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if Seinfeld The perfect sitcom, a show about nothing, was The Martin Scorsese Show casino It’s arguably an almost perfect movie, and a cross-section. It was also Scorsese’s attempt to connect the themes with Good guys, a hidden and unofficial sequel of sorts. Scorsese bet that the interesting characters in the scripts could carry a three-hour movie. When you have dozens of plots, so many locations, and fifty characters, it’s easy to forget that this mob saga is technically a movie about papers and pensions filed incorrectly.
Based on research by Nicholas Pileggi – the same author who wrote the book Scorsese’s classic Good guys were based – casino It will never be an ordinary movie. unlike Good guys, This production process was informal from the start, without a basis for narrative formation. Producer Barbara De Vena admitted, “In this case it was like a pile of notes”.
The lack of a plan fits with the film’s mood and “anything goes” language. Scorsese may have envisioned the characters as archetypes, but he felt comfortable letting the actors fill in all the blanks. Due to some legal hurdles, they often had no choice but to make up for it immediately.
Loosely centered around the black irony of a gambling expert who offers the worst long run bet in history, he and every other character ruin their brilliant scheme through sheer pride. althoug casino Compared to a Greek tragedy by more than one reviewer, it really is more like a slasher TV series.
Mobb Scorsese trilogy
Pileggi, on Blu-ray commentary Scorsese’s fascination with the Italian underworld, explains this film as a natural continuation of his previous films: means the street And Good guys. casino It served as the end point of a gangster dream, while the first two films analyze the early, immature stages of two-bit caps on their small neighborhood street, stumbling their way to the top, and selling stolen cigarettes.
casino It represented “the pinnacle of the mob world”, as Pileggi called it, while Good guys It was the middle class, suburban stage of mob success. Scorsese penned it as a battle of egos, “brains and strength” unable to maintain the balance necessary to keep the lucrative racket going. Mob culture affected not only the characters but also how he portrays the film, which is riddled with darkness and anecdotes, which in themselves are not crucial to the plot, and which Scorsese openly admits are self-indulgent. The movie is intended to be excessive and clichéd, veering from sentimental tone to tone.
However, a straight sequel was not seriously considered. The director, actors, producers, editor and screenwriter chose to continue on the same path he had followed Good guys, but in a completely different world in Vegas far from being Henry Hill’s character in New Jersey. Colorful mafia characters are always their own worst enemy, and they take a lot of risks for the sake of money.
Holes in the desert, holes in the text
According to producer De Fina, the source material book (Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas) wasn’t even completed when Scorsese was approached to adapt it into a movie. The fact that his old friend, Nicholas Pileggi, was writing it sweetened the deal for him. The book was released about a month before the movie. However, Scorsese said he preferred the characters, not the plot. casino is a perfect demonstration of this philosophy. Story wise, the movie can be incoherent at times, but each character’s arc is always clear.
Some movies are based on books and other plays. no casino. Inspired by just a scrap of newspaper, the nearly three-hour long crime epic to end all crimes is a domestic disturbance case that Scorsese has built an entire movie around. All he had to do was work out every detail that led up to that interaction to make sense. Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, and James Woods ran with him.
Due to legal issues and time constraints, the real numbers are being merged, cut off, or renamed. “They wrote the script before the book was done,” said the producer. Bilgi’s sordid little tales intrigued Scorsese, who couldn’t get the idea out of his head. Without countless quirky characters, no one could have made an interesting story about hearing boards and embezzlement.
Improv 101
If the film seemed erratic and disjointed, it wasn’t a coincidence, editor Thelma Schoonmaker took advantage of new digital editing technology to make more experimental edits. At the same time, Scorsese mystifyingly explains, “The whole movie was carefully planned. It was restructured in editing.” Scorsese had parts of the movie to play with, but as he tells it, each part didn’t have a specific chronology or end goal, just set up characters, crimes, and emotional stakes.
The movie was shot fast and loose, with the cast confident that the editing would bring all the pieces together. Scorsese never approached the film more as a drama than as a documentary, allowing the actors to get a glimpse of the characters and then letting them talk about them as they felt like it. If there was one thing he charted meticulously, it was the music, keeping a chart on his office wall during filming to lay out tracks, organizing scenes around the eclectic soundtrack.
The actors had plenty of leeway in how they introduced the character to audiences, with Joe Pesci changing his character, Nikki Santoro, insisting he had more depth than he did in police depositions. “The actors are 100% free to improvise and do whatever they want within the confines of the composition,” co-star Kevin Pollack complimented the director. Some of the strongest scenes in the movie can be traced back to the cast for scene reinterpretation and out of script.
And why don’t they? It’s not like the director didn’t do the same. Which shows what happens when a film crew trusts a director and his system. while casino It may not be Martin Scorsese’s most well-quoted or well-quoted film, it goes to show how good his system at this point in his career is that he can produce such a compelling, deep, and satisfying film on such an abstract framework that it relies on little more than a hazy mental image.
