 Shelley Winters (qv) was such an extreme method actress that she  spent the entire evening before the grave scene at a funeral parlor  staring at a real corpse in a coffin convincing herself she was  staring at her dead son, in addition to listening to loud opera just  before shooting a scene to work herself up emotionally, and throwing  a very real wine bottle at Lloyd (De Niro) in order to make him cry.