Where to watch GoodFellas (1990)

Trivia & production notes

• Scorsese postponed directing Goodfellas in 1988 to make The Last Temptation of Christ instead.
• Ray Liotta aggressively campaigned for the role of Henry Hill despite Warner Bros. preferring a more established actor like Eddie Murphy.
• De Niro was cast as Jimmy Conway after Scorsese saw him in Jonathan Demme's Something Wild and was impressed by his explosive energy.
• Ray Liotta listened to FBI audio cassettes of the real Henry Hill while driving to and from the set to accurately replicate his speech patterns.
• Lorraine Bracco deliberately chose not to meet the real Karen Hill, deciding instead to develop the character entirely from her own imagination.
• Former EDSA prosecutor Edward A. McDonald was cast to play himself in an unscripted scene about witness protection, which he agreed to do on a whim during a location scout visit.
• Scorsese and Pileggi went through 12 screenplay drafts and ultimately decided to share writing credit after realizing the visual styling required complete reworking.
• Scorsese drew inspiration from François Truffaut's Jules and Jim for the film's use of narration and employed New Wave filmmaking techniques from around 1961.
• Scorsese had to remove 10 frames of blood from the film to secure an R rating from the MPAA despite wanting to depict violence realistically.
• Forty audience members walked out during the first ten-minute sequence at the initial test screening, though the infamous insult scene became a favorite with audiences.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Goodfellas, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.