10 Mistakes Directors Hoped You'd Forget By The End Of The Movie

There is no movie in existence that doesn't have a single mistake in it - the production of even the simplest film is so freakin' complex that it just isn't possible.

When potentially hundreds of people working across dozens of departments need to co-ordinate their skills, the potential for error is massive, and generally the larger a movie's budget and scale, the more mistakes there are likely to be.

And while the overwhelming majority of movie mistakes are missed by casual audiences, sometimes mistakes are bizarre or egregious enough that they effectively draw attention to themselves.

There are entire communities online devoted to spotting movie mistakes, and though these errors sometimes leave directors red-faced, other times they simply operated under the assumption that, even if viewers spotted them, they'd forget them before the end credits rolled.

But that's not always the case. Whether years or even decades later, these movie mistakes continue to endure among obsessive fans, laying bare technical issues and editing gaffes which the filmmakers understandably assumed wouldn't get much attention.

Yet with each successive, higher-resolution release of a classic movie, audiences become ever-more likely to remember those mistakes the directors hoped they'd quickly forget...

Regardless of his opinions on Marvel movies, Martin Scorsese is largely accepted to be one of our finest filmmakers, and as utterly, inarguably perfect as his 1990 mob masterpiece Goodfellas might seem, it ain't quite.

Scorsese has spent more than 50 years working with editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who in a 2014 interview opened up about her and Scorsese's philosophy when it comes to editing mistakes.

Schoonmaker was specifically referring to an infamous editing error in an early Goodfellas scene, where when Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino) meets with Sonny Bunz (Tony Darrow), Paulie's cigar disappears from one shot to the next.

Ultimately editor and director made the pragmatic decision that it was more worthwhile to preserve a quality take than worry about a mistake which, hopefully, most audiences wouldn't even notice:

"It was much more important for us to get this beautiful performance by this untrained actor than to worry about where the cigar is in Paul Sorvino's hand. One wasn't want to do that, one would hope not to do that, but if the choice comes between a beautiful, clean line and a laugh, we would always go for the laugh."

As fantastically engrossing as the movie is, this editing mistake sticks out enough that Scorsese fans still talk about it today, more than 30 years later.