How Marlon Brando almost talked Martin Scorsese out of making ‘Goodfellas’
In 1990, one of the greatest gangster films ever made was released. Goodfellas was legendary director Martin Scorsese’s return to a genre he hadn’t worked in since he first broke out with 1973’s Mean Streets. It would prove such a roaring success that he became synonymous with the genre in later years thanks to further mobbed-up classics like Casino, The Departed, and The Irishman. Fascinatingly, though, Scorsese was almost talked out of coming back to the organised crime world by another totemic figure in gangster movie history: none other than Don Vito Corleone himself, Marlon Brando.
Scorsese first got wind of the project that would become Goodfellas when he was shooting 1986’s The Colour of Money in Chicago. Depending on whose memory you believe, he either read a review of Nicholas Pileggi’s non-fiction book Wiseguy or caught an excerpt of it in New York Magazine, which is where Pileggi plied his trade. He became fascinated by the book, which told the tale of real-life mobster Henry Hill from the 1950s to the early ’80s as he transformed from a teenage errand boy for the Mob to a member of the crew responsible for the infamous Lufthansa heist at JFK airport, and finally to an FBI informant in witness protection.
Scorsese felt in his bones that Wiseguy would make a great movie. There was just one problem, though – he didn’t want to make another gangster movie. At the time, Scorsese felt he’d said all he wanted to say with Mean Streets, which was a very personal movie dealing with the kind of street-level mobsters he grew up around in New York City’s Little Italy. He had then dabbled lightly with Mob elements in 1980’s Raging Bull, and that left him feeling he wanted to leave the Mafia in his rearview mirror.
Still, Scorsese couldn’t deny that the prospect of Wiseguy appealed to him on some level. It would serve as the perfect counterpoint to The Godfather by showing that real-life gangsters weren’t men bound by codes of honour and devotion to family; they were cold-blooded killers who would turn on each other at a moment’s notice.
Interestingly, around this time, Scorsese went to Tahiti to visit Brando, who had become immortalised as Don Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 classic. He explained his reservations about going back to the gangster well and explained that he was pushing himself by making different kinds of movies, such as the surreal comedy After Hours and his biblical passion project, The Last Temptation of Christ. In Glenn Kenny’s Made Men, Scorsese admitted that Brando’s reaction jived with his thinking at the time: “You don’t wanna do that again”.
Naturally, such advice from an icon like Brando would always affect Scorsese. He admitted to going sour on the idea of Wiseguy, which had been renamed Goodfellas when he and Pileggi collaborated on a script adaptation of the book. Thankfully, though, advice from another important Hollywood figure convinced Scorsese that he would be doing himself a disservice if he didn’t tackle the film.
You see, Scorsese’s editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, was married to director Michael Powell, best known for the 1948 classic The Red Shoes. She had read the script to her husband, who wasn’t exactly a devotee of gangster movies – and even he thought it was special. Scorsese admitted, “Michael called and told me, ‘You must do this.'”
Those four words were all it took to make Scorsese do a complete 180 on the project. He revealed, “That shifted me back into the original energy and original impulse to make the picture,” and before long, cameras were rolling on Goodfellas.
