Mean Streets dealt with the American Dream, according to which everybody thinks they can get rich quick, and if they can’t do it by legal means then they’ll do it by illegal ones. That disruption of values is no different today, and I’m interested in making a couple more pictures on the same theme. These guys’ idea of making money, maybe a million or two, is by stealing, beating or cheating someone out of it. It’s much sweeter, much better than actually earning it. At the beginning of the script of Mean Streets there was a quote from Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues: “Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.” Or, “forget it, we’re not going to do it”. Of course Dylan meant something else. But I wanted to delineate that attitude, to understand how these people suddenly find themselves in a quandary, where the only way out is very often death… The people who received the most respect in the area where I grew up were not the working people, they were the wise guys, the gang leaders, and the priests. And that was what inclined me towards the priesthood, which was a tougher profession, I’m afraid!
Mean Streets was an attempt to put myself and my old friends on the screen, to show how we lived, what life was like in Little Italy. It was really an anthropological or a sociological tract. Charlie uses other people, thinking that he’s helping them; but by believing that, he’s not only ruining them but ruining himself. When he fights with Johnny against the door in the street, he acts like he’s doing it for the others, but it’s a matter of his own pride – the first sin in the Bible. My voice is intercut with Harvey’s throughout the film, and for me that was a way of trying to come so terms with myself, trying to redeem myself. It’s very easy to discipline oneself to go to mass on Sunday mornings. That’s not redemption for me: it’s how you live, how you deal with other people, whether it be in the streets, at home or in an office.

Martin Scorsese, Scorsese on Scorsese, edited by Ian Christie and David Thompson, Faber and Faber, London 2003