“Goodfellas” may not have made Spielberg’s list of favorite movies in IndieWire, but it did earn a comparison to some incredible Hollywood classics, including one of the names on Spielberg’s list.
Scorsese’s 1990 film had “the greatest needle-drop score since ‘American Graffiti,'” Spielberg told Variety, “and the best spoken narrative since Billy Wilder’s ‘Double Indemnity.'” The “E.T.” director also compared “Goodfellas” to “The Godfather,” one of his favorite films of all time.
“Everyone has a favorite Scorsese picture, and this is the one for me,” Spielberg concluded, “in a photo finish with my other favorite picture of his, ‘Raging Bull.'”
Scorsese and Spielberg started making films around the same time and achieved major success within a few years of one another. They were friends early on in their careers and have remained friends to this day. They discussed Spielberg’s newest venture, “The Fabelmans,” in an interview at the DGA Theater in 2022.
The “Taxi Driver” director, meanwhile, was friends with Spielberg when he was making his breakout horror film, “Jaws,” and he remembers the obstacles that the young filmmaker was up against. “I remember when Steven was in production on ‘Jaws,’ the word around town and in the L.A. Times was that it was folly and that it was gonna be a disaster,” Scorsese recalled in the 2017 documentary “Spielberg.”
“I remember the night ‘Jaws’ opened I was with Steven,” Scorsese recalled. “I said, ‘Let’s go and see the lines.’ And we were looking and going by all the lines by Westwood and places like that, and I said ‘This is it. This is gonna be a major change.'”