What Is An Anti-Hero?our film being a gangster film raises the obvious problem that our protagonist can not be a conventional hero as gangsters by definition are; corrupt,murderers,drug dealers and generally bad people. We therefore had to look to other gangster films and the creation of anti-heroes.

A shadow casts over Henry Liotta’s face. This connotes his unpredictability and mystery/danger. Also notice the use of the rule of thirds, Henry Hill is in the centre as he is the protagonist and the audience’s main attention.

An anti-hero that I studied is Henry Hill in Goodfellas. He is outlined as morally corrupt from the outset when he says “As far back as I can Remember I always wanted to be a gangster” however is the protagonist of the film and thus by portraying his life from ‘innocent’ youth to a corrupt gangster the audience is persuaded to side with the gangster despite his moral questionability. I echoed this when writing the script by including the younger version of Hugo and giving him some of a backstory as to why he wanted to be a gangster. I played on the dangers of glamorizing some gangster movies such as Scarface and how it can sometimes have a negative effect on a malleable mind of an uneducated youth such as Hugo when he says “I wanted to live the dream, like Tony Montanna, in scarface”. Hugo has the aspects of an anti-hero in the sense that he is a protagonist that at heart wants to be good but is tempted by the rewards of illicit activities as most gangsters are in the gangster/crime genre; this makes him in some ways a conventional character of my genre.