Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro reflect on paying the mob to make ‘Mean Streets’
Over 50 years after Mean Streets was released, director Martin Scorsese and star Robert De Niro looked back on the making of their first collaboration, which included paying off the mob to enable them to shoot.
In 1973, Scorsese directed his third feature, Mean Streets, an early indication of his enduring cinematic interest in crime and violence. It also kickstarted the filmmaker’s close collaborative relationship with De Niro, who he continues to cast in his films to this day.
In a recent conversation with Variety, the duo recalled paying the mob in order to shoot Mean Streets around New York. According to De Niro, some of the “neighbourhood guys” even made appearances in the background of shots.
The director remembered shooting on Mulberry Street in Manhattan, explaining that they had to pay in order to use the location. “My father had to go talk to the guy who owned the building,” he remembered, “We didn’t get much sympathy from them, my father saying, ‘It’s a kid from the neighbourhood. Come on — you’re gonna charge him that much?'”
Despite his father’s pleading, they stood firm on the cost. “He goes, ‘What? He makes money on this’,” Scorsese remembered, “‘You make a movie, he’ll go away. We’re still here. This is what’s gonna cost.’ There was no romantic sticking together.”
Scorsese also remembered borrowing $5,000 from fellow legendary director Francis Ford Coppola “because you couldn’t shoot in the festival, because we had to contribute to the San Gennaro Society. As soon as we sold the picture I gave him the money back.”
Mean Streets marked the beginning of a long-standing partnership between the actor and director, who were undeterred by the daunting tasks of paying off the mob and borrowing from Coppola. Since then, De Niro has appeared in nine more of Scorsese’s feature films, including the 1976 cult classic Taxi Driver and the iconic Goodfellas in 1990.
They have become one of the most iconic duos in Hollywood, and their creative partnership is still going strong. Killers of the Flower Moon, their most recent project together, arrived just last year, earning Scorsese a ‘Best Director’ nomination at the Academy Awards. De Niro also received a nod for his supporting role.
Scorsese is set to reunite with Andrew Garfield for his next project, which will adapt Shūsaku Endō’s book, Life of Jesus. The pair previously worked together on the 2016 religious epic, Silence.
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