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Louis DiGiaimo(Producer): I knew Joe from when I was a kid and hadn't seen him for years. Actually, I met him when I was down in Georgetown, working on The Exorcist.

PA: And then, Joe disapeared for a few years, and he fell out touch with him. And only later, did he learn that he disappeared because he was living this undercover life in the Mafia.

LD: For three or four months, we used to play basket ball two three times a week, and one day he disappeared.

PA: Lou was actually involved with the book and so forth in creating the book.

Joe Pistone: When Louis DiGiaimo first approched me about doing a book, I didn't think there was any book there, because, you know, I mean I'm an FBI agent. I'm doing a job, conducting an investigation and never had any thoughts that anybody'd be interested nation wide, let alone world wide about this undercover operation.

PA: And when the book came out and he brought to Barry Levinson's company.

JP: I sat down with Barry and had a discussion with Barry. He got Paul Attanasio to write the screenplay.

PA: I wrote the script. Stephen Frears was supposed to direct it, with Al Pacino and Tom Cruise, then good fellas came out. And, everyone got scared that you couldn't do another Mafia movie.

Mike Newell(Director): It was felt that the market wouldn't take two films like that, to sort of super real films. Both films have the same trick.

PA: And it circled back around, with another English director Mike Newell who just came off the success of Four Weddings and A Funeral, still Al Pacino and this time Johnny Depp.

MN: I got involved in Donnie Brasco, because I had made Four Weddings and A Funeral about two years before. It made a ton of money, and it gave me a shot at Hollywood.

Lefty: When I introduce you, I'm gonna say, "This is a friend of mine." That means you're a connected guy. Now, if I said instead, "This is a friend of ours," that would mean you're a made guy. Capiché.
Donnie: Yeah, a friend of mine, a friend of ours. What would I call you, a friend of mine or a friend of ours?
Lefty: Keep your fuck'n mouth shut about me.

PA: What's great about Mike is Mike is so hardworking, and Mike came over here, and planned it into the life. Mike got some guys to bring him down to the social clubs, and the bars, and hang out with wise guys.

JP: I know several occations where Mike would go out drinking with real made guys. He tell me about them. I would say "That's great, Mike, you know, there's always pay back with these guys. They always want something from him, you know. They might like your accent now. In fact, being an Englishman, you can drink, you know, you can drink with them."

MN: I saw how they related to one another, spoke and joked. I saw how power worked. The power's always there. They never trust one another.

PA: He got his fingers in it to point out he can feel confident about the details of it.

MN: They didn't trust me. I talked funny. I looked funny. The way that they can judge you is spontaneous. They never said it to me. But, I would guess they could after 5 minutes in my company tell absolutely in what areas I was corruptible and what areas that I was not corruptible. We went to... it was a completely anonymous corner in Brooklyn. And, the door was kind of open a crack, and in we went, and it was full of wise guys, full of mobsters. They were drinking, there was a bar, there was a jukebox, the size of that... a cinema screen. A huge jukebox. Every one of the records was Frank Sinatra, I checked it. It's true. Every one of the records was Frank Sinatra.

JP: The individuals that I was lucky enough to infiltrate in the beginning were individuals, well-thought of individuals within the crime families.

MN: A family is made up of individual separate gangs. Each of which has a capo. Each of which has between twenty or thirty made members, made members that are fully accredited members of the Mafia.

PA: The great thing about the Mafia is that they're wiretapped. So, there are libraries of tapes of the guys talking, and somebody like me who takes it in through the ear, it's invaluable.

MN: Each of these social clubs has a pay phone on the wall, and every case, in every one that I was in, there was a hand lettered notice at the bottom of the pay phone, saying, "Do not use. This phone is bugged."

FBI Technician(played by Paul Giamatti): Hey, can I ask you something?
Joe: What?
Technician: What's "Forget about it"?
Joe: Forget about it is like..... If you agree with someone. You know, like "Raquel Welch is one great piece of ass." "Forget about it." But then, if you disagree like "a Lincoln is better than a Caderac." "Forget about it." You know, but then, it's also like if something's the greatest thing in the world, like minchia, those peppers, "forget about it." Sometimes it just means forget about it.

Johnny Depp: I play Joseph Pistone, who is a special agent for the FBI. Joe is put in undercover situation to infiltrate the mob, a thing that would probably take a few month, you know. And, then he ended up undercover for 6 years.

PA: Johnny is I said was a surprise Johnny was an actor, a young actor, very gifted intuitive young actor who played a lot of excentric parts. And when he arrived at the scene to do this movie, he'd grown into himself. He was becoming a man, not a boy. And, we captured that on the film, which was incredably exiting.

Joe: This shove is eating me alive. I can't breathe anymore. And if I come out, this guy, Lefty dies. They're gonna kill him, because he vouched for me, because he stood up for me.

MN: For Donny, we had to have somebody who was Italian, looked Italian. The current crop of young leading men, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, all of that kind of stuff, pure accident, they all of them looked Nodic. The blond, blue eyed. Then, it wouldn't simply work. not only do they have to look right and be the kind of actor that he is and he is a very very good actor, Johnny. He also had to take arouse fancy.

JP: I thought Johnny Depp in the film was dead on. I mean, if I was listening to his voice, I could not tell the difference whether it was his or mine. He did excellent job He was right on the money.

MN: The thing he got out of Joe is this extreme immobility in his face. If you look at him, he almost doesn't move his face at all in that movie. It's like a mask.

Lefty: You're Don the jeweler?
Donnie: Yeah.
Lefty: That's some beautiful thing?
Donnie: You should give it to somebody who don't know any better, because that's a fugazy. All right?
Lefty: That's a fugazy? How do you know fugazy? You didn't look at it for 2 seconds.
Donnie:: It's a fake.

JP: In the film, Johnny Depp's cover, or the legend of Donnie Brasco, is as a jeweler. And, in the real life undercover operation, I played a jeweler, a jewel thief burgler, and I knew about jewely. I had done to some classes prior to going undercover about jeweley and precious gems, because you have to know whatever profession you take as an undercover agent, you should be very well versed in it. Because you going to get challeged on it, or you gotta be asked to perform whatever duty jeweler profession requires of you.

Lefty: You think I don't know how a hit gets set up. You think I don't know that? You know, what I know how many times I been on the other end of that fuckin' phone? 26 times.
Donnie: Right. Well, you just got done saying you and Sonny Black is friends, so...
Lefty: Donnie, I got sent for. And in out thing, you get sent for, you're go in alive, you come out dead, and it's your best friend that does it.

PA: Al was really inevitable for that part. When you look at all characters Al has played, there is something inevitable about him playing Lefty, something inevitable about the guy who played Michael Corleone, the ultimate godfather, playing on the other side, the hit man who's aging and lost a step.

MN: I think one of the things that was going on for Al was that he saw the symetry between playing this extraordinally physically very beautiful character and this kind of long sighted generesmo of crime from the beginning his career to Lefty the loser in the end. He enjoyed that, he enjoyed that symetry.

JP: Al is incredible generous. He's a really really generous actor, a great actor. He's unbelievable. When he wants to be, he's a master of subtlety, which is I respond to.

Lefty: You know, what I did yesterday. I went in front of all skippers... that cocksucker Sonny Red, all of them. I went on the record with you. You know what that means?
Donnie: I think I do.
Lefty: You do. you have no fuckin' idea, my friend. Nobody can touch you now.

JP: I spent some time with Al, going over Lefty's character. Al listened to tapes of Lefty. But, he took on kind of his own twist on Lefty, as far as Lefty's dress. Lefty was a very neat dresser, where Al kind of dressed down a little bit for the part, wore a hat. Lefty never wore a hat, he always had his hair slick back.

MN: He said "I want to wear a hat." I said, "are you sure?" He said, "why?" and I said, "because one of the things everybody will remember about Corleone is the hat." He had a very sure eye about costume. As soon as he saw those glasses, you know, he wears these wonderful tinted glasses, making him look like an insane wasp, you know, kind of a cartoon wasp. When he saw those, and he went bam straight to them. He was very, very good at costume. So, we discussed this hat. And he said, "No. I want the hat." I hated the hat. He said, "you hate the hat?" "I hate the hat. Yeah. OK, Have a hat. Fuck it. I'm not going to fight about a hat."

PA: Lefty is kind of like the Willy Loman of the Mafia. Lefty is a guy... He was a hitman, and now he is getting older, and young guys are coming up, and he lost the step. In the old days, he never have allowed Donnie Brasco into his midst. He would have been too sharp, but he's slippng.

Lefty: Thirty years I'm busting my hump. What do I got? Even a dog gets a warm piece of the side walk. I ought to be able to show some things for what I did. You know what I mean.
Donnie: Definitly.

JP: We kind of downplayed Lefty in the movie. Lefty was I like to say 24-hour Mafia guy. It's all he did. He lived and breathed the Mafia. Lefty's problem was that he liked to drink maybe a little bit too much wine spritzers, and he had a little bit of a gambling ploblem. But, as far as knowing the Mafia, knowing the politics in the Mafia, there wasn't anybody smarter than him. Any discussions that I ever had with Lefty about Mafia politics always came true.

Lefty: You think you could spot me a couple, please?
Donnie: Yeah.
Lefty: I'll get it back to you, see. And you got it here. I'll get back to you on this.
Donnie: Yeah.
Lefty: Believe me. Call me tomorrow.
Donnie: All right, all right.

JP: Lefty was a taker. There's no doubt about it. You know, if he saw that you had a hundred bucks, he wanted fifty of it. That's the trait of most Mafia guys. They are all takers. Lefty could have a thousand dollars in his pocket , but he always going to tell you "that's the my last 3" or "that's the my last 7."

Sonny Black: I gotta ask ya. Fifty grand a month I kick up to Rusty. Every month! One day, I'm gonna die. I'm gonna be here in the same room with all these same fucking guys... talking about the same fucking scams... that never amount to nothing!

JP: We had Michael Madsen as you know to play Sonny Black, And, you know, everyone had it nailed. And, Michael had Sonny down, because he was warm at times, but then you can see he was stone cold, and that's the way Sonny was. You know, Sonny was a stone killer.

MN: Michael is a force of nature. He both genuinly is and also trades on the notion that violence lies just beneath the surface of his own character, his self.

Sonny B: What do you have, Nicky?
Nicky: I got a guy boosted thirty tickets... to Chaka Khan at the Garden.
Sonny B: What about Florida?
Nicky: I thought we weren't supposed to talk about Florida.
Sonny B: You never got nothing going on?
Nicky: No no, no, no. Nothing ever panned out for me, Sonny. I couldn't catch a break.

MN: Bruno is a fabulous comic actor. But I don't know whether he knows it, and he's everything that you see. It's one of the wonderful things about some actors. They are exactly what you see.

Maggie: You know he comes home at all hours of the night without annoucing when or why or where he's been for the last three months. And, you know what he does? He rearranges the cabinets

JP: We had Anne Heche playing Maggie, Johnny Depp's wife in the film. And, my only regret is that we didn't have more written in script for her, because I think she did a terrific job and that's... You know, if I had one thing to say about what we should have done is I think, you know, there should've been more of Anne Heche in the actual script.

MN: She is a really good actress. She had to come in, and do all her stuff in three weeks right at the end, when we were tired and it was a crime movie and we'd done the crime, and now Christ, we've got to do all this stuff in this tiny little house in New Jersey. And she knew we were all going to be like that, and she said "I know you are all very tired. I know you don't want to do this stuff. But, it's all I've got, and I'm...

Lefty: Fuck! Shit!
Lefty: Oh Christ, I think I shit in my pants.

PA: The lion was true life. They gave us the lion. They used to walk the lion up and down the block in Brooklyn. Ummm... 'till one of the neighbors finally complained, and the cops came for him. They kept him in the basement and fed him hamburgers.

JP: When we got the lion in the real undercover operation, he wasn't a full grown lion. We kept him in the club. Then he got too big, so we had to put him in a warehouse and we used to feed him 20, 30 steaks a day. And then, it just got too much, you know, you couldn't play with him any more, because he was a full grown lion.

MN: The lion used to ride in Lefty's car, and it did, and one of the things that was so funny about it was Lefty was always bitching about the way the lion scratched the leather.

JP: What they did was we took him to the park in Brooklyn and chained him to a tree, and gave a couple of neighbors a couple of hundred dollars to call a police and tell the police there was a lion in this park. The first night that this couple called. The police thought that they were just two drunks, you know, boyfriend, girlfriend out having a good time, so they didn't bother to come to the park to get the lion. Then we did it again the second night and they finally sent a squad car out. They found this lion and it made all the papers in the city, New York city.

Lefty: Thirty years I'm busting my hump for what? A lion. Any work to be done, call Lefty. I never complained. Twenty-six guys I clipped. Do I get upped? No, they pass me by.

JP: What really kicked me was watching this film was the scenes with the family

Maggie: Look what the reindeer dragged in.
Joe: Merry Chrismas.

JP: In the film, we see Johnny having contact with his family not on a daily basis, but a regular basis. In actuality what happened was after the first nine months my family was moved across country, so my only contact with the family was via telephone.

PA: I remember I was very interested in what happened to Donnie Brasco when he went home. And that problem for a guy who's got to be somebody different all week. It's like a method actor, or something. He's got to then come home, and be a good guy, nice to his wife, nice to his kids, and sometimes it's not so easy.

Maggie: You're becoming like them. you know that?

MN: No longer knows himself, and he doesn't know what he believes any longer. He lost his sense himself. He lost his beliefs.

(The Japanese restaurant scene)

MN: Donnie has to be part of beating the Japanese waiter, because the reason the scene is there, is to show, as it were, the beginning of his decsent to their level, as it were.

Lefty: Here it is. Sonny Red's kid, Bruno, has disappeared. Now, as long as he's on the loose, ain't none of us safe. He's got a nickel-a-day coke habit. He's gonna turn up somewhere. We got the contract.

JP: I had the contract to kill Bruno, because there was two factions within the Bonano family, fighting to take over control the family.

MN: They're all killers. They all have killed they don't get to be made unless they have

JD: I believe that anything they do as far as hurting people, is all done within, you know, it's within the confines of the organization

MN: All the violence in the movie, it's very carefully plotted, and very carefully used for something. It's not cosmetic violence. It's not balletic.

Lefty: Don't say nothing. Don't say nothing to them.
Lefty: Don't tell them nothing!
Lefty: Donnie, don't say nothing to them! You all right? ...
Joe: Fuck you. I'm not coming out.
FBI agent: It's over, Joe.

JP: I did not wanna come out of the operation, not because I was so ingrained within this undercover operation and with the wise guys, but my reasoning was I had been proposed for membership in the Bonano family. I was ... in December of that year, I was due to become a made guy in the Mafia.

JD: Joe is a lot like them. They're very, very similar, which is one of the reasons, I think, Joe fitted in so well. He has a tremendous pride, honour and loyalty.

MN: It was very unfasionable and a poor career path to do what he was doing. That is to become a criminal in order to smoke out criminals.

PA: The goverment went after the Mafia, and destroyed the Mafia. The timing of that with our movie was accidental.

Lefty(answering the phone): Yeah, yeah. All right. All right. O.K.

PA: It's a very emotional thing at the end he's gonna go, because of that... because he's truly... He's gonna go, because he really fell in love with Donnie. He took him on like a son, and when he dies, in a way he has no regrets about that because of that. He says,

Lefty: If Donnie calls, tell him, tell him, if it was gonna be anyone, I'm glad it was him.

JP: The film Donnie Brasco, I thought, was a terrific film, not only because, you know, I was associated with it, but... you know, the script Paul Attanasio, directed by Mike, "even though you're an Englishman, Mike, you did a hell of a job," Al Pacino, Johnny Depp, I mean Johnny Depp, I mean, we're friends to this day. He's a hell of a kid, and he's a hell of an actor. I don't know any young actor today that is as good as he is. They put together a great film, I mean. What I liked about it was that it portrayed the mob the way it is. It's undercover life. It was a great movie.

MN: It was Hollywood, and it was something other than Hollywood all at the same time.