Casino: The Cast and Characters

Casino: The Cast and Characters (2005)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Director Martin Scorsese, writer Nicholas Pileggi, editor Thelma Schoonmaker and producer Barbara De Fina are joined by cast members Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, Sharon Stone and Frank Vincent as the talk about the casting of the movie. Clocking in at twenty-minutes this here is a very fun featurette that offers you some insight into the characters as well as how the actors wanted to perform their roles. The cast interviews are mainly promotional stuff but they're still fun to see. Scorsese gets some great moments discussing the characters and what he wanted to get out of them. The highlights are the behind-the-scenes footage, which shows Scorsese working with the cast and we get some great stuff with Don Rickles telling some jokes and being who you'd expect him to be.

This is one of six featurettes on the 2-Disc Special Edition DVD of Casino, and one of the four of them that have their own page here on the site. It consists of interviews, clips of the movie, behind-the-scenes footage and stills. The person who gets the most time(meanwhile, it never gets to be boring) is Stone, and we get the full back-ground story for her taking the role, and delivering her astounding performance. They go into the off-camera relationships between the actors, the many interesting casting choices, some of Scorsese's directorial methods, and more. We hear about Pesci and DeNiro, how the first was in general during production and how the latter helped Sharon out. Motivation and such is also gone into. This is well-paced, with a 20 minute running time. It's edited well, and informative and entertaining throughout. The anecdotes alone are very much worth watching this documentary for. There is rather infrequent strong language in this, and that is the only real objectionable material in it. I recommend this to anyone who wants to know more about that aspect of the film. 7/10