Daily Dialogue — April 5, 2018
Henry Hill: Anything I wanted was a phone call away. Free cars. The keys to a dozen hideout flats all over the city. I bet twenty, thirty grand over a weekend and then I’d either blow the winnings in a week or go to the sharks to pay back the bookies.
Henry leaves the witness stand and speaks directly to the camera.
Henry Hill: Didn’t matter. It didn’t mean anything. When I was broke, I’d go out and rob some more. We ran everything. We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers. We paid off judges. Everybody had their hands out. Everything was for the taking. And now it’s all over.
A series of same looking suburban homes.
Henry Hill (V.O.): And that’s the hardest part. Today everything is different; there’s no action… have to wait around like everyone else.
A door to a nondescript house opens. It’s Henry in a bathrobe. Stoops down to pick up the morning newspaper.
Henry Hill (V.O.): Can’t even get decent food — right after I got here, I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce, and I got egg noodles and ketchup.
Henry peers into the camera.
Henry Hill (V.O.): I’m an average nobody… get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.
— Goodfellas (1990), screenplay by Nicholas Pileggi & Martin Scorsese, book by Nicholas Pileggi
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Breaking the 4th Wall.
Trivia: Martin Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi collaborated on the screenplay, and over the course of the twelve drafts it took to reach the ideal script, the reporter realized “the visual styling had to be completely redone. So we decided to share credit.” They decided which sections of the book they liked, and put them together like building blocks. Scorsese persuaded Pileggi that they did not need to follow a traditional narrative structure. Scorsese wanted to take the gangster film, and deal with it episode by episode, but start in the middle and move backwards and forwards. Scorsese would compact scenes, and realized that if they were kept short, “the impact after about an hour and a half would be terrific.”
Dialogue On Dialogue: Even though there is voice-over narration throughout, the sudden transition to breaking the 4th wall in the courtroom scene drives home in an intimate way how even though Henry escaped imprisonment, he ends up ‘in prison’ in his secret suburban life.
