOUNCER: Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: It was a very complex film to make. It took about 100 days to shoot.
And they were very long days.
Part of the problem was shooting the first six weeks in the Riviera Hotel
which was all right, we got the extraordinary atmosphere and flavor
but we weren't important. What was important for everyone was the gambling.
The first day of shooting l see an electric sign outside,
"Come and see the shooting of Casino with Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, Don Rickles."
And people would just show up. We started shooting around 11:00 at night.
And it was murder. People all over the place.
But around 1:00, 2:00 a.m., it started to get quiet. It was great.
Then around 6:00 a.m. you'd see the older people coming in
that we have pictures of at the end.
And that sort of thing.
There were two clowns outside every morning.
It was kind of scary. They were ladies.
After about the first week, we became friends. They were great.
They told me how they went to clown school
and they gave me an application
for clown school. l thought it was really interesting.
They were sweet. Every morning, l got to say, "Hey! How are you doing?
(LAUGHING)
"The clowns are outside.” We were out of our minds by that point.
You know, it was like living in that casino.
And the explanations of the games and that sort of thing.
Of course, the way that that world is depicted in the film
is now ancient history, in a way.
The scams are much more complicated and sophisticated. But in any event
it was a very difficult shoot because of the different locations
and bits and pieces of scenes rather than long scenes.
Long scenes were easier to shoot. Once the actors had it, we were okay.
And then the violence in the film
comes out of simply, you know, the enforcing of their will
and making money.
And it's no different from the rest of the world.
It simply isn't. Especially breaking the man's hand who was coming in and robbing them.
When we were doing that, there were two guys who had
held this fellow, the actor, and they threw him in the room
and there were two real guards.
At one point, we were halfway through the scene
he mentioned a few names. He said,
"This guy is getting away lightly." Because so-and-so, there was a wall,
a special wall in one place in Vegas, one guy...
There was a wall that they had that was covered with blood basically.
They said they'd do what they had to do
and throw him out in the middle of the road and say he got hit by a car.
That's just normal. That must have been in the '50s.
So if that happens, that could happen anywhere.
But you had to organize it, figure out, a guy's coming and making trouble,
he's gotta be dealt with.
And the only way to do it is with violence.
It's as simple as that.
The Rothstein character, based on a guy named Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal
was so precise and so guarded
and so cautious in his life.
He dealt with some very tough people. We don't even get into that.
You can't even get really into...
Every aside that somebody said, in research or something
that Rosenthal told us or...
You can make three films out of that alone. You don't know.
This just scratches the surface. He was very particular and very careful.
If you come back here, either one of you...
ANNOUNCER: Nicholas Pileggi.
PILEGGI: The only thing he ever did that was illegal when he was in lllinois
was gamble. He was a bookmaker, a gambler, and an oddsmaker.
He did all this stuff, and gambling is illegal in lllinois.
But it is legal in Las Vegas and Nevada.
So the minute he steps over the border into the state of Nevada
he is a perfectly legitimate human being, doing everything he did in lllinois.
But in Nevada, he is totally legitimate.
And that gave him such freedom
that made him feel so good, it was a great benefit to him
just in his heart. And that I think
that sense of freedom and release
was part of the thing that made him think that he could actually live a normal life
and find a beautiful girl to marry and have children and live this kind of
Leave It to Beaver life which, of course, was a dream beyond any chance of fulfillment.
You've known me two, three months. What do you know?
I'm 43 years old. I don't want to wait.
I know you well enough to know that I love you very much.
ANNQOUNCER: Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: He gave an impression when we met him a number of times and had meetings
and also we did research on him.
There's no doubit, he was a very methodical, scientific person.
Genius at what he was doing with numbers,
how to make things run and make more money.
I care about you.
But there is the fatal flaw.
The fatal flaw is...
I'm sorry. I'm not in love with you.
...he decides on making a life with a woman
who he knows does not necessatrily love him.
And he knows the nature of the world she's in, as he tells her:
“Let's make a business deal, in a way. We're a certain age.”
It's a very interesting scene between De Niro and Sharon Stone.
He says, "This is the top of the line. We can go further.
"You want to hustle chips for the rest of your life?
“I could take care of you." It makes sense. People do that
without even being at the top of the line. "We're both lonely.
“Let's get together and see If it works out.”
But the excess and the drive for more and more
pushes them way off the track and she ultimately not only brings down...
And I personally don't think it's her fault.
She brings down not just the relationship between Rothstein and Nicky Santoro
but the entire power of the Chicago mob.
And a whole epoch changes, in a way.
This has happened all throughout history, where different alliances are made,
lines of trust are crossed between close friends.
And this happens in politics, happens in history.
It's not about being man or woman. It's about being human.
It's about what happens between people and how they add to that
no limits of any kind.
I just sold a picture, The Aviator, about Howard Hughes, he had no limits either.
And he pays his own price. But this is a world where they have no limits.
It shows you what happens to a world where you have no limits.
SAM: ...but I didn't give a fuck. I'm Sam Rothstein, I said.
I can change her.
NICKY: It was typical Ace.
He invited the biggest people in town. He knew they'd show.
He knew they all wanted something from him.
With Ace, nobody ever got a free ride. Even Ginger.
With her, he still covered his bets.
They had to have the baby first, before they could get married.
He even made us watch Amy for a few days...
ANNOUNCER: Nicholas Pileggi.
PILEGGI: So he is madly in love with her but he understands who she is.
This is not Donna Reed with Robert Young.
This is a working girl.
She's made money. She's making a million dollars a year with all her boyfriends.
He's got to make up for that to her.
And so what he is going to do is, he wants her exclusive to himself basically.
He's gonna say, "Look, whatever you want, you want a million dollars, I'll give it to you.
"My sense is that once we begin to live together
"as husband and wife
"and maybe we'll have kids, and we'll go on with our lives
"we"ll fall in love. I'm already in love, but you aren't.
"But believe me, I'll make you fall in love with me”
which is probably what he felt.
She's a street girl. But she's very sophisticated.
I hate to even use the "street girl" word.
She's a knockaround girl and she knew her way around Las Vegas.
This is an exclusive kind of person in Las Vegas
who has, by the way, in that kind of community, all the respect
and the reputation of legitimate people.
That's who she was.
And in the end, he could never get her to fall in love with him.
And I think part of the problem was
she was always in love with the one guy who she couldn't control
and the one guy who was really bad to her.
All these other guys gave her money. This one guy used to take it from her.
And she let him take it. I think we see that very clearly in the movie.
Of course, there's no one betlter for that than Jimmy Woods.
ANNOUNCER: Costume Designer Rita Ryack.
RYACK: We thought of a little sort of quasi Jackie Kennedy,
doll-like, Barbie-doll suit,
that's with an innocent kind of collar.
A little Peter Pan collar, the suit is made of white silk matelasse.
And her pumps are of the same fabric
and I don't think we got a good shoe shot but they do have little rhinestone heels.
And she had that little fingertip length veil
and, you know, it is kind of
a loss-of-innocence costume, although I don't think
there was much innocence to be lost.
ANNQOUNCER: Actor Sharon Stone.
STONE: I was asked to audition for the role a couple of times
and Marty didn't show up for the audition.
I forget what happened the first time that he didn't come.
And then the second time they said that he was on a train.
- Right? - Yeah.
The first time that he didn't show up, l waited and they said,
“It'll be between this hour and this hour. He'll come and we'll call you.”
I was in my car waiting for like, you know, four hours, and then he just didn't show.
And then the second time
they said he's on an Amtrak train and he's coming in.
Then they called and said the Amtrak train broke down.
And I was like, "Yeah, right.”
l actually called Amtrak and said, "Did the train break down?"
They told me that it did and I still was like, "No.
"He's actually just blowing me off." Because I couldn't...
It was just inconceivable to me that yet again...
All I ever wanted was to be in a Scorsese movie.
All I ever dreamed about was to work with De Niro.
This was my biggest goal in my whole life.
So here I am, twice being blown off by Scorsese, so I'm like, "Of course.”
And so when they called me again and said would I come and see them, I said no.
Because my heart couldn't take it.
It was just too traumatic and heartbreaking for me that
this guy would blow me off a third time.
So I just went out to dinner with my best friend.
The agent called me and said, "He really wants to see you."
l said, "No, he doesn't. He really wants to blow me off again.”
They said, "Can we tell him where you went to dinner?" I said, "No."
And they called me back later and said, "Sharon, where are you?"
l was at this Italian restaurant.
They said, "He really wants to see you."
And I'm like, “No, he really doesn't.”
And so I am sitting at this restaurant and having dinner
and I look up and there's Marty
standing at my dinner table.
And I thought I was gonna have a heart attack.
'Cause it's little me and there is Marty Scorsese in a white suit
standing at my dinner table.
And he is like, “I really do wanna see you for this part
"and I really have seen all your movies.”
I'm like, "Yeah, I bet,
"especially King Solomon's Mines because that was a big winner."
He's, like, “No, I really did, l saw that, too.” And I'm, like, just...
"This is a nightmare.”
He's like, "Can I sit down?"
l was so humiliated.
And he sat down and he talked to me for, like, an hour
about everything I had ever done,
the good, the schmaltz, everything.
And what he thought about me as an actor and my work
and I thought I just wanted to get under the table and die
'cause he'd actually come to the restaurant to talk to me.
And he said, would I come and audition?
Which I did, and I went to New York
and I auditioned
and it was a very peculiar thing to audition
for this part of Ginger because she is so wild.
And you know, it's a fine line to tread
because you wanna do the part
but you don't want to beat the crap out of De Niro
because is he gonna give you the job if you beat him up in the room?
So I wanted to
demonstrate that I had the acting prowess to play the part
but I also didn't wanna damage him in some way
where they wouldn't hire me.
So I didn't think I quite did a great audition because it was...
l kept withholding in the work.
And then I got this call
that Marty and Bob were coming to California
and they wanted to see me again.
And I went into this hotel room
and they said, "What do you think of your audition?”
And I said, "I thought I sucked.”
And I said, "Because I didn't want to beat you up
"and I have to really... To be Ginger, you have to go berserk.”
And they talked to me at length about would I really let it rip.
And, of course, that's all I had to hear.
I said I would
and I promised them that l would be thrilled to do so.
SAM: Trouble was Nicky was dreaming of his own kind of Vegas.
NICKY: I put money out on the street charging three points a week.
Juice to the dealers.
Don't make us look for you.
ANNQOUNCER: Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: A Iot of people love fo go to Vegas
because they love the aesthetic of the bad taste.
I find it a little... I find it remarkable.
I find it interesting to look at. I don't like being in places that say,
“Isn't this wonderful bad taste?"
Where I grew up, I mean, there was enough
that I saw that was kind of ugly
and at the same time, there are some wonderful things.
But it was a pretty rough area, in particular, more ugly
than the skid row area of old New York, the Bowery.
People at the end of their lives Just thrown away like refuse.
And so, for me,
that bad taste, celebrating the worst instincts,
I don't know, I don't go for it, really.
The humor in the piece just comes from not just the look of it
'cause the look should be a provocation.
Leopard-skin carpets, and particularly the clothes,
the costumes that Ace Rothstein wears.
The houses and that sort of thing. There's a certain time and place, you know,
when you can look down on their taste.
I don't look down or up at it. I just get...
I think it's interesting visually but I don't enjoy it.
If there's any humor meant there, it's the humor of excess, also.
How much further can they go with the style, what they wear,
the style of the houses, the cars, everything?
But also, the humor of... The presence of Don Rickles
who understands that world
is part of that world, represents people that are part of that world
that is so important, that is the lounge act.
He's not just that. I'm sure he did that when he was younger.
The lounge act who became friendly
with the gods of the '50s, of that entertainment life,
Sinatra, Dean Martin and those people.
And has a certain look, even though Rickles is so remarkable with his
stream of consciousness.
He doesn't say... He isn't a jokester. He doesn't do one line as a joke.
He just starts somehow,
monologues that go on coming. There's no stopping.
Some of it is pretty tough.
The humor is tough humor and it's
remarkable in its truth.
Some of it is hard because it is true.
But it's good to laugh it out.
And he does that.
He's a really remarkable man
and he represents that attractive side, to me, of that world,
that sort of thing and just his presence in the film
is very important because he looks... He's the real thing.
Not a real gangster, I am talking about the part of the entertainment world
that was owned by, ultimately,
I guess, crime groups in Chicago and New York, or whatever
who bought those hotels.
But you must remember that all the people in the crime world down there...
You had...
That's why there's so much time given to the different deals in the picture.
Different deals and how they bought these hotels. If you could follow it.
But all you have to know is that it always has a clean face on it.
It always has a front man that is running it it could be the mayor of the town.
Maybe the governor of the state or maybe the president of the country.
So that's the issue.
That's why I went through all machinations of trying to explain that.
Even if you don't follow the voiceover of how this hotel wound up there and
who's signing a check, people shaking hands.
Pictures being taken. It's just an act
for brigandry, really,
just to rape and pillage.
NICKY: ...bring in the crowds.
He knew all the fucking angles.
He brought the whole Femme Fatale show...
ANNOUNCER: Rita Ryack.
RYACK: A Iot of people don't understand that the '70s and '80s
are indeed period movies.
In fact, 1997, that's period.
Here's an off-the-record thing, l was asked by Production,
"Why does it have to be so expensive?
"Can't you just go to a thrift shop and get '70s knockoffs?"
No. We're story-telling.
We had to do a tremendous amount of research
because there's such a range of clothing.
And you mentioned geography, of course.
All different parts of the country have very different looks.
Just before this film, I did Apollo 13
which was the same time period and that was Houston.
And although it was the same time perioq, the look was absolutely different.
So, regional differences are really important.
And of course you have to choose the clothing that will tell the story
of the film and the characters.
So I went to visit Frank Rosenthal, who was generous enough
to show us all of his personal stuff,
his wedding albums.
We took a little tour of his closet and really became very well acquainted
with his style, and he lent me few of his own things
that he had saved from the period
from the TV show.
When we tried them on Bob
who has his own physicality and personality,
the clothing, although it looked very flashy
in the context of Frank Rosenthal's environment
on Bob, it looked almost Wall Street, it looked very straight.
So we built all of his costumes. I think we built more than 70 suits.
So, I don't know if all of them made it into the film.
But the dark ties that Frank Rosenthal used
didn't work on Bob at all.
One of our most important meetings was on the roof of the hotel
where Marty was staying.
We were up there with bolts of fabric, a mirror, and the dying light
at magic hour, draping Bob with bolts of fabric
lo see what turned him into Ace Rothstein.
It was a very illuminating process.
I have something else interesting to say about Ace, it may or may not be interesting.
The guy who made his shirts, the shirt maker, Anto,
actually had made shirts for Frank Rosenthal.
This was just a coincidence, because I always work with Anto
because he's brilliant.
But he's done everybody.
He had Frank Sinatra shirt paftterns, he had
various wiseguys I cannot mention.
But he had Frank Rosenthal's, So we were actually able
to tell a little bit of the story of Frank Rosenthal
or Ace Rothstein
through the development and changes in those collars.
And the more authenticity that we can have
I think the more helpful it is.
SAM: She made everybody feel good.
ANNOUNCER: Sharon Stone.
STONE: Rita and John are the finest costumers
and their detail is quite amazing.
We had this Bob Mackie gown,
I mean, that thing probably weighed 30 pounds.
But very specific
and arduously
detailed work.
When they went to Bulgari for the jewelry
we got them to remake pieces
that they had from that period.
We invented pieces. They found pieces in costume houses.
But they even got me pieces to have,
to wear, to hang out in.
Between takes like my trailer pieces, I had,
which I still have, a Pucci jacket.
That was just what I could wear when I was in my trailer.
So I didn't have to go completely out
Just between takes in those hours when you hang out.
I wasn't just in a sweatsuit.
I had stuff that was still
in that character's groove.
All right, I will.
Listen carefully. There are three ways of doing things here.
The right way, the wrong way, and the way that I do it.
- Understand? - I do understand. I'll get right on it.
- Thank you. - Don't thank me. Just do it.
You're the slots manager. l shouldn't have to tell you this.
Dang, you are right. I'm so sorry.
SAM: So I ended up working 18-hour days.
Ginger was the one who wound up enjoying the best of Vegas.
Come with me, please. l have a better table for you.
What did you say to that fucking jerk, anyway?
I told him that I was Mrs. Sam Rothstein.
You might as well get something out of it.
ANNOUNCER: Thelma Schoonmaker.
SCHOONMAKER: You don't always get two actors that work so well
in improvisation as Pesci and De Niro.
The first time they ever did it, l would assume
there was just a spark, and you knew from that point on
(LAUGHING)
that you could give them any sort of situation and they would
begin to
create and improvise, and always within certain limits.
They always know they have to start
in one place and end with one line.
Start with one line, end with one line.
So that the scene will work in the way it's supposed to in the film.
But within that they are given a great deal of latitude and they just...
There is just something magical about the way the two of them feed off each other.
Let's say, for instance,
l want to go into the restaurant, which happens to be in the casino
to get one of those sandwiches I like?
Forget it. You can't even set foot in the parking lot.
That's how serious it is.
- In other words, I'm fucked? - In so many words, yes.
ANNQUNCER: Barbara De Fina.
DE FINA: I think one of the reasons aclors like Marty so much
is that he does let them go
with their gut and he does let them improvise
he does let them make suggestions.
He doesn't necessarily always use
all of their suggestions but he does
let them... And in fact, great things come out of it.
I think he would admit there're some wonderful things in the movie
that were the actors' ideas.
That's why the relationship is so strong and healthy between them.
Marty and Joe have another kind of relationship.
I think there is a lot more humor there.
I think Joe makes things funnier and I think Marty lets him go with that.
I think it is really important because Joe plays the unsympathetic guys.
Frank Vincent I think
brings a lot of reality.
He understands the character, he's from the neighborhood.
I think he's authentic, in a way, and I think Marty lets him go with that.
I think he knows
when to listen and when to let the actors do their thing
and when to use it but change it. I think it makes a great mix.
- What's taking so long? - This is a motherfucker!
It's working.
ANNQOUNCER: Frank Vincent.
VINCENT: In terms of my career,
working with Martin Scorsese has been
probably the biggest career boost any actor could have
because anything else I do, that's always made a reference to.
They're always, "He worked for Marty three times."
It's wonderful to do a Scorsese film,
but to be in his three classics,
casting people and other producers...
It's a great boost.
It's an honor to have done it and it's great for my career.
ANNOUNCER: Nicholas Pileggi.
PILEGGI: I know it's hard to believe sometimes but they are all human.
I don't care how bad they are, or what we think of as bad
or society thinks of as bad.
They are murderers, they're Killers, and they're brutal and it's a horrible,
brutal killer life and you can get killed Just as quickly as you can kill somebody.
But that is their life, they know that. At the same time,
they are quite often terrific daddies,
great mommies,
they're great with their children. They can be very generous.
They are human on a million other levels.
Except there's this one trigger
and suddenly you're dealing with a crocodile or an alligator.
They'll destroy you.
But that's what that world is, that's one of the things
you want to show, in a sense.
You think this is interesting, you want to be the godfather,
you want to play in that world? This is what that world's really about.
In the end, these guys are really brutal.
They could be good fathers, but they are brutal. They have a...
"They just don't feel your pain,” some politicians say.
They just don't.
They'll take your hand and slam it shut in an automobile door.
They don't feel you.
They feel their pain.
If they get a splinter, they go to the doctor.
But they don't feel any pain in other people.
They can laugh, they can eat while they're killing.
ANNQOUNCER: Frank Vincent.
VINCENT: When you meet these people in real life,
you see that they are all comedically based.
I mean, people don't realize that
but the comedy of these people is very, very tragic, but it's there.
And they use it a lot.
And they call what we call "breaking balls" a lot.
They'll always take a shot at you and say something funny about you.
“I don't like those shoes. Where'd you buy them?"
Or something about your hairdo, or your clothes or your...
Not your wife, not your children but
something about you and they'll always say,
"Frank, are you still wearing that shirt again?
"Take a break, for Christ's sake.”
And they always have comedics
'cause when they get serious, they're serious.
So everything other than serious is funny.
And they go for the laughs.
They always go for the humor of it.
So, Joe and I being essentially comedians
and musicians, and entertainers,
you see that in the characters, and we had the opportunity to do that.
And I addressed them as being people,
l don't wanna say average people, but they're just human beings
and they travel the earth and do what they do.
And they're in a business.
Sometime in their life they got caught into this lifestyle
and the attractiveness of it is what drives them, I guess.
I don't know what it takes to pull a trigger and kill somebody.
That's beyond comprehension to me. But evidently,
this lifestyle demands that kind of action, and they do it.
To play that, I think you gotta play it with the utmost honesty you can play it.
'Cause they're not fearful when they do it
So you can't be fearful as an actor doing it.
You have to be sincere about it.
I mean, that's my feelings.
You just do it.
I met a lot of people in my life, in the music business and whatever
who lived the lifestyle.
They all seemed to have the same character going through them
where they justify their actions
by the fact that they do what they do for business reasons.
ANNOUNCER: Nicholas Pileggi.
PILEGGI: The kind of violence, we don't make up.
We're simply telling the story.
Just the way you tell the story that
Ace fell in love with Ginger and she had a boyfriend on the side,
Just as you tell the story that she drives her car into his
on their lawn and steps all over the petunias,
you have to tell the violent part.
And in the violent part,
Nicky literally put a guy's head in a vice.
That's the way they tried to get this guy to talk.
They were in a workshop
and the fastest way to do it was to put the guy's head in a vice.
And finally the guy...
The guy was just a stubborn man. He would not talk.
He should've looked at the vice and given Nicky anything he wanted.
Nicky didn't want to. "I don't wanna put your head. Don't make me do this."”
That was what... "Don't make me do this."
Can you imagine saying that to somebody as you put his...
See, Nicky was blaming the guy who he's killing
for forcing him to force him to...
That's the kind of mentality you're dealing with.
But he did do that and it's a horrible scene.
But it actually happened.
It so identifies the Nicky character.
Just by his saying something like, "Don't make me do this”,
you know who he is.
And you can't leave it out. I mean, why?
Don't make the movie if you're gonna leave that out.
That's what you're making the movie about.
People may be offended and think it's horrible.
Well, don't go see the movie. I don't care.
If you're gonna do it you may as well do it right.
ANNQOUNCER: Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: The character of Spilotro that Nicky Santoro is based on,
what Spilotro had actually done in the late '60s in Chicago.
A murder occurred.
An unnecessary and brutal thing that we show off.
Poor woman gets killed and the guys say, "We wanna know who did this.
"He's gotta be taught a lesson.”
And in that frame of mind, those people then have to catch someone
and when they do, the guy's not talking.
They have to do terrible things. Otherwise their head's in the vice.
That's why you get a guy like Santoro to question this gentleman
and also I have respect for him, because he keeps his mouth shut. It's amazing.
Joe felt strongly
“I don't wanna be just the bad guy, putting heads in a vice."
'Cause that's what happened in reality.
He said, "I got it. What if I'm the guy... 'Please don't let me do this.
“Don't let me... Because I'll have to do it l have to do it.'
"We've been here three days and nights, you haven't said a word.
"I gotta do something now that I'm not gonna like.
"“Please don't let me do it. Don't."
And the guy curses.
"Put his head in the vice now." "Please stop it."
“I'm gonna tighten it again.”
It goes on like this and you realize
what kind of frame of mind you have to be in, what kind of person.
(LAUGHING)
But in his way, he's right.
He's telling him, "Just give it up, will you?"
The guy won't go, so Joe improvised that angle into the scene.
It was much better.
We did have a problem with the eye. We had a prosthetic in the eye
beginning to pop out. At our first preview,
there were too many cuts to this prosthetic effect that was happening.
The audience got upset and I wasn't interested in that.
I realized that just the thought of it got people quite upset.
So, two or three shots...
It was the first time I worked with prosthetics, like a horror film.
I found that I was getting more involved in the technical aspects of the prosthetic.
I realized that's not what it is. It's what Joe is doing.
And what the young actor is doing in the vice.
But it's really what Joe is doing.
That horrible aspect of the humanity he still has
while still behaving like an animal, in a way.
You motherfucker!
Frankie, do him a fucking favor.
SAM: Word got around that finally...
ANNQOUNCER: Frank Vincent.
VINCENT: Vegas, I had been before.
Only one time before when I visited all... Joe and I actually went together.
But I was in Vegas for four months for this film.
So we lived in a Marriott residence and we took our cats with us,
my wife Kathy and .
You play slot machines in the supermarket, at the car washes.
I was living a life in Vegas
and thank God I wasn't in a hotel or a casino
but it really made you feel
what actually happened by living there.
And the whole rhythm and the beat of Vegas,
I think, came out in everybody.
There's a very huge afttraction to Vegas. Very huge.
But I think that most people go to Vegas and stay a week.
And they just let it all out and stay up all night.
But when you're there for four months, you...
We went out here, we went out there, once or twice a week.
Plus we were in a casino. We did a month of nights in the Riviera.
Nights. We would come home in the morning
and put blankets on the windows to keep the sunlight out.
'Cause you wake up at 9:00 in the morning, it's 100 degrees in Vegas.
And the sun is blasting. It's the desert.
So to sleep...
And if you only work two, three days this week
you still had to stay up, because you couldn't turn around.
So we would go visit the set if we weren't working,
stay up till 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning
and we spent a lot of social time together because we were there for the holidays.
We have a mutual friend who lives in Vegas.
We spent New Years, we spent Thanksgiving and Christmas.
We all got together and the guitars came out.
We sang, and ate, and drank.
So it was really quite a social event, also.
We visited a friend, and he would cook macaroni.
We'd eat, and drink, and have a good time because you didn't wanna go out.
Everybody knew you and you had no privacy.
Especially when we were shooting the film because everybody knew we were in town.
And it was mayhem.
So it was a great, great experience. I loved it.
I loved shooting the film. I loved being in Vegas for four months.
I haven't been back.
I had been back once, Just to shoot some stuff
but it was a great experience.
Just a little. That a girl.
- You wanna go to Mommy? - Wanna come to Mommy?
It's all right, sweetheart.
I need to talk to you. I need some money.
- What do you need? - Got her?
I need a lot. I need more than usual.
ANNOUNCER: Nicholas Pileggi.
PILEGGI: I'm sure there could've been another woman in the world
and there are millions out there
whose husbands are just as obsessive about money, and just the accounting.
"Where is this?" It's neal. He's clean. He's neat.
Those 50 suit jackets upstairs are all on perfect hangers
in a beautiful closet.
His house is immaculate. I've been to it. Everything is...
He just lives a clean, rather enviable life.
There are women who would find that very appealing,
who would find great comfort in it.
Ginger never had to worry about a penny in her life.
She didn't have to worry about anything. Ace would handle everything.
She could have just played tennis and taken care of the kids,
taken them to school, helped them with their homework,
cooked once in a while or gone out.
Whatever she wanted, he would do for her.
But she was an independent woman.
She had been making money and earning money on her own
and was resistant to anything he tried to impose.
And so that was the problem they had.
Had she been a different woman, I'm sure that marriage would be going on today.
But of course, he wasn't interested.
There were other women he could have married
but Ginger was the one he wanted.
He really loved that woman, the woman he marrieq, truly loved her.
They had terrific kids, and yet it couldn't work.
And he looks back now with great sadness at what happened.
Maybe he or she could have done it differently
but it didn't work.
She was obviously a sick woman. She was addicted to pills and to alcohol.
He could never get her out of that.
Well, that was the heart of the story
and more important to me and I think even to Marty
than the skimming and all the mob stuff.
She's leaving the bank now.
I'll follow her.
ANNOUNCER: Sharon Stone.
STONE: That scene had tremendous truth, l thought,
and was really powerful, even though
neither Lester nor I had much dialogue,
there was a lot of dialogue between us,
a lot of communication in that scene.
And a lot of
whatever had been left or innocent in her was over.
And the break of her was huge.
And the primal
crisis in her was really
gigantic.
Bob Richardson shot that scene particularly well
and made it recall
the certain unrealized seediness of that period.
The drugs, the clothes,
the way that everybody was so stoned but nobody really thought about it.
The way people would sit in a restaurant
and flip over a bread plate and start doing a bunch of blow.
And people wouldn't even really think about it.
But that's what was happening in that period.
And just the way that people acted out in the craziness of that period
was also captured, just in that certain...
He had, like a 55 degree down angle.
And that look,
at the three of them in the booth, and Bob's sort of heaviness
and everybody's behavior, mixed with the clothes...
And Lester had,
l thought Jimmy captured this amazing body language
of that guy in that period. And he had great shoes.
And there was something about everybody's body language
and the dialogue and the...
We didn't see anybody do drugs
but you were clear that everybody was doing drugs.
It just was so captured
in the particular kind of lighting, the fluorescent light.
It captured that whole coke weird thing
that everybody was on in that period.
And then her primal break.
And the way he shot it, with the sky...
He just gets the psychological
density of emotion
very clearly, Marty.
(GINGER HYSTERICALLY SOBBING)
Piece of shit.
LESTER: Do it yourself, you chickenshit cocksucker!
ANNOUNCER: Rita Ryack.
RYACK: We used a Ilot of leather on her
because it was very much of the period and it's also very...
It's an organic fabric.
It's an animal fabric and she was an animal.
Frank Rosenthal had said to me, he called Ginger...
l remember his saying, "She could charm a snake.”
I think we did use the snake as a metaphor
on all the characlers.
I believe she was wearing a kind of black chain-mail halter top.
It was quite revealing, with a zipper.
That was a real piece from the period.
We had black, very tight leather pants made for her.
And that scene shows a lot of back.
It was very seductive.
I never seen him act like that with anybody else.
I think he's crazy about you. He really loves you.
- He does. - Come on.
I went into this with my eyes open.
I knew the bottom could drop out at any time.
I'm a working girl. You don't think I'm gonna go into a situation like this
if I don't think I'm covered on the back end?
ANNOUNCER: Sharon Stone.
STONE: Joe Pesci.
First of all, Joe was one of the main people who really wanted me to be in this film.
He championed me, he believed in me, he supported me through this film.
He's a great person. He's a great actor.
But I tell you, you will never...
When he is in his character...
He plays such a scary guy in this movie.
And I'm telling you, you're scared when he's in the room.
It's not like, "Ha, ha, he's playing that character.”
It's so terrifying to be in the room with him
when he's playing the character, that you can't breathe.
It's not like Joe's playing that character.
He's that guy to such a degree that it's so...
It's just so terrifying that you would do anything,
anything to make it work.
When he's working with you and you're in that scene with him,
you're in that scene, and you're in that scene to stay alive.
It's not like you're in that scene because, you know, "Action, cut.”
You're in that scene. You're with him. You're working.
And it's real It's so...
He is so true.
I have never in my life...
l mean, probably...
I've worked with George C. Scott.
There is no finer actor.
But I have never worked with anybody
who is so the character
that you don't have a microcosm of your being that you think you're acting.
When you're with Pesci, it's happening.
(PHONE RINGING)
County Commissioner Pat Webb is here to see you.
- Give me a minute. - Okay. Just a minute.
ANNQOUNCER: Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: The color of the film and the widescreen was very important.
The costumes were very important. We had Ryack do the costumes.
De Niro's character, Rothstein, is based on Frank "Lefty” Rosenthal
whose actual wardrobe was even more extreme than what we showed.
Much more.
Always within suits and ties, but still, it was very extreme.
One of my favorites is the scene in his office
where he has his pants in the closet because you don't wanna ruin the crease.
And why not? I understand it. He has to give a certain image to people.
If there's a meeting, then he'd go, put the pants on, sit properly
without ruining them, the way I'm ruining the crease in my pants, and have a meeting.
His suit, I think, is the color of aqua-blue or So.
Who comes in, L.Q. Jones, who is one of my favorite actors.
He's been in the movies since the early '50s, Raoul Walsh films
of course, reached legendary heights there with Sam Peckinpah.
He'd often play with Strother Martin.
Two extraordinary people together
almost to my mind like
Joe Pesci in a way, the urban film,
L.Q. Jones is very much of the West, in a way.
And so to have
L.Q. Jones and De Niro in the same frame, l thought was pretty interesting,
let alone the same scene.
And also, the scene in the dramatic structure, on which everything pivots.
All Ace has to do is say, "Okay, I'll let the guy stay in here.”
Because L.Q. Jones says, "Even if you give him a spot further on down the trough..."”
Meaning somewhere in the back Just as a token.
And he said “I can't do it he's costing us money.”
It is the element of pride, the downfall.
The pride that he could take up with a woman whom everybody wants.
She was an extraordinary woman that everybody loved.
All the researchers there, all the people, we're talking old cops and wiseguys
and gambling denizens and all these people,
they always had great words for this woman.
They loved her.
But in his pride, he thought
that was his flaw, that he could do anything.
If she can love him, he could
be so difficult politically
with the natives of the area.
These are new guys who are just guests here.
L.Q. Jones told him, "You're just a guest.”
It's the Chicago power and the organized crime power against Nevada.
I don't know, maybe he stepped too far over the line
but he couldn't let it go. And that's a fatal flaw when he doesn't put
that guy back on the job
or just something to just placate a few people around to make things easier
for everybody.
No. He's the boss, he's the one who says who dances at the show,
he's the one who says what costumes they wear.
It becomes pretty much an old Greek myth
where they just collapse based on pride.
And so costumes were very important and the element of the cultures,
the mix of cultures, the wise guy culture mixed with the West
was very important.
Organized crime
being almost representative of aspects of the Wild West frontier
in a way.
In my mind, the closing of the old Las Vegas was like the end of the frontier, in a sense.
For my ulcer, I take a half of one of these.
That's when I have extreme pain.
I had a three-month supply. What did you do with them?
You didn't have to beat him up.
What?
I was just trying to help him.
Like I'm sleeping with the guy.
Yeah, how do I know?
You can't make me stop caring about people.
- What? - I said,
you can't make me stop caring...
ANNOUNCER: Sharon Stone.
STONE: Bob is simply
the finest actor,
the most generous actor
and the most precise actor.
His work ethic is beyond belief. There's no fooling around.
I mean, you're not, like, goofing around between takes.
He is concentrated, focused and together.
But if you're in the middle of a scene
and it's great but it's not superb,
he'll just say,
at some point in the scene, Just give me a glance like this.
You'lI think, "Yeah, all right."”
You give him the glance, he's doing something that just sets it on fire.
I mean, he always knows what that tiny movement,
small dynamic, little thing is that'll just
set that scene aflame.
He's so great.
I mean, it's not like,
"Yeah, it's De Niro, he's a great actor.”
It's not just because he comes with his stuff.
He comes with his stuff and he knows the bigger picture stuff
and he knows your stuff and he knows how that stuff goes together.
And he knows if one of the pieces is like this, how to make it happen.
There is never a scene that you go, "It was good.”
He knows the piece, he knows if it's your piece,
his piece, a camera piece.
He knows what the piece is, to really make it go.
And he doesn't need it to be about him.
He's just astonishing.
ANNQOUNCER: Frank Vincent.
VINCENT: Bob's a very focused guy
and he gets the jokes. We were joking a Iot.
Joe and I were fooling around, and Marty...
You could always hear him laughing off set.
And Bob was right in there. But when it comes time to work...
And all of us are the same way. It's fun, getting set up, getting organized.
Then when it's time to do the stuff, you gotta do the stuff.
I'm making it sound simple but it's a little... You have to...
You have to know the guys, know everybody.
And it's so close that it's good.
It comes out great and you feel good about doing it.
We go through all this fucking trouble and somebody's robbing us?
Like I said, it's part of the business. It's considered leakage.
Leakage, my balls. l want the guy who's robbing us.
NICKY: Even John Nance, that's the guy who ran the scam,
he knew there wasn't much he could do about it.
You gotta know that a guy who helps you steal,
even if you take care of him real well,
he's gonna steal a little extra for himself.
Makes sense, don't it? Right?
You go try and make these hard-headed old greaseballs understand that.
Why skim if we're being skimmed?
ANNQUNCER: Barbara De Fina.
DE FINA: Ellen Lewis has worked with Marty for many years and
he's come, I think, to trust her and also have a shorthand with her
so that she does a lot of the preliminaries.
Obviously, when it comes to the big actors
he knows, sort of, who he wants.
When we get into the supporting roles
I think she's very valuable and very important to him.
I think she suggested Kevin Pollak, for example
and some of the comedians
and went out personally and found all those older men
who, at the end, are wonderful when the guy says, "Why take a chance?"
I mean, they're just great faces and great characters.
I think that's her real strength.
But actors love to work with him, So it's easy for him...
It's never easy, but actors do tend to want to work with him.
So it's not as hard for him maybe, as other directors, to get great actors.
Even though, if you look at the smaller roles, he casts everything.
In this movie in particular, the, sort of, older men
that, I guess, in St. Louis or wherever,
were all guys from the neighborhood that Ellen found
who have since gone on to have careers as actors, but they were real.
I mean, people would say, "You should go see Charlie down the street.”
I mean, they're wonderful faces and great voices
and different accents
and just great funny people that everybody can relate to.
Great casting.
OBERON: Thank you, Judge.
(GRAVEL POUNDING)
I believe he was fair, and I'm delighted with the decision.
We got a problem.
It didn't go too well. Green has to open up the books,
has to show how he got the financing.
That's not good.
NICKY: She was doing pretty good with her lawsuit.
But before she could start counting her money
the boys back home decided to settle the case out of court.
ANNOUNCER: Thelma Schoonmaker.
SCHOONMAKER: I just think it's interesting, having been in Las Vegas for the shooting
and watching it change... It had already changed so much already.
But it's just astounding to me that people can invest so much
in a city which really has no right to exist.
It has no water. It has no way to grow food.
It's a completely artificial invention
and I'm just astounded that people are pouring into that city.
I forget what I read, the figure of how many people move to Las Vegas every year.
It's just frightening. Where will the water come from in the future?
Particularly if the Supreme Court decides to give the Colorado River water
back to California, or takes it away from California and gives it to Las Vegas.
I just don't know, it's bizarre to me.
And it was bizarre to me when we were there working.
It was interesting, but I just didn't get it.
(LAUGHS)
But I think I'm very much in the minority.
I once took the train across the country with my husband, Michael Powell.
He insisted we take the train wherever we went, if we could.
He loved trains. And we came across the Sierra Nevada from San Francisco.
We were heading through this dense desert blackness.
Suddenly we saw a glow in the distance. And it was Reno, Nevada.
As we approached, the glow got stronger,
then we stopped in Reno and everybody got off the train
'cause it was filled with gamblers. Then we pulled out of Reno, Nevada
and soon it was disappearing, the glow in the back
and there was pitch blackness. It's a very interesting concept.
I guess it has to do with gambling laws. Obviously that is why these places exist.
Did he really say that?
Why, of course he really said that. It's right here.
Has that man even filed for his license yet?
I don't know. We have to check the files.
Without getting your shorts in a knot, would you do that?
And check closely, 'cause we may have to kick a kike's ass out of town.
Thank you.
A Gaming Control Board investigation of Tangiers executive...
ANNOUNCER: Thelma Schoonmaker.
SCHOONMAKER: There's a certain
roughness and crudity sometimes, in transitions and things.
There's a kind of jagged, nervous,
strange lack of finessing transition.
So transitions don't happen smoothly. They're kind of jarring.
Obviously, the editing style was very much linked in
to the subject matter there.
It's impossible. It's booked up, and it's very difficult to get in.
It's okay, I'll use the service entrance. I'll see you at nine.
All right.
ANNOUNCER: Nicholas Pileggi.
PILEGGI: That den scene is a critical scene because
everything is in that, everybody is in that room
and you see it falling apart.
Ginger's drunk. It's morning
and Ginger's already loaded in her tennis ouffit.
And Ace grabs her arm and forces her down the stairs.
"Get out of here."
And Sharon Stone's resistance to his helping her down the stairs
is so perfect.
It's such a brilliant piece of acting on her part
because the way she resists his arm
is the way she has resisted him throughout the entire drama.
I mean, that is when...
When Ace goes to help Sharon, she holds back.
You see, in that scene, if Sharon were in front of a truck
and the truck is coming, and Ace went to push her out of the way of the truck
she would resist. She'd rather get hit by a fruck
than have this son-of-a-bitch husband of hers save her life.
I mean, that's how angry she is. All of the tension.
The whole movie has been building, in a sense, to that scene
where all of the players are playing it out.
I thought it was a brilliant scene by Bob and Joe at the end
but equally brilliant by Sharon.
Just watch her resistance to his arm. It's just great.
...you might have to take some kind of loss.
I think I want my money back.
ANNQOUNCER: Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: Working with the group from Goodfellas
we had gotten into a routine, really.
A lot was shaped around De Niro and Pesci.
There was so much material on Ginger, Sharon Stone's character
that there wasn't the need... Her stuff was pretty well set down.
But within the relationship of the two men
and how the brains and the brawn, So to speak, of the operation,
how they balance each other out, and where you showed
the friction between the two.
How one would overstep the line with each other.
When you have... Two really excellent scenes for me
one in which Nicky Santoro almost attacks a banker
in Rothstein's house, and then they have this argument.
Rothstein is standing there in a pink robe from Sulka.
The wonderful relationship between the two. That's where things really break.
- You think he got the point? - What are you doing?
He's a square guy, for Christ's sakes. He's gonna run to the FBI.
That prick's been dodging me for three weeks.
- You're trying to tell me what to do? - I'm not trying to tell you what to do.
You're way out of line. Where's your head?
Where's my head? Where's your fucking balls?
I'm trying to put something big together. You know what I'm talking about.
If you're acting like this now, how can I depend on you?
A lot of things gonna change.
ANNOUNCER: Thelma Schoonmaker.
SCHOONMAKER: It was the first time that I had ever used digital editing
and I had a wonderful assistant who trained me, named Scolt Brock
and he really taught me how to do it.
But it took a little bit of time before I was comfortable with it.
But then I kicked in, and I was off and running
and I did find it was very useful for experimentation
that I would think nothing of ripping into a scene
and trying another version of it.
I would just make a copy of my edit. And that freed me up a lot.
It was very interesting how that freed up experimentation.
Also, the fact that we could run many more tracks was very helpful
because of the complex music texture of the movie.
So previously, when I'd been working with three sound heads at the most,
now I could have up to 8, or 10, or 16 tracks.
I wonder if the music would have been as easy to interweave and create
such a dense, complex texture without it. I don't think it would have happened.
We started mixing for ourselves, for our own screenings.
We started mixing in the Lightworks, which was also a new experience for me.
We used to go somewhere and spend a lot of money in a sound facility
mixing very few tracks together.
Now we were mixing an incredible number of them.
That was the beginning of a different way of doing things
which we've gone on. It's gotten more complicated now
So that our mixes are actually taking much longer to do
because we have so many more tracks that we can mix.
She came to me.
But Marty just loves to score his own movies. He always has.
And he's done it in different ways.
Mean Streets, of course, is one of the first great uses of rock 'n roll
in film scoring.
And Raging Bull was more subdued, because it was of a different time
when music was coming through tenement windows and from small radios.
Goodfellas, the music became very up-front, because we had stereos
and everybody had great sound systems in their cars.
So by the time we get to Casino, music is just omnipresent in the culture.
Marty just loves creating a tapestry
that underlies the whole movie with songs that he has heard
that he feels are appropriate.
Particularly, there's a Rolling Stones song that is used under a montage
and we worked so long on that. l remember making music cuts.
It was very hardq, making the music cuts on that film
because we were doing them all ourselves, and that was difficult.
So there's something kind of
very up-front and brash about a lot of the music
which fits very well with Las Vegas.
ANNOUNCER: Rita Ryack.
RYACK: Those collars were years in development for me.
(LAUGHS)
l started figuring out those collars
because there are very few prototypes that really exist.
When I was doing A Bronx Tale and Mad Dog and Glory,
l did a lot of shopping in New York and the Lower East Side
and the places that those guys had actually bought their clothes.
And it was very hard to find any extant stuff.
So a lot of that was just, kind of, adjusting and adjusting
until everybody was satisfied.
I have to tell you, I don't know if they're exactly real.
What do we call them? The Lock collar, the Dime Round Point.
You can't really put a knot, there's no tie space.
Man, those collars just went on forever.
Again, you hit on certain images that are...
It's intuitive, and you can feel it when they work.
ANNQOUNCER: Frank Vincent.
VINCENT: It was thrilling to wear the clothes of the period
because, like I said, I grew up in that period
and it brought back a lot of memories.
And Rita was wonderful. In fact,
I think we baby-sat for her cat once.
She had to do something. I think she had to leave town
and my wife and I baby-sat for Rita's cat.
But it was really...
You put the clothes on, you felt like the character.
I put sideburns on, they dyed my hair for the time changes.
Sometimes the costume does the work for you.
NICKY: I got the latest anti-bugging equipment
from the same places that sell to the CIA.
I had all the special police frequency radios, FBI de-scramblers, night-vision cameras...
So, the miserable sons of bitches never caught me doing anything I couldn't handle.
SAM: I got my job on the line, and he's out having the time of his life.
ANNOUNCER: Rita Ryack.
RYACK: Putting Bob in pink was just so delicious.
He's in a pink sweater in the scene where he's talking to the guys
and the helicopters are going overhead over the golf course
watching Joe Pesci play golf.
Bob is in a pink bouclé golf sweater there.
Again, who else could wear that pink sweater and pink slacks?
He probably even had pink shoes, I'm sure he did.
Then you have to choose the clothing that will tell the story
of the film and the characters.
It was usually the morning ritual of the watch and the ring.
Kind of a papal ritual, wasn't it?
Every morning we'd meet in Bob's trailer to look at the outfit for the scene
and decide.
We had a box of rings and waftches. And decide
which was the most appropriate set for the day.
I guess each watch and ring, as every costume, neck tie,
add a certain semiotic value.
There would be some discussion in the morning.
Should it coordinate with the ouffit, and what is it we want to say?
How much are we gonna see the hand and the wrist?
And we'd make the choice.
$100, whoever hits the plane.
SAM: If things weren't bad enough, in comes Piscano, the Kansas City underboss.
He ran the grocery store in Kansas City...
ANNOUNCER: Thelma Schoonmaker.
SCHOONMAKER: Katie Scorsese, Marty's mother, was a great addition to the film.
And as usual, as in King of Comedy
and his other films, sometimes he just puts her into a scene,
doesn't really tell her much what it's about, and just says to her,
"Just react to it," as he did in Goodfellas with the famous scene
where she's cooking food for them
when they have a corpse in the trunk of the car.
Here he had Vinny Vella, a wonderful actor
who was ranting, and using a lot of swear words.
Katie was naturally upset by the use of swearing. She didn't like it.
So he just said to her, "Just react to him." And the way she does it,
you couldn't write such a thing, you couldn't dream up such a thing.
It's so natural. And the wonderful thing in the outtakes is that
Marty, when he was directing her, would say, "Okay, Mom,
"just react again to him when he says that bad word." And she said,
“I am. I keep doing it and he keeps saying it."
She really was in the scene, in other words. She was living in it.
She didn't think of herself as an actress, and that the actor she was working with
was doing lines or anything.
For her, she was really reacting to him. And so it was a great deal of fun
to pick the moments of her despair with this guy.
There were so many of them. We had to narrow it down to the best ones.
But I just loved working on that sequence. And then again, later on
he said to her, "Just make sure you react to him when he says the 'F' word."”
And she said, "Marty, my virgin ears!"
(LAUGHING)
She was just a natural, she's perfect.
ANNQUNCER: Barbara De Fina.
DE FINA: Length is always an issue.
The one big issue. If you get past a certain length
the exhibitor loses a show.
So to deliver a movie...
l can't remember exactly what the number is
but the exhibitors get very upset.
Because instead of having three or four shows a night, they'll have two.
And that's a major problem for a lot of exhibitors.
So that there's always the extreme...
So that length is always an issue.
And the studios also like to have a movie
that they feel is the right length...
We wanna have a movie that...
It doesn't matter how long it is. You can't feel that it's long.
If a movie feels long, even if it's two hours and 10 minutes,
then it really is too long.
But another movie can be two-and-a-half hours, and it'll play fine.
There's always an issue with length.
Part of it has to do with the economics
and a lot of it just has to do with having a movie that works
that leaves the audience satisfied but not looking at their watches.
I don't comp you at least three times a month?
ANNOUNCER: Sharon Stone.
STONE: I often sat with Marty, and would watch him watching takes.
And I'd be like, "What are you looking for, Marty?"
And he'd say, “I'm just looking for all the elements.”
And I would sit and watch and watch
to see if I could pick which take had all the elements.
To start to try to understand what was the Scorsese thing.
'Cause it isn't the perfect take that Marty looks for.
The perfect take is almost never the Marty take,
you know?
It's that thing about how the flaw lends the beauty and attraction in a person.
When we look at a person, we don't look at the person and think,
"It's that beautiful, perfect person.”
You know how you always think,
"It's that little chip in their tooth, that's why I love them.
“It's that way they do that funny thing,” you know.
Marty really gets that when you waftch a scene.
It's that thing.
And he knows when a scene
has that chip in its tooth
or when it has that funny thing. He gets that.
It's uncanny.
You know, Marty's movies are so powerful.
We have a saying in my company where we say,
"It's big-girl time now."
When you see a Marty movie, it's always big-boy and big-girl time.
It's not, "Oh, nice picture.”
"Gosh, what a moving picture. Wasn't that great?”
When you see a Marty movie,
it's an epic experience.
It's a completely engaging, rip-your-heart-out,
completely open your head.
We had a guy out of a witness protection program
come and show us how to kill people, who actually knew how you Kkill people.
This is how people really get killed. It's not some joke.
This is how, in real serious business, people actually get killed.
That's horrifying to see!
And you know what? It should be.
It should be. It shouldn't be a joke.
It's not a joke to kill somebody.
It's a horrifying, violent,
disgusting, awful thing, and it should be.
It shouldn't be like boom, boom, boom.
Wow!
It should be...
(GROANS)
You shouldn't wanna go do it. It shouldn't be thrilling.
It should be horrifying.
And because it is,
you can't get with it.
And so you don't get with it in a Marty movie.
They're great.
And when people fight and they tear out their heart,
it tears out your heart.
And when people feel things, or they laugh,
or they cry, or they're moved, they really are.
So you are having these experiences
that touch the real truth inside.
And, you know, people...
So many people live arrangements,
not even relationships.
How many people get married and have an arrangement?
Not a lot of people have the guts to have a real relationship with anybody.
You go to a Marty movie, you're having a relationship.
ANNOUNCER: Rita Ryack.
RYACK: We looked at his old television shows.
We had some very interesting costume choices for those, too.
I think we found some wool with glitter woven into it.
I don't know how well it read onscreen but there was one
with a black suit with purple glitter that Bob wears with a purple tie
with the orchid tie... We had colors.
We created our own names for a lot of the colors,
for quick, shortcut communication.
And he had a navy suit with glitter in it, as well.
ANNQOUNCER: Frank Vincent.
VINCENT: All the mob guys l ever met in my life,
all dressed with exquisite clothing
and malching watches and designer clothes.
That's their style, they had the money to do that.
If you look back historically to the gangsters, they all...
You know, you go back to the '30s and the Al Capones,
they all wore... I think it's a status thing.
It's the same thing today that the inner city kids have,
the rappers, that they wear the $60,000, $70,000 waftches,
they drive the big cars.
They look like they are not dressed up
but they are dressed up in expensive clothing.
And I think it's a status symbol, with the big things around their neck
because I am who I am.
I guess they show off. The mob guys all did that.
I would just get out.
(SIGHS)
ANNOUNCER: Nicholas Pileggi.
PILEGGI: I was staying at the Sands Hotel
and I got a call saying Joe was coming to the Sands, he wanted to see me.
I said, "Fine." I was waiting, he knew where I was.
There's a knock at the door, I open it, and it wasn't Joe.
But it was Nicky Santoro.
The real guy, who I'd seen, I had pictures of him.
He had the little moustache, everything:
the hair, the dress, the style, the swagger.
'Cause, you know, Santoro had been photographed for years,
not only in surveillance pictures, but in newsreels
because he had wandered around, and he'd go into the court
with his lawyer, who is now the Mayor of Las Vegas, Oscar Goodman,
who was unbelievably helpful in the movie and a terrific man.
There he was, in my doorway.
There was Nicky Santoro who, at that point
was the most terrifying person in Las Vegas. Everyone was afraid of him.
And he had come in. Pit bosses and guys would look up
'cause everybody knew he was dead
but you're never quite sure with those guys.
And they saw Joe dressed like him, looking like him, made-up like him.
There were guys that almost fainted behind the gambling pits
thinking that he'd come back. Later everyone knew it was Joe Pesci.
It's brilliant makeup.
ANNQOUNCER: Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: I was told by certain people at that time
who had been in that gang,
who turned state's evidence and were around, these technical advisors said,
"The desert's a wonderful place.
"You put something there, and overnight it disappears.
"Then nobody will know."
So he's looking at that.
That is why the shot sort of moves... The humor of it, we thought,
but also the humor
of these two, sort of, the almost traditional American cowboy, out-of-control outlaws,
only in silk suits and sunglasses
(CHUCKLES)
in the middle of nowhere.
By that point, Ace Rothstein can't say a word
to Nicky Santoro. He's got to take it.
He's got to take it
because he knows he's going to wind up right in that hole.
ANNOUNCER: Rita Ryack.
RYACK: The first time I see a movie, I only look at the clothes.
I always have to see the movie at least three times: once for the clothes,
and once for the plot,
and then once to just give up my involvement with it and enjoy it.
I have seen it so many times now. I love it.
And every time I see it, it's richer and richer.
I can really isolate every scene.
There is just so much to waftch.
Bob's performance is so nuanced, it's just magnificent.
ANNOUNCER: Thelma Schoonmaker.
SCHOONMAKER: I think once Scorsese got a feeling for how good
the improvisation would be
between Joe Pesci and De Niro in Raging Bull,
he then wanted to mine that vein
in any movie they were in together.
So he did it in Goodfellas, and particularly here in Casino.
There is a lot of improvisation in Casino.
Some of the films we made recently have hardly any improvisation in them.
But that film was filled with them and scenes, for example,
where Pesci comes out to the desert and attacks De Niro
are wonderful improvisations.
And again, there it's a matter of getting the rhythm to work right.
And to get the dramatic information across
but to get the rhythm of both of the actors working together as well as you can.
The body language and the way Joe Pesci...
The way he speaks, it's almost as if every part of his body moves when he...
(LAUGHS)
Because he's expressing himself so vehemently.
It's wonderful. And Bob, very impassive,
wearing sunglasses very similar to Lew Wasserman's sunglasses,
the famous Hollywood character.
And I remember seeing Bob choosing those glasses with Marty.
I was there in the room when they were doing it.
It was wonderful to watch how the decision finally veered towards
the Lew Wasserman glasses.
He's just hardly moving at all, and then standing there
when Pesci peels away in the car and the dust envelops him.
Just something about Bob's body language IS so incredible
what it's signaling in that wide shot. It's just great.
ANNOUNCER: Rita Ryack.
RYACK: All of the extras, of course, were pre-fit and we had our crew.
We pulled a huge stock for the extras
and everything was committed to different scenes.
We had a lot of fittings, and the extras were local people
who really, in New York and Los Angeles,
you do work with a lot of professional extras.
Although real people certainly have
a vitality that the professional extras don't.
But they really didn't understand the costume process.
There was a letter in the local paper that said,
"This production, I went in to be an extra.
"All they do is put us in these horrible clothes
"and tell us we look fabulous."
(LAUGHING)
And I got into a lot of trouble with Barbara De Fina for that.
But that's right, we do. We put them in horrible clothes
and tell them they look fabulous because they do look fabulous for this film.
I don't expect them to wear those things in their own lives
but it's a period film
and these are the clothes that they would have worn at the time in this situation.
Yeah?
- Sam, we got a problem. - What is it?
BILLY: The little guy. Nobody told him he was eighty-sixed from the joint.
We turned our heads and made out like we didn't know who he was.
He's over at the 21 table with his nose wide open.
He took money out of his own kick. His nose is open for about $10,000.
Now he's really pissed.
- He wants a $50,000 marker. - Just give him $10,000.
That's it. I'll be right down.
He's gonna come up with $10,000 just the way you want.
No, I said fucking $50,000!
ANNOUNCER: Thelma Schoonmaker.
SCHOONMAKER: All the wonderful, actual dealers and pit bosses,
they are so believable.
Marty believes when he is in an environment like that
that you should use the real people:
real fighters, real pool players, and in this case real dealers.
That wonderful guy that Joe Pesci calls "the beaut.”
The man who comes over and takes all the abuse from him
when he is angry and about to be thrown out of the casino.
He was one of our favorites. l mean, he was just perfect.
You didn't have to tell him to do anything
because Marty said
he had actually encountered the real person that Joe Pesci was playing once
in a similar situation, so he knew how to handle it.
But they are all so great, they are so believable right away.
They seem to not need acting lessons.
I don't know, they are just themselves.
I'm sure that's what Marty said, "Just be yourself,” and they are.
But it gives a wonderful flavor, a believability, too.
ANNQOUNCER: Frank Vincent.
VINCENT: I had gotten a little cold or something.
And we had all our trailers in the parking lot.
They would take us by van to the front of the casino.
So one day, I was walking past Rickles' trailer.
He had his door open, he was sitting there.
I said, "I've been sick, Don. I have a frigging cold.”
“Frank, I really don't give a shit,” he says.
(CHUCKLES)
But he's really a sweetheart, and when we had to do this scene
where we beat him up in the casino, where Joe hit him with the phone
he had everybody crazy.
“Italians beating up the Jew, I'm calling my lawyer,” he's going.
He had them crazy, he was just nuts.
ANNOUNCER: Sharon Stone.
STONE: These men in this picture are giant talents.
It was fantastic for me to have the opportunity
that this character gets to have this dynamic
with all these people, and that they are all
extraordinarily different kinds of technicians in their work
but they are all...
They all have great bravura in their work.
They are all super-generous actors
but they are all very much their own men.
You know, [ love that.
I just love that, I love working with the big tigers.
You know, I love working with these men
who are fearless
and they don't have a problem
when you're present in the moment
and different and aclive.
And you have that awareness that each second
is a new and alive and daring adventure.
And they are all like that, they are all just
off the hook, with the new...
You never know what they are going to do in any given second.
And they are thrilled when you are just unpredictable.
And Ginger was a pony on linoleum.
I mean, she was just Skidding around and just...
Every second, and they all three were just so embracive of that.
And that's very rare.
(TELEPHONE RINGING)
Hello.
My wife is with an old friend of hers in L.A.
Some lowlife named Lester Diamond.
My daughter's with them. They're gonna try and kidnap her.
- Is there anybody you can send? - We'll take care of it.
(DOORBELL RINGS)
We got a number and an address.
Hello. Is this Lester?
ANNOUNCER: Sharon Stone.
STONE: Lester is really Ginger's heart.
Lester is her true love.
He's the love of her life.
He's just the reason her heart beats
and has been since she was young
and he gets that about her.
And whether or not he cares about her back is something that I don't know.
There isn't anything that she wouldn't do for him.
And she just turns herself inside-out for him.
And she's...
In that way,
that a man can just own a woman, he owns her.
You know, I have done a couple of films with Jimmy
and he's one of my dearest friends and compatriots.
And he's directed me now.
He's one of the smartest people l have ever met
and deepest and most soulful people l have ever met.
And he has a fearless energy.
He's on it.
He's one of the best improvisational actors there is.
And he's witty
and he knows whether it's supposed to be funny or hostile
Just tonally on the second.
He's just a great talent
but we have such a fun relationship and such a witty relationship.
And with him, I love the dynamic of getting the little girl
who played my daughter to just torment him.
So between takes, I would say, "Go hit him with your purse.
"And hit him in the balls,
"just hit him in the crotch with your purse during the scene.
Or, "Whatever he says to you, Just ignore him.
*Just go 'Nah, nah, nah' through the whole take."
Or I would set her up to do things
to just make his life hell.
So I could pretend that I was interested in him
and it wasn't my fault that she was torturing him.
So I got her to bug him
lo creale that friction in the room.
And Marty doesn't cut for physical continuity.
He cuts his films for emotional continuity.
What a gift to a bunch of us, the hoodlums.
Because we don't have to follow that kind of
structure with Marty.
And when you start to get square,
Marty will stop the show,
come up to you and tell you some story about his life.
Some kooky story.
Like, he will say, "I did this."”
And he will tell you some crazy story about his life.
And in the beginning when he did it, l thought...
And then you see he's trying to say,
"Man, I've been there, I've seen it
“there's nothing you can say or do that is going to scare me.
“Listen up.”
And no matter where you are...
There was a scene
where we quickly were trying fo get scenes where...
And there is a scene where I am kneeling by a little,
like a tufted,
like a seltee cushion in the bedroom.
And I'm kneeling, and I'm crying
and Bob's yelling at me or something.
And I'm trying to express this thing
and I went up to Marty before the take and I wanted to tell him something.
I was so upset and disturbed with the scene that I couldn't really talk.
(WHIMPERING) I was, like, "Marty, I just..."”
And he just looks at me and he goes, "I know."
And I'm sobbing and I couldn't speak.
I so needed to get this thing through to him, I'm like...
(BABBLING)
And he just grabbed me. He's like, "I know.
"Yeah, I got it.
"I get you."” And he just like...
And he did get whatever the hell I was trying to...
"I got you. That's it. Right.”
And he really made that contact with me,
got it. I couldn't have said, "Boo."
l went back, I did my scene.
Whatever the hell was going on with me, he'll hang with you.
I was in a phone booth at one point
having this kook conversation with Bob.
And I just said, "Marty, I can't have you over there.
"I need you where I can touch you.
“I'm really scared.”
Marty sat on the dirt
by my feet outside the phone booth
so that I could go to crazyville.
But so that I could see him and touch him
because he knew...
l just said, "I'm going somewhere far away, I need to make sure I can get back."
He's like, “I'll get you back, babe."”
Whatever it takes, he isn't scared of this thing.
And so many directors are just scared.
They're scared that if you, as a woman
go big, or go wide, or go deep,
first of all, you're gonna roll over the guys
and second of all... I don't know, it's like that expression,
"If one woman told the truth, the whole world would crack open.”
Well, Marty wants your truth.
SAM: The good part was I had Amy back.
ANNQUNCER: Barbara De Fina.
DE FINA: Bob's good with script.
He's really so intuitive about characters, especially characters that
could be very unsympathetic.
ANNOUNCER: Nicholas Pileggi.
PILEGGI: The original version we wrote
he asked her about so much money and that was it.
Bob said, "No.
"He's not going to just ask her once or twice.
"He's going to stay after her. He'll say,
-"What'd you do with the money?' -'I gave him $3,000 for a watch.'
"'$3,000. Okay, that leaves you $47,000.
-"What happened to the rest?' -'Well, I got...'"
So it was Bob's insight into the character
that this is an accountant, this is a gambler,
this is a guy who knew the odds to everything.
He was an odds maker, he set the odds.
He set the odds for all the football games played on Sunday for the mob.
He set the odds for the country.
He's not going to let somebody get away with $40,000 this way. No.
So Bob just kept after Marty and me in the room.
“No, then he's going to say this." So we gave him...
Then he'd say, "$6,000 for a suit?
“I've never spent $6,000 for a suit. How many suits can a guy buy, three?"
And he would keep after it and he just exhausted us.
But that's exactly what he does in that scene.
He really loves her, he doesn't want to chase her away
but he is compelled to be one way.
He is programmed, it's in his DNA
to get it down to the last five cents.
And it drives everybody nuts
and chases away the one person he really loves.
It's just fascinating.
But Bob spotted it, and made the scene much deeper.
ANNOUNCER: Sharon Stone.
STONE: I think the interesting thing about the Ginger-Ace relationship was that
she was so
in love with the idea that someone like Ace could be interested in her.
That someone big and important
would notice her.
It made her feel big and important.
And then I think when he stopped really paying attention to her,
she thought that if she acted like she was big and important
he would pay attention to her.
She didn't ever have a comprehension of love.
And, of course, he didn't have a comprehension of love.
So they never really had a real coming together in any healthful way.
They just had this strange,
broken ego-dynamic where they kept trying to get each other's attention.
And when these two broken egos
started clashing
and fighting to get each other's attention from their incredibly
needy places...
You know, Bob and I had the best time.
We thought it was hilarious when we fought.
We would fight to the death, but the crew was
(LAUGHS)
horrified.
Marty would let a whole mag roll out on camera
and just let us go, let us improv
and we'd just go for it tooth and nail.
We'd have these fights,
verbal, that were just wow
because we could go. And physical to the point
where sometimes he'd drag me down those hallways.
That house had marble hallways, and my legs would just be
black and blue and green, because we were just,
you know, really fighting.
And the camera would roll out and you'd hear the film go...
(MIMICS FILM SPILLING FROM CAMERA)
And Marty would go, "And that's a cut.” And you could hear a pin drop.
Then Bob and I would start screaming with laughter
and still no one... People would be so horrified.
But you don't very often get to go like that.
Ginger was a really interesting character
because, of course, on the surface, Ginger was a person
that just slides and "see you."
And we talked a lot about how
it's not the fact that she starts out and she slides into her demise
that is what's interesting about Ginger.
What's interesting is though, apparently, that's what she's doing...
But the playing of Ginger is that you don't play that.
You play that she thinks she's winning the whole time she's doing it
and that's what makes Ginger so happening.
And that's what I really got when I read her.
But no, to play her, you have to play like,
what's her hook every time?
How is she going to find a new way to win
in every losing situation?
ANNQUNCER: Barbara De Fina.
DE FINA: The movie works on many different levels
So that different people can relate to it in different ways.
I think Sharon's story and the love story
is a kind of fractured love story
but, in a way, very glamorous and believable
and has a reality to it.
I think the American public, especially,
l guess it was in the '70s, and even when we made the movie in the '90s
we were all obsessed with money
and I think Vegas works on...
Everybody still wants to go win.
"Something for nothing" is a big theme.
Everybody wants to go to Vegas and put a quarter in a machine and win.
So I think that's a theme
that at the end you see is empty.
And I think it works on the level of it's just incredibly visual:
all the clothes, the photography,
the world, the slot machines, and the lights, I mean, it's just...
You can just watch the movie as a roller coaster ride.
ANNOUNCER: Rita Ryack.
RYACK: She cuts her hair and she goes...
Now this is again pretty subtle
but she goes from a triangular silhouette
lo a reverse, an inverted triangular silhouette
with stronger shoulders.
She's declaring her independence
she goes off with Lester, and she comes back with a boob job
and a new strong, we call it her I-am-woman silhouette.
And she's cut her hair
and her clothing is much harder and stronger from that point.
ANNOUNCER: Sharon Stone.
STONE: There is no one more exquisite to work for than Scorsese.
It just doesn't happen
because not only will he give you
every bit of every research that you could possibly ask for.
And I'm a research animal.
He gave me photos,
everything, pictures,
anything I wanted that was available.
To me, it was a treasure trove of goods
on this woman that I was playing.
And it was enervating and exciting and scary.
But once I began to play her,
people came out of the woodwork.
And people started calling me and saying, “I knew her."
And I would get calls
that were real up-front,
"I'd like to meet you, take you to lunch," and I was friends with her.
And other calls that were very
low-down, you know.
“I'll meet you on the corner, and I'll tell you
"and you never saw me."
And people would lay some really
serious information on me or:
“I'm just going to tell you these two things."
And they wouldn't tell me who they were or what it was.
Or, "I'm gonna give you this."”
Or would just walk up to me and say, "Boom."
And some of the information that I got was just invaluable.
And there were just a couple of two little pieces
that just turned it for me on her.
And some things that were so the heart of her
and some things that were so tender
that I got to know her.
And eventually, when you play someone like that,
you carry them really near and dear to you
and some of the contacts and relationships that I had
became sacred to me
and will always be sacred to me.
I felt, at a point
like I carried her in me.
ANNOUNCER: Nicholas Pileggi.
PILEGGI: Ginger getting so angry at her husband
for all this other stuff, and getting stoned and getting smashed.
And so she then starts coming on to Nicky.
Nicky, because he's so angry at Ace
is gonna screw his wife Just to get even at Ace. I don't know.
That was not a passionate relationship. That was a get-even relationship.
At that point in Nicky's career,
I think Nicky would have loved to put a bullet right through Ace's head.
He got so angry at him. Nicky was that volatile.
He could've been sorry in the morning, he'd never tell you.
But he was so angry. So the next best thing
to killing a guy is to cuckold him
in Nicky's world. So that's what Nicky does.
(LAUGHING) She is also angry at Ace
and the best thing she can do is betray Ace with his best friend.
So how do you walk away from a soap opera like that?
We should have shown this movie at 9:00 in the morning on soaps.
It's classic stuff.
ANNQOUNCER: Frank Vincent.
VINCENT: The first time I saw it, I said, "I'm not sure about this film."
Then when I saw it one or two more times, l became sure of it
because it's a lot to see on a one-time basis.
And I see a lot of people now that tell me how much they love Casino.
And it happens with all of Marty's films.
It always has a delayed effect on people.
I see people who know every word of the films.
So there is a delayed effect on all of Marty's films
because I don't think you can watch any one of these three films one time
and get it.
Because there is so much to see
that people watch it, they have it on their machines, they come home...
One guy told he just walked in the house, he puts it on and watches Casino
over and over and little nuances that he picks up.
And he watches Raging Bull over and over and Goodfellas.
So my initial reaction was, "Wait a minute.
“It's long and it has a lot of characters in it. There's a big story in it."
So it took me a time or two
to really get it.
ANNQOUNCER: Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: This was a very
relaxed way of working that we have between Joe and Bob De Niro.
And then Sharon was brought into that.
It was a long process working with her
and meeting and auditioning with her. She agreed to an audition.
We auditioned a bunch of other terrific ladies.
But she really seemed to have something special,
particularly with that character
and she was ready to push through as an actress
and go further than what she had done before.
And the real generosity there was betlween
De Niro helping her in the scenes,
being there for her.
That was very important.
Helping her and being patient with her.
This was very important.
And Pesci, for the most part, he only has a few scenes with her.
But Bob has many scenes with her, so we'd lay it all out very carefully
so that she felt comfortable in some scenes, particularly where
it's revealed that she's been having an affair with Nicky.
She's in the bedroom, crying
and he says, "Do you realize what could happen?”
In that scene, it was so quiet in the place, we just simply
made her feel okay and comfortable.
She was slowly
somehow becoming this...
Becoming the emotion, Just lying there on the ground.
Then we just turned the camera on
without her knowing and he kept talking to her.
So I had to be very careful. She was really something in that scene.
She felt very...
l remember, just to do the death scene, she was waiting during the lighting,
she'd come and sit next to me and hold my hand.
You have to go through the experience because that's how the woman died
in some hall of some motel in LA, you know.
She took on, she understood
the pain of that woman, and so did a number of other people
particularly some of the policemen who were acting in the film also,
who were no longer working as cops but were on that...
In the '70s, they were stationed
and their job was to keep tabs on
what Tony Spilotro and all these people were doing.
They were now retired and they'd tell us things that they did
so we put it in the film, and they'd act a certain way.
And a number of times, a couple of them,
one nice guy kept saying that she didn't deserve it.
She was the best of them.
She just didn't deserve what happened to her.
And it was interesting...
For me, it was interesting 'cause she really came...
She stood up to the challenge, Sharon Stone.
She was in rehearsals, too.
And rehearsals had actually worked very nicely
and we'd have an assistant there who was very quiet.
We'd give him the audio tape
and he'd type it up, bring it back in, then we'd work out and rewrite the scene.
Normally what I did in Mean Streets
or Raging Bull... Not even Raging Bull, but
Goodfellas, in a number of scenes
we'd do different takes on audio tape, type them all up
and then I'd put them together and create the scene
from the rehearsal sessions.
So this was very important.
Then a lot of the other cast, Alan King, and so many people...
Some of the old wiseguys who are supposed to be from Chicago,
we found them in New Jersey, somewhere, and Ellen Lewis...
So it was a very carefully...
That process was pretty close to what we did in Goodfellas.
I want to know if he's doing all right, if he's okay.
- He's good, he's fine. - I'm asking you to keep an eye on Nicky.
- Do it for me. - No problem.
You see, I wouldn't want to be jeopardizing anything for our friends.
You understand?
- I understand. - Okay.
ANNQUNCER: Barbara De Fina.
DE FINA: Well, the violence in Casino I think is...
Again, it's a true story and a lot of it is based on true events
and things that people actually did.
And there is always the balance between
showing the reality of how these people live and behave
and not completely offending the audience.
And sometimes it's hard
until the movie is finished and you start showing it to people,
it's hard when you have been So close to it
because we all know it's not real.
I watch other peoples' movies
and I say "Oh, my God, that's so violent.”
But it's hard when you are there doing it
to really have a good understanding
of how intense it is or how shocking it is. You really have to show it to people.
And so when you shoot,
you shoot different variations and different intensities of the violence
and then during the editing and showing it to people
usually means taking it back.
I mean, I'm not talking about censorship or the MPAA rating.
Just generally sort of taking it,
showing it to people you trust and just seeing how they...
Because you want it to be upsetting
but you don't want it to be So upsetting that people can't
look at it or they think it's too upsetting
or it just ruins the whole experience of the movie.
I think the violence in his movies
always has a...
When somebody does something really bad and somebody's really violent
there is a morality to what happens to them, there's a result.
So if somebody really shoots a gun
and somebody gets shot,
unlike in television and other movies, you actually see
that they have been hurt
and they have been wounded, and it's bloody and it's really shocking.
I think so much of the violence in other people's movies
and on television, in particular,
people are shooting one another all the time
and there never seems to be any real resull.
They cut away
and there's never any blood, there's never any...
It's like a game. I think it's sending a message
that you can take a gun and fire it at someone
and nothing really happens.
And I think in Marty's movies
when somebody gets shot, you see it
when somebody gets hit, you see it.
And then usually that person, who has been living this life
of crime and violence,
usually in the end
something happens to him, as well.
"You live by the sword, you die by the sword."
So there is a moral...
In a strange way, there is this very strict morality to it.
And I think, even though the movies are very violent
they don't show that lifestyle
as being particularly attractive in the end.
NICKY: I said I'm not sure. I'll let you know. l want to think about it.
Where are these pricks at? They're in the motel?
There or in the fucking bank. I don't know.
ANNOUNCER: Rita Ryack.
RYACK: He does look like the devil, and I guess that's why
it was right for that scene.
But so many of these choices are instinctive.
Generations of graduate students will look at the Casino
and they will find motifs that weren't...
We never thought of them consciously.
But then when you go back and look at it, you can make analogies like that.
I'll be right back.
Any calls for me, give them to Mr. Sherbert.
- Sure, Mr. Rothstein. - I'm going home for a few seconds.
ANNOUNCER: Sharon Stone.
STONE: Directors, by and large, are often very afraid
to let women really rock 'n' roll.
You know, it's like
show up, look terrific, hit your marks, and shut the fuck up and go home.
And Marty really let me play.
When you get to play with De Niro
and when you get to play with Pesci and Woods,
you're playing fastball in the big leagues.
And that's so where it's at for me.
When we finished Casino, l kind of was, like,
l was so lost.
I didn't know what to do as an artist. Like, where do you go?
You play that with those guys? Now what?
It was very disappointing and disillusioning because it was,
what am I gonna do?
What am I gonna play?
You know, you can only... What? Medea?
What?
I was lost and then I kind of left the business for a while. I just felt like,
what am I gonna do now?
It's only now where I start to feel like l have some life experience
and a desire to begin again.
And what would I like to do? I'd like to work for Marty again.
ANNQOUNCER: Frank Vincent.
VINCENT: Marty gets the best out of everybody.
Sharon really went to a nice level of work
and she really was wonderful in the film.
I felt a little bad for her because, again
there was all these guys.
I mean, it was all men in the movie, essentially.
Well Joe had a wife,
Melissa Prophet,
who also was in Goodfellas
but she had a minimal role. But Sharon was great
and I felt a little sympathy for her.
She really played the character in Casino good.
She got nominated for it.
I thought she should have won it.
ANNOUNCER: Sharon Stone.
STONE: I was just shocked to be
acknowledged for my work.
It was so thrilling just to get to work with all these people.
To be acknowledged for my work was...
l remember when the phone rang
and I was told, "You're nominated for a Golden Globe."
When I won the Golden Globe, l was completely dumbstruck.
I didn't even hear them call my name.
I was talking to the person in the seat next to me.
It was inconceivable to me that...
l won the mother-daughter bowling tournament.
I mean, I didn't think l could win a Golden Globe.
And then the morning I got the call that I was nominated for an Oscar
l ran around my house like a wet puppy. l kept running in circles like,
(LAUGHING)
"What am I gonna do with this information?"
So it's pretty kooky business.
But I have to say, it kind of makes you sick
'cause then you spend weeks where you are just nauseous
and kind of freaked out and...
It's actually freaky and scary
to be nominated for these big awards. It's kind of,
you're really excited for two days and then you're basically sick till it happens.
ANNOUNCER: Rita Ryack.
RYACK: Love the gold.
I can't remember exactly where that came from.
I think we were talking,
"Wouldn't it be great if we had a kind of motorcycle jacket silhouette?”
I am always inspired by fabrics
and I think that we loved pearlized leather for her
for some reason. It just had that special flash.
And I had these gold skins
(CHUCKLES)
and this other stuff this kind of suede reptile. Not reptile.
I said, "We gotta put these together.
“Let's do a motorcycle jacket and pants and let's show that she's deteriorated.
“Let's give them a nice baggy ass
“to show that she's really declining, but she's still wearing this armor.”
It's almost protective armor. That's another thing about leather.
Now it doesn't define the body, as it did in the black pants
and some white leather pants that she wears earlier.
It reveals that she is no longer filling that armor out.
You really notice the fit, I think
when she falls down the stairs at Nicky's restaurant at the end.
NICKY: Get down there! Take it easy!
I shouldn't have gotten involved with this nut!
You'll kill her. Take it easy.
ANNOUNCER: Sharon Stone.
STONE: There is a point where she really realizes that
she's got nothing left to lose.
And, you know, there's a saying
that a woman will take herself down into the gutter to take a man with her.
She was that kind of broad.
And when it hits that point...
And I really wanted to do my own driving
when I smashed up his car and drove my car into the back of his car.
And I have to tell you there was a point when I hit his car
and my bumper got hooked on the back of the bumper
and I put the car in reverse
and the car was just grinding and it was pulling the car.
There are very few times in my life
when I felt that kind of down-in-my-guts exhilaration
where I was just loving beating the shit out of that car.
It was just so fantastic.
The freedom of that kind of rage
is really fantastic.
And I really understood
that kind of thing
and we got that piece and I was driving across the lawn
and I threw the car door open
and I realized...
And it's the cops and Bob
and I turned to Marty and said,
"Can we hold it? Hold me if I fall down."
And we backed the camera because I thought
it's so much more powerful.
She has more power
if she actually falls down in the yard, too.
Like it's more horrifying for him
if once she smashes up the car, then she falls on the ground.
The worse it is
for him...
The more vulgar she is, the more powerful she becomes
because it's so horrifying for him.
That's when I really understood what that meant.
And that's that kind of
breakthrough moment
when she's just
crushing him with her own vulgarity.
And it's so freeing for her because she's got nothing left to lose.
What are you looking at? Fuck offl
Go back inside! This is none of your business.
I don't have to take your shit all the time anymore.
I will go to the FBI! I'll go to the police!
- I am not protecting you anymore! - Mrs. Rothstein...
GINGER: He won't let me inside!
Mr. Rothstein, we've been getting some complaints about the noise.
I'm just trying to get in my house.
ANNOUNCER: Thelma Schoonmaker.
SCHOONMAKER: Marty always has humor throughout his films.
It's not up-front kind of humor
but it's humanity, it's the way people behave
(LAUGHS) and the way things are sometimes said unexpectedly
that are bizarre.
He's always had tremendous humor in his films, from the beginning.
And so here, as usual
Marty loves to capitalize on any accident that occurs and the improvisation.
And if it was humorous,
for example, the way Sharon Stone was throwing things at Bob was so funny
and his reaction with
the leaves flying in front of his face
(LAUGHING) and him just going like this to the cops was...
We did pull that out as much as we could.
But it was there, believe me. l didn't have to find it
And it's just a matter of finding a way to make the improvisation
hang together dramatically, and yet get the best of the humor.
ANNOUNCER: Nicholas Pileggi.
PILEGGI: I was in Las Vegas all during the shoot but I never went to the set.
I was within walking distance of the set for three or four months.
I never went once
because I just feel that I'd get in the way, you don't really...
You're not performing any service if you're "just the writer."”
And there's so much technical stuff going on
and if you do get there
people come over to say hello,
they haven't seen you and all that stuff. It just interrupts the rhythm, I feel.
And I don't get a kick out of it, to begin with
because it's all so technical.
They shoot like 30 seconds, or a minute, or a minute-and-a-half
and then they change all the lights and it takes another half hour.
If you're just watching it,
it's not anything that I really care to do, so I don't.
And therefore I don't bother going to the dailies or do any of that stuff.
So when I was in New York, they had a rough cut of the movie.
And Marty said, "I want you to see the cut.” Sure.
And he'll often tell me when he wants me to see it
because he's really got it laid out in sequence.
He'll have other people or me see it first.
'Cause he's curious about what my reaction will be to something else.
Sometimes he tells me where to sit.
"Don't sit there.” I say, "Why not?" He says, "Sit over there.
"I wanna watch you..." So it's that kind of thing.
(LAUGHS)
He said, "I want you to see the rough cut.” l said, "Great."
He said, "You're gonna be watching it with Ace.”
l said, "Oh, no.”
Ace and I went to a small theater.
Just the two of us in this theater, watching.
That's how [ saw it for the first time, and it was just
unbelievable to see.
Fine, you wrote it, but you can't put it all together.
You can't put the Bass titles on,
you can't put the Saint Matthew's Passion.
When you are writing, you are on a computer.
You don't have the orchestra, the color, all of that stuff laid out.
When you type the fact that he gets up from his desk
and walks to the closet without his pants,
you don't have the color turquoise socks. That all comes...
That's your costume person,
that's your set designer, that's Marty's vision for how it goes.
And so you see it for the first time,
it sort of explodes, the movie explodes for you
if you are the writer.
And it also exploded for Ace. He just got up...
You would never do anything like hug Ace
but we came as close to doing that as you can.
'Cause I think he was really pleased and he was, you know...
All of that angst and all of that,
the memory of that nightmare
that he lived through, I think,
he felt happy that he had helped.
The final result was more than I could have dreamed of.
I mean, it's such a big movie, it's so grand
and it tells such a... It's complicated but it tells a simple story.
But it's complicated in a good way.
I think it's rich
in what it shows of that period.
And I'm not talking about the writing part. I'm talking about what Marty did with it.
The combination of...
I mean, I gave him a structure from the book
and then we wrote the screenplay.
But that screenplay was so enhanced, as screenplays are
by camera angles
and mood and color.
And the music is always so important to Marty.
It's never failed him, I mean, right back in Boxcar Bertha
he just had it, he just knew that part of it.
SAM: Everyone began to tumble, like dominoes.
FBIl We have a warrant!
SAM: Between Piscano complaining on the wire
between Nicky, Ginger, me and my license,
paradise. We managed to really fuck it up.
Mom.
ANNOUNCER: Sharon Stone.
STONE: I was searching while I was doing the whole movie
lo have it come to me.
Did she kill herself?
Did they kill her?
Did she overdose?
Did they overdose her?
And I felt that eventually
l would know,
or someone would tell me, or something would happen,
or she would tell me, or somehow
l would get it. And instead
the freight train of this character
Just got going
and it was just going and going.
And I wanted to lose the weight at the end
to be increasingly involved in the drug and alcohol life.
And I started just dropping the weight.
Marty had said, "We'll shoot the death scene whenever you want to.
"We don't have to shoot it at the end.
"You'll just call me and say,
"I'm ready to shoot it,' and that's when we'll shoot it."
So I was losing that weight
and I was getting pretty nuts.
Anyone who was on that show will tell you
l had lost any sort of normal perspective.
I wasn't eating.
We were working crazy hours.
I was so involved in this character
and I was just waiting to know and obsessed
and I kept running the bathtub over in my house and flooding my house.
I must have flooded it three times.
And eventually,
l had become this animal who had to get these people
to give it to me
and give it up to me what was happening, and that was all I could do.
I couldn't even think straight.
I was reaching out around to try to make it happen.
I'd lost complete grip
on day-to-day life and anything except being in her
and her drive
to figure out what was happening and what was gonna happen to her.
And at the end,
l just called Marty and said, "Okay, I'm ready to do the death scene.”
And we sat in that room
(GROANS)
and we did a couple of takes.
They were good. Marty felt like we had it.
And then I really felt her presence with me.
And I just really started to understand the process
and why I'd done it, and what it was about, and it got really clear.
I told Marty I wanted to do another take
because I was so clear of her presence.
And I went down the hallway and it was so different.
I was floating down the hallway.
And I couldn't really see where I was going.
And I reached towards the end
and I had this thing where my heart came up my throat.
I could hear it doing this...
(THUMPING)
And I let go of the wall, and I just
sort of came up off my feet
and I hit the ground. And when I hit the ground
this sound came out of my body
and this kind of visible thing came out of my body.
(GROANS)
And I could see this happen.
And everybody in the room heard this thing happen.
And I just lay there,
couldn't get up.
Marty cut. Nobody moved.
And eventually Marty came over and sat with me.
And we all... Nobody kind of knew what to do.
And then he asked me if I was okay or if I needed help
or if we needed to go to the hospital or...
But everybody was just impaled
by the intensity of this thing that had just happened.
And that was when the Ginger thing Just kind of left.
I felt that the witnessing of her presence
had been completed.
I thought that Marty was very smart
to have left that until the end
and to have left it to be when it was appropriate.
And sometimes I think things just need a witness
maybe more than they need an answer.
SAM: It's the only thing that saved my life.
ANNQOUNCER: Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: The violence, by the end of the picture, the lifestyle's so violent,
what they're doing to each other is so violent emotionally,
that by the time you really want to know how
a tough, underworld figure dies, in a way
or is taken out by his... It's done usually by his closest friends.
And it's done in the most brutal manner.
And this, the killing of Joe Pesci and his brother,
Joe's character, Santoro, and his brother
is based on the actual murder of Spilotro and his brother.
And I didn't know how else to shoot it, except just to shoot it flat,
as honest as possible, and they even buried them while they were still alive.
They were killed by their best friends, and this is basically
the end of the road for this kind of lifestyle.
And after doing that, I sort of ran out...
It was no longer interesting depicting violence in movies the way I did
in Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull.
Raging Bull is different in the sense that you have...
The violence in the ring is one thing.
It is the emotional violence in Raging Bull and these films that I am still interested in.
But the actual physical violence, I don't...
Having watched it, l wasn't interested in showing it anymore
in certain stylistic ways. l just did it flat in this sequence.
That's it. It's almost like a straight documentary.
There's no other... Just show what it really winds up like.
ANNOUNCER: Nicholas Pileggi.
PILEGGI: They were so angry at him. They felt that he...
Whatever it is, they decided he was not going to live.
He was not going to die simply.
And they said they were going to meet them for a meeting in the Indiana cornfield
where they beat them to death with baseball bats and buried them
half-alive in a grave, and nobody would ever see them again.
There was no way they were gonna see them again.
This was a great cornfield, and I think
in the next year or months later, l can't remember the dates
but there was a farmer out there doing his crops.
The crops were coming up, the corn was coming up
except there was this patch where there was no corn.
He couldn't understand what that was.
So he called the State Game Preserve people
because you're not supposed to shoot deer there
and they suspected somebody shot some deer, and buried the bodies.
So the Game Preserve guy comes up and he starts digging to find a deer.
The first thing he finds is underwear.
Now, deer don't wear underwear.
So he calls up the FBI. They dig up and find the bodies
of not only Nicky Santoro, but his brother.
And when they do the autopsy
they realize that these guys had been beaten to death
with baseball bats, and there was all the CSI stuff, I guess.
And that they...
Because some of the sand was in their throats
they realized that they had still been breathing
when they were buried. So it was a really very brutal death.
And the Ace character, no one really knows who blew him up.
The suspicion is now that it was not the powers that be
or he would've been killed again. It was just some...
Probably they feel it might've been somebody doing it for the Nicky character
because they were so bitter and angry at each other at the end.
And the thing about this Cadillac
was because there had been a balancing problem,
they had put a metal plate under the seat
of the driver
and the bomb had been placed under the passenger seat.
So when the bomb went off,
the impact of the bomb was deflected
by that metal plate.
The power of a bomb is going to go where it has the least resistance.
So it had resistance under his seat.
He was able to get the door open and roll off onto the street.
He was injured. He went to the hospital and was banged up badly.
He got away just in time. There was a secondary explosion
but he was out of the car by then. So it was pure...
Nobody knew that there was that steel plate
and it was only there because of the technical problem with that Cadillac.
ANNOUNCER: Thelma Schoonmaker.
SCHOONMAKER: At the time that Casino came out,
a lot of people expected it to be another Goodfellas, [ think.
Marty and I were upset by that attitude
as if everything we made had to be a sequel to Goodfellas.
It's a problem we have with all of our films because people loved Goodfellas so much.
For me, I thought the choice was so interesting
because it wasn't just another mafia film,
although the mafia is obviously predominant in it.
But what was interesting was Marty's feeling that he wanted to make a statement about
greed and how it can destroy you.
So I, of course, thought that was a wonderful subject.
Frank Rosenthal was the perfect person to hang it on.
And so, for me, that's what it was all about
because that's always the way Marty talked to me about it.
But he really wanted to make a statement about what America was doing to itself
and continues to do to itself.
He really wanted to lay down what greed was going to mean
and how
this shallow culture
was going to be a problem for America.
And he really wanted to lay that down. It's not a film about the mafia.
It's interesting 'cause they are in it all over the place.
Wonderful actors improvising great flavor to them.
But that's not what it's about.
To a certain extent, it is a Western, but I think he...
Secretly, he probably has always wanted to make a real one
but since he isn't particularly comfortable around horses,
(LAUGHING) I don't know.
But, of course, he admires so much the great masters of the Western.
He can watch them over and over. l am sure there was some flavor of it there.
ANNQOUNCER: Martin Scorsese.
SCORSESE: It was how much is enough? It's never enough, we gotta keep going
till everything explodes and comes down. That's also, in a sense
the idea of Casino as a kind of
metaphor for Hollywood, too.
And making bigger pictures, flashier, and more hundreds of millions of dollars
till finally it's going to explode, and the bottom is going fall right out of it.
And we have to continue
the nature of cinema in a different way, ultimately, in America,
I think, unless it will split forever
between the gigantic budgeted pictures
which are, at times, very well done.
All the new techniques are extraordinary. Some are done better than others
but can't take much chance at the box office
because you need a lot of money
to make the movie. Which means a lot of people have to see the movie
to make back some money.
And any film that has any kind of
edge to it or something where you're thinking more
than just something which is black and white,
good characters and bad characters.
This is what the moral is.
Then having to tell the audience constantly what the moral is
and indicate how they should feel with music, and all kinds of overdoing.
There are other films in America being made by younger people,
some excellent ones with lower budgets, but they'll always have that lower budget.
It might be interesting to see if those people would ever be given a chance
to be given more money
the way a number of people were given, including myself, at some points in the '70s.
But that, I think, is long gone, and probably will never come back.
So this was sort of
a moralistic tale for me to tell
and to get people provocative and angry, in a way.