One of the movie’s most memorable running gags is that Vinny can never wake up naturally and is always startled awake by something, be it a steam whistle, boisterous pigs, and even a screech owl. Lynn talks about their decision to use a real screech owl in the DVD commentary, which he later admits was probably a ridiculous thing to do. The owl’s behavior was so perfect that people thought it was fake. “It screeched, it looked back at Vinny, and then it looked back at the camera and screeched again. We got amazingly lucky with that screech owl.”, said Lynn.
The screeches were actually added in later. The filmmakers used a special trick to get the owl to open its mouth at the right time: “We discovered that if you put a little bit of meat into its beak, it half swallows [it] and then, approximately three seconds later, opens its beak as the meat goes down,” Lynn said. “So we fed it a little bit of beef just before the camera starting turning so that for its first screech, which is added afterwards, his beak opened at the right moment. Everything else he did in that scene was pure luck!”
Pesci Actually Performed His Famous Card Trick
When Vinny is trying to convince Bill to allow him to represent him, he performs a card trick. Lynn talks about the authenticity of the scene in the DVD commentary, explaining that it was imperative for him for the trick to be real.
So, Pesci had to actually learn how to do the trick! And he did it brilliantly.
Bill’s Mother’s Scenes Were Dropped in Editing
While they were getting ready to shoot the film, someone at the studio brought up a big hole in the plot, how is it that Bill’s Italian mother never shows up to support her son who is going on trial. “Well, that was a tough question, because the answer is, Mother ought to have been there,” Lynn said in the DVD commentary. But then he went on to say that it would've been a problem because the script was already too long.
Instead, they added some scenes where Bill's mother suffers from a heart attack right after Vinny goes to Alabama. But when editing, they realized the scenes were going to ruin the film's continuity, so they decided to cut them out.
Austin Pendleton Made the Cast Laugh During Shooting
Actor Austin Pendleton, who has a real-life stutter, was cast by his friend, director Jonathan Lynn, as the tongue-tied public defender. Lynn told Abnormal Use that, even though he knew Pendleton would be hilarious in the scene, he wasn't expecting it to be that funny. Apparently, he had to hide behind the camera because he couldn't stop himself from laughing.
Mitchell Whitfield also found his scenes with Pendleton hilarious.
The Memorable "Yutes" Was Inspired by a Real Conversation
The scene in which Vinny and Judge Haller discuss the “two yutes” was “perhaps the most quoted piece of dialogue from the film,” according to Lynn in the DVD commentary, and it was based on an actual conversation that took place between Lynn and Pesci.
The two were prepping the film at the Mayflower Hotel in New York and Lynn recalls, “He said something about ‘these two yutes’ who were on trial and I said ‘what?’ and he said ‘what?’ and I said ‘what’s a yute?’” Lynn recalled. “I realized as we were having that conversation that that was something that ought to happen between Vinny and the judge, so I simply wrote it in the way it happened naturally.”