The two work so well together that they are already planning another project. Right now, however, they are spending a lot of energy and more than an hour perfecting a single line—”Hey, get the fuck outta here.” De Niro’s up after every take: “Push up the f more, stronger on the f” “a little longer on the hey this time,” “this should be really strong,” “a little stronger, like ‘Hey, I told you already.'” “Good, good, but I’m just gonna push you to try and get it.” De Niro pushes, Palminteri reacts, and by the time they get the take, De Niro’s called “Sonny” every name in the book, they’ve repeated the line to each other about 700 times, and Palminteri’s voice is shot.
I never knew there were so many ways to say those words, but both men are intimate with the distinctions. “There was a way he should say it and he knows it,” says De Niro, seriously. “For that world, that line said in a certain way means something different.” He demonstrates, saying “Ay” instead of “Hey.” Oh, I tell him, I thought it was “Hey.” “It is ‘Hey,’ but it sounds like ‘Ay.’ ” He grins. “Make sure you get the inflections right.”
Getting it right has been a very big deal with De Niro. “Chazz knew the world he was writing about, and I knew it in some ways from hanging around there,” De Niro says. “So I knew that between him and me, he and I, whatever, the story would be done accurately.” Though the story is the boy’s, it takes place in a very specific place and time—a Bronx neighborhood in the 1960s—and it deals with a subject, the Mafia, that is hardly unfamiliar to filmgoers or to De Niro, who has already been in six movies about the mob. “It’s about something we’ve seen before, so I thought the only thing to do is make it as real as possible,” says De Niro. “The story is very good, very tight, very strong. You just gotta make it believable.”
So he used actual locations and assembled a cast of unknowns. With the exceptions of himself, Joe Pesci in a cameo, Palminteri, and a couple of others, no one else in the film had ever even acted before. The woman who plays De Niro’s wife was cast when she brought her young son to an open call. The wise guys are wise guys, the Hell’s Angels are Hell’s Angels, the cop is an ex-cop from the neighborhood who has known Palminteri all his life. Eddie Mush, the mush-mouthed guy who jinxes every bet, is Eddie “Mush” Montanaro, the mush-mouthed guy who jinxes every bet. “We had to get people who know the milieu, the environment, people who know the moves so they can interact with each other. There are few actors who know that world.”
