@filmenthusiast: There was no script for this scene. Martin Scorsese gave his mother Catherine one direction, be motherly, welcome your son home. The only written line in the whole thing was about a painting on the wall. Once the cameras started rolling, she just started talking. Pulling out food, asking questions, cracking jokes about grandchildren, and De Niro, Pesci, and Liotta responded in character in real time, completely unscripted. Two cameras, one small house in Queens, and Scorsese basically just let it run. Even the painting she points to was real, painted by the mother of Nicholas Pileggi, the writer who adapted his own book into the film. Scorsese has called this one of his favorite scenes he's ever directed, because none of it was engineered. It's also one of the most quietly unsettling moments in the movie, a mother feeding a table of men hours after they committed murder, with absolutely no idea what actually happened that night.

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Monday 10 August 2026 16:00:00 GMT