Be extraordinarily prepared but completely open to happy accidents
Goodfellas may be violent, but it's also hilarious – and Martin Scorcese's approach is why.
“He's extraordinarily prepared but completely open to happy accidents.” That’s how Paul Sorvino described Scorcese in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas: A Complete Oral History (GQ).
It’s a great attitude to have in standup too. Go in with a plan but remember: There’s a reason people came to see a live human being. So don’t be afraid to be human.
A big reason why Goodfellas is so funny is Scorcese’s approach. He was, as one actress put it, “always open to seeing what was going to happen in the moment.” If something sounded like a line, he’d try another word. If a scene sounded robotic, he’d tell the actor to go off script. He’d start and end scenes with certain lines but try different things along the way (very Curb). He left in mistakes if they turned out funnier than the script. All the above = great lessons for comedians too.
Some more excerpts about all that from the oral history:
Julie Garfield (Mickey Conway): He was always open to seeing what was going to happen in the moment. If he felt like the word you were using sounded too much like a line, he'd say, "Try another word."
Sorvino: If you stick slavishly to the material, you're not going to be able to get it so that it sounds like you're saying it for the first time.
Thelma Schoonmaker (editor): The whole film was improvised, really. [laughs] Scorsese always tells them they have to begin a certain place and end a certain place, but what they want to do in between is okay. For example, when Pesci shoots Spider.
Imperioli: The only line in that scene that was actually scripted was the last one Spider says, which was "Go fuck yourself."
Liotta: For the scene at Tommy's mother's house, I don't think Marty gave his mom a script. I remember Joe saying, "Mom, I need this knife. We hit a deer, we got to cut off its—" and he can't remember it, and Bob jumps in as he's eating "—hoof." There was a lot of improv. And then they're talking about the guy [with the dogs] in the painting. Joe says, "One dog goes one way, and the other dog goes the other way. And this guy's saying, What do you want from me?" I don't know where the fuck that came from. To this day, it's really funny.
David Chase (creator, The Sopranos): Maybe that's my favorite line in the whole movie. I might as well have been back in my uncle's kitchen around a Formica tabletop at midnight. There was also something in the movie in which Pesci as Tommy is dressed to go out, and he comes into the scene, and Mrs. Scorsese as his mother says, "You're home?" [laughs] And he says, "Home? I'm leaving!" It was obvious that someone had lost their place there, and that was so clearly improvised. And it just worked. A lot of people might've cut and said, "That's a mistake, let's go back." A guy talking to his mother who's in her sixties, it was so perfect.
And then there’s the classic scene where Pesci is saying, "You think I'm funny?" Here’s the story of how that came to be…
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