I think my mother’s a pretty good storyteller. I get a lot from her, the way she tells stories; the way she behaved was the key thing. (…) I asked them a few questions and they took off and I learned a great deal about them. I learned about what it was like to be an Italian American, what it was like to be a Sicilian immigrant around the turn of the century, how they lived – things I didn’t know. They had a whole other way of life; working at the age of nine, living in three rooms with eight kids and parents and whoever was the newest baby had to be taken care of by the eldest daughter that is. During the day the beds were pulled up and there were chairs. At night the whole place was like a hotel, beds all over the place, kids sleeping everywhere. And everybody living together and having to get into their own pecking order with respect for the father and the mother, you see, very very strong. And so my father’s a little more reserved in the film; he has a darker side and he’s more controlled when he speaks. My mother’s more open and they have a good balance and I watch this go on during the shooting of the picture. I shot it in three hours on a Saturday and three hours on a Sunday – six hours, and I learned a lot about storytelling. I guess what it really was, more than timing, it’s an attitude about a certain reality and you just say it and the hell with it and that’s the way she was, you know. She had a kind of surrealistic humour about it too.

Roger Elbert, Scorsese, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2008