'Casino' takes the trilogy to its bloody end



NEW YORK - Casino goes for the jackpot with a three-hour, sometimes violent look at the end of the mob in Las Vegas. It is a splashy reunion of the GoodFellas guys - director Martin Scorsese, writer Nicholas Pileggi, stars Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci - plus an added roll of the dice with Sharon Stone.

In 10 to 15 years, prophesies Pileggi, who wrote Wiseguy, the book that became GoodFellas, as well as the non-fiction Casino, "they will discuss the great Scorsese Trilogy as though everybody knows."

Scorsese's love affair with the mob began with 1973's Mean Streets, an almost biographical look at life among guys on a street corner in Little Italy trying to survive. GoodFellas was the Mean Streets guys grown up.

"But what it's about is hijackers," says Pileggi. "They never even get to Manhattan, they're in Queens. That's who they are, they're not major Mafia guys, they're not John Gotti.

"Now Casino takes you to the very top level where the mob owns a city, owns a casino. Then just like in Mean Streets and GoodFellas, they fuck it all up. They do. That's the trilogy."

And that's what interested the director in the films, "because they take on this lifestyle from a different angle," he says. "Each film deals with it bigger and bigger."

The reunited quartet from GoodFellas believes the chemistry they share can make lightning strike again in a fact-based story about the front man (De Niro) for a mob-owned casino. Pesci is the villain, a hit man whose business ties to De Niro become strained. Stone is a glamorous hustler with whom De Niro becomes obsessed.

Scorsese says he never doubted he wanted De Niro for their eighth collaboration. Or Pesci for a third time (he was in 1980's Raging Bull). Stone plus the neon lights of Las Vegas added an interesting backdrop, he says.

"I would have played paint if they asked me to," says Stone, who is getting some of the best critical notices of her career in a role that may help validate her as a serious actress.

Scorsese says Stone auditioned for the part - something she hasn't had to do much lately - and in the end that may have won him over.

"I think she has what she needs, but she really wanted to do this," Scorsese says. "And I saw that dedication. That plus a certain look, plus a certain toughness that I thought was really important. When she goes into her final downward spiral, there was no vanity there. That was very generous of her."

Pesci admits to some reservations about getting on board for Casino. He won an Oscar playing a very similar ruthless killer in GoodFellas.

"I told Marty," says Pesci, "that I don't want to have to go in there and have to outdo my performance. And have people say, 'Well, he was great, but he wasn't as good as he was in GoodFellas . . . Oh, it's Pesci doing his same thing again.' I have to buck that kind of stuff and I don't want to."

He scrambled to do small things to separate himself from the GoodFellas guy: Steel blue contact lenses and a Chicago accent. Plus the character of Nicky in Casino is more of a level-headed businessman. Tommy would make you laugh and then kill you.

"I don't know what the critics are going to say," says Pesci.

De Niro says he committed to Casino before the script was written. He waited while Scorsese toyed with the idea of directing Clockers, which he ultimately produced. His relationship with the director is special, he says.

"I'm very fortunate," De Niro says. "I speak to other actors who say, 'I wish I had somebody I could work with all the time, could always rely on and go back to . . .' It's considered that your work is special and I like that."

Not that De Niro jumps at every role Scorsese offers him. He balked at participating in 1988's The Last Temptation of Christ. But he would have done it if pressed. "It wasn't that exciting, even with him. But I said if you're stuck and you need to get it done at the end of the day, I'll do it."

The two are such a good match, De Niro says, because "I know that if he says it, it's going to be what he says . . . I also support him as a director. I'll do whatever he wants, the way he would do whatever I want even if he feels it's not right."

Two things some early viewers of Casino have criticized are that the film is nearly three hours long and that it has some almost unwatchable violence.

Scorsese defends the length. "I expected it to be a big canvas," he says. Showing the details that converge to undo everybody provides the picture's tension, he says.

The violence - well, it really happened, he says, including the scene that will have most audiences buzzing. To extract information, Pesci's character places a man's head in an industrial vise and twists it until the guy's eye pops out.

The scene has been trimmed to get an R rating, but what's happening should still be vividly apparent.

Says Pesci: "Here I am squashing this guy's head and yelling at him for making me do it. . . . When I first did the scene, Marty and I laughed so hard. It's just so crazy that it's not worth doing anything but laughing. It's so sick is what it is."

Scorsese, who once toyed with the idea of becoming a priest, is very spiritual about his films, adds Pesci.

"He likes to show the horror to make a point about it, to show how horrible it is. . . . He's not showing you bad things because he's crazy or screwed up."

Scorsese is not surprised that a New York guy like himself would do a story that is like the final days of the wild West. The Casino characters are more urban than Eastern, he says.

"They've been tossed into a place. They didn't care if it was on the moon. If there was legalized gambling there, they'll figure out a way to breathe in the atmosphere. And it's a perfect place to go out of control."

The director says he's not a gambler himself. "Not in games," he says. But he gambles on the movies he makes. "It's scary, it's risky, but that's what interests me."

Though Scorsese's next movie will be about the Dalai Lama in Tibet - shooting is scheduled to begin in March - he and Pileggi have completed a screenplay called Neighborhood. "It's about hard-working Italian citizens" that Scorsese grew up with. Both say that with Casino they're done with the mob. "I couldn't see going any further," says Scorsese. Pileggi says, "I see it as so over."

A flushed Pesci, angered by questions he considers rude, hopes he is never asked again about the love scene he has in Casino with Stone, the screen's current sex goddess.

"Sooner or later, they're going to make movies where normal people have affairs. Do I have to look a certain way to have sex? I mean, I have a young, beautiful wife. What does that mean?"

Stone has been quoted as saying De Niro is a great kisser. But Pesci says she told him, "You were better in the sack."

By Tom Green, USA TODAY