Pileggi I went to the set for a little bit, then I got bored. There was nothing for me to do. You know what kills me? It takes forever to change lighting. Twenty minutes, a half-hour, 45 minutes. I don’t know where Marty gets the patience.

Bracco [On the scene in which Karen pins Henry on the floor and points a gun at him, which was her most difficult.] Basically I had to straddle Mike Ballhaus, who was our director of photography, and not Ray. And Marty had Ray and I, basically we kind of had to talk into the camera. We could see the reflection of ourselves in the camera, and that was weird. Marty told us it was going to be hard. He begged us to take our time.

Image Catherine Scorsese and Mr. De Niro. Credit... Warner Bros. Pictures

Liotta The whole thing was tempered by my mom, who was sick and had cancer and died in the middle of it. I was going home every weekend to New Jersey. Then one day I got a specific “You need to get home.” Marty told me, and my knees buckled. I finished the scene, went home, buried her and was back to work three, four days later. And the first scene after the funeral was after I stand Karen up and she says, “Who do you think you are, Frankie Valli?” And I’m kind of laughing. That’s one of the great things about acting. Between action and cut, you can really lose yourself and do what needs to be done.

Pileggi You know that scene where Mrs. Scorsese [the director’s mother, who plays the mother of a gangster] is talking about how she’s taken up painting? My mother was taking up painting. One of the pictures my mother did was this guy in a boat with one dog looking one way, the other looking the other. So my mother’s picture ends up in movie. The last credit in the movie is “Painting by Susan Pileggi.” She referred to the movie until she died as “my movie.”

Sorvino After production, I felt guilty about it for about six months. My image of myself is artist, painter, poet, sculptor, thinker, author. What am I really? Am I a killer? It bothered me. It unsettled me. Then I came to the conclusion, I rationalized, if this isn’t in all of us, how does the military of any country inculcate a killing drive into soldiers, to go confront people [toward] which they have no natural animus and kill them? I was in the Army, I know it’s possible. They dig that out of you. That’s how I got out of it.