Mark Welsh

When making The Departed, Jack Nicholson told Matt Damon, “I never would've made it this far in my career if I wasn't a great fucking writer.” Meaning, he would contribute great ideas to a story through his performance and improvisation. Damon recalls a perfect example of this: “And I'll give you one story - it was my favorite thing that happened on The Departed, was this story about a scene that I was not in, but he (Nicholson) was - it was 1 eighth of a page, and it said Costello - which is the name of his character - ‘Costello executes man kneeling in the marshes.’ Now, most people look at that, and they'll go, ‘All right, it's gonna be one shot - that's gonna be an hour of work, and that's all I'm doing that day, or whatever.’ He looked at that, and he goes, ‘Okay, I can do that, but I think I can make it better.’ And so he's telling me this story. He goes, (in Jack Nicholson’s voice) ‘So what I do is,’… he goes, ‘I come from the Roger Corman School, so I'm not gonna add any time, and I'm not gonna add to your budget. But instead of a man kneeling in the marshes, I make it a woman.’ ...And he goes, ‘So I'm gonna execute a woman, but I'm not gonna be alone. I put Ray (Winston) in the scene with me - and I shoot her in the back of the head like it says in the script. But if you leave the camera rolling, after she falls, I turn to Ray and I say, geez, she fell funny. Now that's a really sinister thing to say. Because it means I do this a lot, and there's a way people fall. And she didn't fall that way.’ And I go, ‘oh yeah, I get it man, I get it.’ ‘Now you could end the scene there, but if you leave the camera rolling, Ray steps forward, and he reveals that he's holding an axe. She's gonna chop her up. Now you could end the scene there.’ He goes, ‘But if you leave the camera rolling, I turn to Ray and say, “wait, I think I wanna fuck her again.”’ And he goes, ‘Now that's a very sinister line.’ I get it, I get it, it's really, really, really disturbing. And he says, Now you could end the scene there, but if you keep the camera rolling, Ray stops and looks at me, and there's a pause. And I go….ah! He goes, ‘And that's a sinister thing to do, “'cause we're making a joke out of this whole thing.” And I go, yeah, I get it, I get it. ‘Now you could end the scene there, but if you leave the camera rolling, Ray says, “Francis, you really oughta see someone.” And so that's what they did. He took this one eighth of a page scene, and he did all of that, and they had two cameras on it, so it could cut back and forth. And what Marty ended up cutting was he shoots her, she falls, he says, “Geez, she fell funny.” And Ray looks at him and says, “Francis, you really oughta see someone.” But he just gave him all of these options, as dark and as sick as you wanna go.” Quote comes from Matt Damon's appearance on the What A Joke Show with Papa and Fortune

In The Godfather Part II, early in Vito Corleone’s flashback storyline, Don Fanucci suddenly appears with a scar across his neck - a scar that wasn’t there in his earlier scenes. The film never explains how he got it, but a deleted scene reveals what happened, and it plays out almost exactly as Mario Puzo described it in the novel. “One day Fanucci was set upon by three young men who cut his throat from ear to ear, not deeply enough to kill him, but enough to frighten him and make him bleed a great deal. Vito saw Fanucci fleeing from his punishers, the circular slash flowing red. What he never forgot was Fanucci holding the cream-colored fedora under his chin to catch the dripping blood as he ran. As if he did not want his suit soiled or did not want to leave a shameful trail of carmine.” Coppola wanted the moment to match Mario Puzo’s description as closely as possible. The blood-spurting effect from Fanucci’s neck was created with a fake piece of skin made from foam latex, rigged with two canisters hidden under actor Gastone Moschin’s arm: one filled with compressed air, the other with fake blood. A trigger was placed in Moschin’s palm, and when he pressed it, the compressed air forced blood up through tiny tubes beneath the fake skin, making it look as if Fanucci’s throat had been slashed open. It was a great effect; however, the problem with the scene is that Coppola chose to shoot the attack in a very brief wide shot, from Vito’s point of view. As a result, the violence had less impact than what audiences had come to expect after the first film. Special effects supervisor A.D. Flowers explains… “Yeah, well that was a scene where actually it didn't photograph as well as the story [required]. And this is one of the things which ruins effects, that often the camera goes away so fast from where it happens that you don't realize what is happening. An effects scene can't stay on too long, but it's got to stay on long enough to register. Like there, a guy's getting his throat slit, and he was supposed to put his hat underneath it to catch the blood dripping, and the scene was cut real short, and I don't think the audience really got that much out of it, and I think that was the main reason they cut it out.” (1/2)