Scorsese: Goodfellas, Gangsters and Guilt

Goodfellas (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

Goodfellas is about guilt more than anything else. But it is not a straightforward morality play, in which good is established and guilt is the appropriate reaction toward evil. No, the hero of this film feels guilty for not upholding the Mafia code – guilty of the sin of betrayal. And his punishment is banishment, into the witness protection program, where nobody has a name and the headwaiter certainly doesn't know it. What finally got to me after seeing this film – what makes it a great film – is that I understood Henry Hill's feelings. Just as his wife Karen grew so completely absorbed by the Mafia inner life that its values became her own, so did the film weave a seductive spell. It is almost possible to think, sometimes, of the characters as really being good fellows. Their camaraderie is so strong, their loyalty so unquestioned. But the laughter is strained and forced at times, and sometimes it's an effort to enjoy the party, and eventually, the whole mythology comes crashing down, and then the guilt – the real guilt, the guilt a Catholic like Scorsese understands intimately – is not that they did sinful things, but that they want to do them again. – Roger Ebert

Martin Scorsese's mid career masterwork GoodFellas (1990) is a follow-up to his own Mean Streets (1973), released in the same year as Francis Ford Coppola's third episode of his gangster epic The Godfather, Part III (1990). It is a gritty, honest examination of a true life mobster scenario involving three violent "wiseguys" accentuated by the Italian-American director's personal experience growing up in Little Italy. Scorsese reunites with one of his favourite actors, Robert De Niro, who previously featured in Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull (1980), and The King of Comedy (1982)

The film's factual, semi-documentary narrative was adapted from Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese's script, which was based on Pileggi's 1985 non-fiction book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family. 

The true story involved a low-level, marginalised gangster (or 'foot-soldier') with mixed ethnic ancestry (half-Irish, half-Sicilian) - Henry Hill - who eventually broke the gangster's code of 'never ratting on your friends' and became an informant for the FBI.

The fast-paced, exhilarating, episodic plot, which is peppered with profanity, bold editing cuts and graphics, changing points of view, and people speaking directly to the camera, is delivered via voice-over narration by Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). It spans thirty years of his life, from his adolescent years in a Brooklyn Irish neighbourhood to his exploits as an adult gangster, ranging from the 1950s to the drug-fueled 1970s, during which he was married to Karen (Lorraine Bracco). The inclusion of his wife's voice-over gives more insight into the all-encompassing culture and allure of 'family life.' The freeze frames interspersed throughout emphasise the lasting, formative events of Henry's life. 

GoodFellas is a film defined by an extraordinary, almost anthropological attention to experiential and procedural detail, stylistic virtuosity manifested through freeze-frames, majestic subjective tracking shots, overlapping and occasionally improvised dialogue, propulsive editing, dual voice-overs, a breathless pop-rock soundtrack, and an insider's knowledge of organised crime. 

The picture is both wonderfully constructed and produced, as well as a bravura mash-up of tones, genres, and sensibilities, inspired by films such as Truffaut's Jules et Jim. 

This overpowering sense of the material realities and pleasures inherent in the film's chosen, sometimes gaudy, environment draws us into a mostly male, chauvinist world characterised by easy corruption, hair-trigger violence, moral ambiguity, and a sense of imperiousness. 

GoodFellas creates a minutely portrayed atmosphere that we both repelled and seduced by. As is the case with many Scorsese films, we identify with the scenario of an outsider being indoctrinated into a highly ritualised environment with each picture "filled with activity and texture," as Scorsese puts it. 

While essential collaborators such as editor Thelma Schoonmaker and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus have been rightfully recognised for their work, Kristi Zea's production design really brings this "cloistered" and insular universe to life. The garish, residential interiors are densely evocative and immersive. We're fascinated from the minute the picture starts in the middle of the tale, with bright red taillights illuminating Henry's face as he declares, "As long back as I can remember, I've always wanted to be a gangster." 

Scorsese's films often derive their cues from snippets of music, riffs from certain songs, or the rapid-fire transitions between tracks. This approach to music contributes to its jagged, sometimes abrupt, almost jazz-like rhythms and tones by Harry Nilsson, Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones.

Scorsese's career peaked with GoodFellas, and marked a notable return to form after his more disjointed work of the 1980s. The film ushers in an era of unprecedented output in the first half of the 1990s, which includes such landmark works as The Age of Innocence, his documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Films, and an equally violent and kaleidoscopic slice of mob life, Casino. 

In many respects, GoodFellas is an unsettling love letter to the gangster cinema, packed with distinctive allusions to earlier inspirations such as The Roaring Twenties, Public Enemy, and Scarface.

It is considered the defining work of Scorsese's career, drawing the audience into its hellish world through cinematic virtuosity, and dazzling performances, simultaneously promising the fulfilment of one’s deepest desires and the pain of getting what you want.

The filming is enticing because it portrays Hill's criminal lifestyle as alluring; it invites us into his world. Thus, Scorsese creates a subjective experience, frequently literally: in the shot introducing the film's various gangsters and hangers-on, all of whom speak directly into the camera ("I'm going to go get the papers, get the papers"), or in the film's infamous "May 11, 1980" sequence, which uses jagged cutting, jittery camerawork, and clashing musical cues to transport us directly into the action.

In comparison to prior tales of mob life (including The Godfather films), the immediacy of Goodfellas is striking, terrifying and visceral.

It left clear imprints on a number of subsequent films and television series. “Boogie Nights is unmistakably Goodfellas,” Glenn Kenny, author of the forthcoming book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, stated. He also finds a strong parallel to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs - specifically the repeated theme of gangsters who hang around, speak trash, and go about their business as if it were a business. 

The majority of gangster films concentrate on the top bosses and godfathers; Goodfellas and its sequels focus on the grinders, intermediaries, and lower level thugs. 

Kenny also identifies the concept of "mobsters having other facets of their existence," such as ordinary marital and family difficulties, which was a critical component of David Chase's groundbreaking series, The Sopranos. Chase has openly cited the film as his holy book, not only for the tone and viewpoint of the picture as inspiration for The Sopranos, but also the cast, which includes numerous future Sopranos co-stars. 

In the following extract from Richard Schickel’s Conversations with Scorsese, director Martin Scorsese discusses guilt, celebrity and the gangster in his great movie of mob life:

RICHARD SCHICKEL: Your next full-length feature after ‘Last Temptation’ was ‘Goodfellas’ in 1990, which I suppose with ‘Raging Bull’ is one of my two favorite movies of yours. Perhaps part of my feeling for that is based on the fact that most of us share a sort of love for gangsters as outsiders, or rebels. I mean, we always sort of sympathize with the gangster Jim Cagney, or people like him. They seem to have such a nice, rich life: lovely meals they’re always making for each other, a certain amount of friendship, brotherhood, and all that. They enjoy the good life, and at the same time they get to whack people.

MARTIN SCORSESE: When I was doing The Color of Money in Chicago, I was reading The New York Review of Books and saw a review of a book by Nick Pileggi called Wiseguy. It seemed like Nick was taking us through the different levels of purgatory and hell in the underworld, like Virgil or like Dante. Irwin Winkler said, ‘Are you interested in that?’ I said yes and he bought it for me. I said yes because I thought Nick was telling the story in a different way. It’s about that lifestyle, and the dangerous seduction of that lifestyle.

I remember I was talking to Marlon Brando from time to time, and he said, ‘Don’t do another gangster picture. You’ve done Mean Streets, you did the gangsters in Raging Bull. You don’t have to do that.’ I came to feel the same way. So I said to Michael Powell, ‘I think I don’t want to do this Goodfellas thing,’ or Wiseguys, as it was then called.

Michael Powell went back to his apartment with Thelma Schoonmaker, whom he’d married right after Raging Bull. He couldn’t see anymore, so she read the script to him. I was in the editing room, I remember, in the Brill Building, and suddenly he called and said, ‘This is wonderful. You must do it. It’s funny and no one’s ever seen this way of life before. You must do it.’ And that’s why I did it.

RS: Well, there’s a William Wellman story on ‘Public Enemy’. He found the script and he took it to [Darryl] Zanuck, who was running Warner Bros. It was then called ‘Beer and Blood.’ He loved it – these young writers had lived in Chicago and knew some of the mobsters. But Zanuck said, I can’t do another one of these. I’ve just done this, I’ve just done that. Tell me one good reason to do it. And Wellman said, ‘Because I’ll make it the toughest one you ever saw.’ And Zanuck said, ‘You got it.’ You could argue that, of all the modern gangland things, ‘Goodfellas’ is the toughest one of all. Was there some aspect of ‘Goodfellas’ for you that was like Wellman’s attitude, that you could do it tougher?

MS: I thought of it as being a kind of attack.

RS: Attack?

MS: Attacking the audience. I remember talking about it at one point and saying, ‘I want people to get infuriated by it.’ I wanted to seduce everybody into the movie and into the style. And then just take them apart with it. I guess I wanted to make a kind of angry gesture.

RS: Why were you angry?

MS: I guess I used to feel I was the outsider who has to punch his way back in, constantly. Some people don’t have to do that, but I do. I’m not just talking about films, but everything.

I get angry about the way things are and the way people are. I get very involved in stories and the way a character behaves and the way the world behaves. More than anger, I think, maybe it’s caring about how characters behave, how the world behaves. I’m curious about those things. I still get excited by the story. I still get upset by what a character does. And the anger is something to get me working. I have to get sometimes rather upset with myself or a situation before I can really start working, thinking clearly. Some other people can do it very quickly, which doesn’t mean they don’t put energy into it. But they don’t put their heart and soul into it. I’m one of those people who does. It’s every minute of the day and night.

In the Rolling Stones documentary, I do a takeoff on myself for the first ten minutes. It’s about everything that could go wrong for me as the director. And things do go wrong. And they affect you.

I remember a priest told my father to come to talk to him and bring me with him to the rectory one day. I wondered why, what I did that was so bad? I must’ve been about twelve. He said something about me going around with the seriousness and the weight of the world on my shoulders. At that age I shouldn’t be that way, the priest said. I should have been enjoying my life. And he told my father something I’ll never forget. He said, ‘This boy,’ he says, ‘behaves.’ I did really, because I always was sick and never got in trouble.

But then later, when they threw me out of the preparatory seminary, the monsignor told my father, ‘Your son? There’s a brick wall. Don’t hit your head against it, you’re going to get hurt.’ The monsignor gets up, mimes hitting his head against the brick wall, and that was the end of it.

Everybody cares about what they do. But I tend to get emotionally involved, or let it get to me. I get too emotionally involved with everything. So over the years it became funny. Except when it wasn’t funny. In my mind, whether it’s the stroke of a pen or a bullet, a lot can happen to people. In our America, businesspeople are slaughtered every day. People are robbed every day.

RS: Well, there’s that whole theory of Robert Warshow, about ‘the gangster as tragic hero.’

MS: I was going to mention Warshow.

RS: I’m not sure I completely buy into that in a movie like ‘Goodfellas’; there’s actually nothing very tragic about those guys.

MS: No.

RS: What happens to Henry Hill is not tragic; he’s just not having fun anymore.

MS: Right. Too bad for him!

RS: And it’s not a tragic ending.

MS: No, he’s still breathing.

RS: I guess I need you to explain where you’re coming from with that because it really is a unique movie, I think. You’ve said you can’t see ‘The Sopranos’ in it, but I see a sort of precursor in it.

MS: A lot of the wonderful actors in The Sopranos were in my pictures, so we always talk about it. A lot of the people in Goodfellas are not on the upper levels, so they’re not tragic. It’s just everyday tragedy. These guys are dealing on the everyday level. I knew them as people, not as criminals. If something fell off the truck, you know, we all bought it. It was part of surviving, part of living. Some of those guys were smarter than others. Some overstepped their bounds and were killed. That was based on reality.

There’s a danger in idolizing that world, but many of the police who were down there in that neighborhood were on the take. I was surprised the first time I saw the American system at work, which was in Twelve Angry Men, Sidney Lumet’s film. Today, I credit the priests in the neighborhood who screened a 16 millimeter print of it down in the basement of the church for some of the kids. It was like being on Mars.

RS: The surrogate in your film, practicing that idolization as a kid, is the Henry Hill character.

MS: Yes. If you engage in that life, certain things are expected of you. First of all, to make a lot of money for everybody. Or to be the muscle. You have to perform, and you have to be careful: the scene that Joe Pesci asked to be put in, and improvised with Ray Liotta – the ‘You think I’m funny?’ scene – shows that you could be killed any second. They don’t care who’s around. The trick in the picture was to sort of ignore that danger, make it a rollicking road movie in a way – like a kind of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby picture, with everybody on the road and having a great time.

When the Sicilian police finally broke up the Mafia in the early nineties, they arrested some guy – I forget his name, but he was the second in command – and an Italian reporter asked him if any movie about that world was accurate. And he said, Well, Goodfellas, in the scene where the guy says, ‘Do you think I’m funny?’ Because that’s the life we lead. You could be smiling and laughing one second, and [snaps fingers] in a split second you’re in a situation where you could lose your life.

RS: Quite an amazing anecdote.

MS: That is exactly where you live all the time. That’s the truth of it. Now that happened to Joe Pesci, originally, with a friend of his. He got out of it just by doing what Ray did. So when he told me the story, I said, ‘We’ve got to use that. That really encapsulates it completely. That’s the lifestyle.’

Remember when Jimmy Cagney got the AFI [American Film Institute] award, he thanked somebody I think was called Two-Times Ernie and the other street guys he knew as a kid. Because they taught him how to act. The kids in my neighborhood who told stories on the street corner, they’d have you enthralled, and often with a sense of humor about themselves. And these were some tough kids.

I’ll never forget one of the toughest I’d ever met telling a story about losing a fight in such a funny way, and not being embarrassed about it. [Laughs.] Not losing any dignity. I thought, That is brilliant: to accept the fact that he was knocked down so badly, had to get up again, get knocked down again. We were all laughing, and he was laughing. I’ll never forget it.

In the Wiseguy book, Henry Hill speaks that way, almost like a standup comic. He’s got his own rhythm. There’s a truth to it. Someone owes you money, and he doesn’t pay you. So you go to him, and he says, ‘Oh, my wife got sick.’ ‘Fuck you, pay me.’ ‘My daughter is –’ ‘Fuck you, pay me,’ a guy like Hill says. ‘My mother –’ ‘Fuck you, pay me’.

RS: De Niro in ‘Mean Streets’ has no conscious sense of consequences, always living in the moment. That’s symbolized in ‘Goodfellas’ by the great tracking shot into the Copacabana, when they all go out on the town. That’s the privileged moment they pay for in blood and death.

MS: Well, the Copacabana – that’s the top of the line for Henry – it was Valhalla. When you were able to get a table there, it was like being in the court of the kings. The Mob guys were really the ones in charge. The Copa lounge was always more significant because the real guys were up there. That’s why you have a lot happening in Raging Bull in the Copa lounge. My friend’s father, the one who would read and listen to opera, his father was the head bartender there. We have him in Raging Bull. Nice guy.

Everyone paid for the privilege eventually. The danger of the picture is that young people could look at it and think, Hey, what a great life. But you’ve got to see the last hour of the picture when things start going wrong in a big way.

RS: I think in one of the voice-over lines Henry Hill says, You only have it for maybe ten years.

MS: That’s right.

RS: That made me think about celebrity. Ballplayers, for example, only have maybe ten years.

MS: Right. Actors, filmmakers, you’ve got about ten years. Some of the greatest filmmakers had a run for ten years. It’s part of American celebrity.

– From Richard Schickel: Conversations with Scorsese (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). Copyright © 2011 by Richard Schickel.

The Art of War: David O. Russell on Three Kings

Three Kings (Directed by David O. Russell)

Writer/director David O. Russell is best known for Oscar-nominated films such as Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle and The Fighter. But before these, it was his critically-aclaimed 1999 film Three Kings that arguably launched his career. 

Three Kings is a darkly comic action-adventure set in the aftermath of the Gulf War. The military battle has barely concluded as the film opens, with the discovery of a map hidden on the person an Iraqi POW. For Capt. Archie Gates (George Clooney), a suavely cynical Green Beret, the find promises legendary fortune, since the map seems to indicate desert bunkers where Iraq has stored piles of stolen Kuwaiti bullion. Archie quickly assembles his own three-man liberation squad and departs through the dunes in a Humvee draped in an American flag.

The three enlisted guys are likeable youngsters engaged in risky play; they are also acted quite flawlessly. Sgt. Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) is a devout Army reserve who wishes to return to his wife and infant daughter in Detroit. Chief Elgin (Ice Cube) is a devout Christian who thinks that "the good Lord has provided us with this map." Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze) inquires if Kuwaiti bullion refers to "those small cubes you put in boiling water to make soup"; Conrad makes up for his lack of intelligence with a passion for high explosives. 

Archie, on the other hand, is a fully developed adult and an apt hero for an unusually complicated picture. If his warrior's cynicism is strong, his sense of outraged humanity is as powerful. He savours the surreal craziness that ensues when he and his companions first enter labyrinthine bunkers filled with such lesser riches as televisions, stereos, and mobile phones; the contemporary world is suddenly regarded as a massive underground appliance shop. When Kuwait's stolen gold is discovered, carefully packed in soft-sided luggage, the bars are gleaming and ready to be taken again, but there is a catch, and it is located in Archie's heart. 

And at the core of the film, because writer-director David Russell has blended terrific, hard-edged action with a profoundly felt morality drama. His script takes subtle aim at the United States' foreign policy as he reveals that the US Administration supported a revolt against the Iraqi tyrant and then abandoned the defenceless rebels to their destiny. 

David O. Russell is at ease in the scatological mayhem that unfolds. His early films, the dark comedies, 1994's Spanking the Monkey and 1996's Flirting With Disaster, first brought his piercing comedy style to the festival circuit. 

Three Kings is replete with allusions to previous films: Apocalypse Now, The Man Who Would Be King, also paying homage to Natural Born Killers by including an aspirational television journalist. The film's visuals are frantic, striking. Archie, Troy, Vig, and Chief gallop their Humvee through an overexposed inferno that bursts in gunfire, mine explosions, and rapid dialogue. Apart from the contemporary generation of action filmmakers Quentin Tarantino and John Woo, there is also a good deal of John Huston here. As with Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, The Maltese Falcon, and Beat the Devil, this is a sublime caper picture that openly wishes for the success of its criminal enterprise and finds its crooks far more appealing than the forces of decency they resist. 

Its strongest visuals owe much to the surreal comic work of the novelist Thomas Pynchon. The desert is place of striking contrast, an ancient landscape that the West has devastated without logic and less compassion. The troops of Three Kings have nothing to say about the vague diplomatic world that justified the war; they are much more concerned with what they they can carry home. For Archie and his troops,  the war is an opportunity for what they can get away with and Russell interweaves the antics of his crew with the more serious issue of an American foreign policy gone awry with respect to the oppressed people's freedom that was the war’s justification.

In the following extract from an interview with Creative Screenwriting Russell discusses disagreements over writing credits, moving from independent to studio films, and the dark heart of the movie.

How did you set up ‘Three Kings’ at Warner Bros.? It’s a very brave film for a major studio. Did they come to you?


Yes. It was a very odd and serendipitous process: David’s Adventure in Studio Land. I thought, what would this be like, to work with something from their candy box? They opened up their logbook to me and this one log line jumped out at me, which was a heist set in the Gulf War, a script by John Ridley. A pretty straight action movie. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. In fact, I was researching another script, a turn-of-the-century story, and I didn’t feel I had cracked it, so I started buying books about the Gulf—photojournalist books that had amazing images in them like hundreds of soldiers being stripped in the desert and Bart Simpson dolls on grills of cars. All this incongruous stuff. There was once a scene where they ate animals in the zoo...

So you found the log line—

It took me by surprise and eventually to everybody’s surprise, I said, ‘I think I want to do this.’ And everybody’s eyebrows went up. Including my agent’s. They were all like, ‘What?’ I said it’s going to be crazy textured, with all the politics and everything. To me, the heist is the least interesting part. So I went off, researched, and wrote it for eighteen months. It was a fun scriptwriting process, like no other I’d ever done. I would make columns of things I found fascinating, and then I would build the script that way. So it’s not character-driven, which is obvious from the movie. There was very volatile material which hadn’t been put in the face of Americans about what really happened there. I read papers, talked to veterans and Iraqis. Then I sewed together the quilt of this script. It was liberating, because it was blank as the desert, a palette where I could do a lot of different things, including action, which I hadn’t done before. I wanted to click on lots of information, like click on their day jobs, click on the wife at home, click on how this punk sees violence as opposed to how violence really is. I’ll do it and see how it works in the editing.

John Ridley has been vocal in his displeasure over credit...

He certainly has. I thought we had an amicable agreement. He was all friendly when we made the credit agreement.

You just used his premise of the heist in the Gulf.

That was all I took from his script, and frankly, that’s the most boring thing about the movie. Which in a way was an albatross, because I thought it was going to help me write faster. It was sort of the opposite.

Ridley was part of the process in the beginning?

Yeah, he sold his script. Like every other writer. I don’t understand what his whining is about because it’s the most common experience in Hollywood. You write a script, you sell it and get paid. Goodbye. You’re lucky you’re not rewritten 700 times. If he wants to direct his own scripts, he should control them a little bit. If he thinks it’s such a work of genius, I think he’d let me publish my script. I even offered to publish both scripts in one volume.

That’s a great idea.

He won’t do it. He got paid, he got co-producer credit, he was all amicable. I wanted to publish the screenplay and then he started playing the jilted writer.

Did he see the film and have a problem with it?

Not to my knowledge.

Was there WGA arbitration at all?

No. He decided not to. I was happy to go either way because I knew I had a very strong case. I think what is truly accurate is screenplay by me, and story by him and me. With him getting first position. He said he wanted sole story credit. I said okay and he got co-producer credit.

Is this going to make you wary in the future?

Oh yeah. [laughs]

You used to be an activist, so did you purposely set out to spotlight our foreign policy?

Definitely. That was one of my main motivations. It wasn’t dealing with characters so much as I did in my other movies, it was being driven by the political charge of the material. I couldn’t believe that no other filmmaker had gone after this and I couldn’t believe that Warner Bros. was going to let me do it.

Why did they?

They were hungry to work with independent filmmakers. They’ve done it before.  They were happy to let me do my thing.

In terms of action movies, are you a fan or was it new territory?

I’m not a huge action movie fan, although the other idea that was a big motivator was violence. There hadn’t been a war film since Platoon, so I thought, ‘Great! I’m going to explore this territory in a totally different way.’ So while I’m writing it I find out that Spielberg and Malick are doing these epic war movies! Yet mine was contemporary and nothing like theirs. The whole process of resensitizing violence cinematically captivated me at the time. I felt that bullets had become glib and cartoonish, even in really smart independent movies, so I wanted to render their impact more real. Sometimes I write in friends’ homes, and I have a friend who was a doctor in an emergency room. I was writing and I said to him, ‘What exactly does a bullet do?’ We talked about it and I thought, ‘I’m going to write this, show this, and if it doesn’t work we can cut it later.’

In the script, you also indicate a lot of visual directions.

That took a lot of work to translate that to the camera department.

So when you’re writing, you see exactly how you want to shoot the scene.

Yes. Then you have to make that technically happen. You have to experiment. Definitely with the shootout. When we looked at the first cut of the shootout, I didn’t think it was going to work. I said, ‘Thank God, we covered this normally.’ And the editor says, ‘But you guys didn’t cover it normally.’ I was shitting my pants thinking we were going to reshoot!

There are lots of cool visual touches in the film.

I’m totally a beginner filmmaker, and I’m learning. My motives were political and informational, but also visual. I’d never been so visually motivated in any screenplay I ever wrote. Any flaws in the film are attributed to this, as well as its assets. I was experimenting with being a more visual writer. We studied these photojournalists, like Kenneth Jarecke’s book Just Another War, and it’s amazing—haunting black and white photos of the Gulf War. A brilliant book. We strove for that look in the film: a big, blank empty landscape with a person here and a truck way far away, that kind of thing. It was a little bit film school for me, so I’ll take a lot that I learned and go back to something that’s closer to my ballpark.

I think the dark heart of the movie is the interrogation scene. You get to hear the other side’s version of things. It’s horrifying what happens to Mark Wahlberg, but you can’t hate the interrogator.

One of the things that inspired me was that the war was like a computer picture from an airplane. So who are the people? It’s a dangerous thing because you can dehumanize the enemy. What would it be like to meet an Iraqi who didn’t want to serve in Saddam’s army—which most of them don’t want to – and bring him face to face with an American. That was exciting to me.

Did you interview any Iraqi soldiers?

We did. A lot of the people in the movie were Iraqi and we cast them out of Deerborn, Michigan, where there’s an Iraqi community.... I met a lot of them after I finished the script and asked if this was right, or this. But as a writer, you’d be surprised at how many of one’s instincts are right, strictly from intuition. I don’t know if it was Henry James who said as a writer, you should be able to walk by a house, and if the door opens for a moment and you get a glimpse into the kitchen where people are eating, then when the door closes, you should be able to write a story about that house.

Do you have certain habits to get yourself in the mood?

I have to write down all the things about an idea that excite me and I have to have the whole menu at my disposal. Sometimes I have charts on the wall. Once I outline—and I outline and outline—I have to insist that I write eight pages a day, otherwise I’ll never finish the script, or I’ll go over a couple pages a million times. Then I give it to another friend of mine so I can’t go back. You have to keep marching forward or you’ll never get it out of your head. I write longhand and then I transcribe onto the computer.

How long did it take to write Three Kings?


I had about a 200-page script after six months, but I wasn’t happy with it. I put it down for a few months before it became closer to my own version.

You gave it to the studio and they said go ahead.

At the beginning, they said, ‘Where’s the script? We paid you the advance and we normally expect a first draft in twelve weeks.‘ And I said, ‘That’s why most of your movies suck.’

‘Three Kings’ has done pretty good box-office. Is the studio happy with the outcome?

They’re very happy with it. Of course, everybody gets all pumped up when the tests are good and the advance press is good. Before that, we had more realistic expectations because the movie is provocative. It’s going to make money for them, I think.

What are the film or script influences on your work?

Definitely the films of the ’70s. I’m a big fan of Wes Anderson and Paul Anderson. All those Andersons. I love Alexander Payne. Chinatown. I watch a lot of movies. But I tend to watch movies I like over and over.

– ‘Not a Typical Action Movie: David. O. Russell on Three Kings’, Creative Screenwriting, March, 2016. Full interview here