‘Goodfellas’ at 35: 7 Rare Behind-the-Scenes Photos With De Niro, Liotta and Scorsese

Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, seen here on set, have long had one of Hollywood's most fruitful director-actor partnerships. The two cinematic icons first collaborated on Mean Streets (1973), and went on to work together with Taxi Driver (1976), New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983), Cape Fear (1991), Casino (1995), The Irishman (2019) and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). While many consider Goodfellas to be the finest film they made together, it’s decidedly difficult to choose just one title as the best with so many great options.

Scorsese and De Niro look to be in deep conversation in this set photo. Over the course of more than 50 years of creative collaborations, the director and actor have developed a singular relationship, and Scorsese has praised the star’s famously intense approach to method acting, telling People, “When Bob commits to a role, he starts digging in with research, questions about absolutely everything, from what the character wears to what he eats for breakfast.”

Here, Scorsese and De Niro converse at a diner. Restaurants, clubs and bars played a key role in establishing the period settings of Goodfellas (who can forget the Copacabana long take?), and the film also shot on location at the Airline Diner and the Sherwood Diner, two old-school diners in New York.

If you hadn’t seen Goodfellas, you could almost be fooled into thinking this picture was a charming family portrait. Here, we see Scorsese with his stars, Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta and Joe Pesci, and his mom, Catherine Scorsese, who played Pesci’s mom in a hilarious scene that was largely improvised. The director praised his mom for the authenticity she brought to the scene, saying, “My mother treated Pesci and particularly Bob De Niro as family members, real family members, because we know each other for so long and to her, it was my son's friends were making a movie.”

Here, Scorsese talks to Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco as he works on directing their wedding scene. Goodfellas was a major influence on The Sopranos, and dozens of actors from the movie later appeared in the show, with Bracco, who played Tony Soprano’s therapist, Dr. Melfi, being one of the best. As the top-billed woman in a macho movie, Bracco channeled the confidence of her male costars, telling The Guardian, “I was lucky, I knew Robert, so I had a friend. And Ray was always delicious. Marty I didn’t know so well, but what I learned was not to be afraid of my ideas, and that he was open to them. Unconditionally! That was a big thing. The boys were always like, ‘Let me try this.’ So by the third day, it was, ‘Well, if they’re doing it, I’m doing it, too.’”

In Goodfellas’ climactic heist, the gangsters steal millions in cash, and here, Scorsese poses on set with stacks of bills. When the film was released, the director talked about the significance of money to the story, explaining to The New York Times, “The film is about money. Throughout, you constantly hear them talking about who owes who how much. It's very important, because that's what they're really in business for. The violence is not the main thing—it's just a way to consolidate power to get the money.”

In this shot, we see Scorsese hard at work shooting Goodfellas. If you look closely, the name Wiseguy is visible on the side of the camera. Wiseguy was the title of the 1985 nonfiction book on which the film was based (the author, Nicholas Pileggi, collaborated on the screenplay with the director) but the film's name was ultimately changed to avoid confusion, as there was a CBS series called Wiseguy at the time.