The director also had one specific influence for this feeling. “There’s a wonderful thing, the clean-up scene after the shower scene in Psycho. I mean, there’s Bernard Herrmann music there, but there’s something about when we first saw that film at the DeMille theater in the first week in a midnight screening, everybody’s screaming, the fact that we’re back in there. He’s just killed the lead of the movie and he’s cleaning up. What are we watching? The quotidian nature of it. I thought the whole last hour of the picture should be that way.”

“I love the way that people’s expressions change and the movement of the flesh on the arms. It’s very, very high speed this camera, Phantom. I felt like it would be only two places: the Joe Colombo shooting in Columbus Circle and the wedding itself, because the wedding is a funeral. People laugh, ‘Oh, mob hits, and that sort of thing,’ [but] the Colombo thing gave me a chance to [capture] the pain of it, the suffering of all the people around, you see all their faces."

"In fact, we used some of the harmonica music of grisbi in the film and Robbie Robertson did the harmonica based on the French noir music of the early 50s. Another one was Jules Dassin’s Rififi,” Scorsese said speaking to the classic heist film. “There was a period there where a lot of those films were coming over here.”

"Then I showed a film called Touchez pas au grisbi, which means ‘Don’t touch the loot,’ which is a very famous early ’50s French gangster film with Jean Gabin,” Scorsese said.

While Scorsese said he didn’t screen many cinematic influences with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto regarding the look of the film, it was important to get the tone of the movie right. “The tone of the movie, it had to be contemplative and an epic, but it had to be an intimate epic,” he said. “I showed a couple of Jean-Pierre Melville films, Le Doulos and Le deuxième souffle [aka Second Breath], with Jean-Paul Belmondo, both of those pictures. It’s a very different world, but I liked the understatement of it.”

While Scorsese said he didn’t screen many cinematic influences with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto regarding the look of the film, it was important to get the tone of the movie right. “The tone of the movie, it had to be contemplative and an epic, but it had to be an intimate epic,” he said. “I showed a couple of Jean-Pierre Melville films, Le Doulos and Le deuxième souffle [aka Second Breath], with Jean-Paul Belmondo, both of those pictures. It’s a very different world, but I liked the understatement of it.”