“I was convinced it was the worst movie ever made”

That Paramount didn’t want Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfatherlike, in general, everything that Francis Ford Coppola wanted for the film – has always been a secret, just like the communication between the producers and the director before and during the filming of one of the best films in history: openly. Al Pacino confirms that suspicion in Sonny Boyhis memoir that is published in Spain this Wednesday, October 16 (Libros Cúpula).

«Paramount did not want me to play the role of Michael Corleone. They wanted Jack Nicholson. They wanted Robert Redford. They wanted Warren Beatty or Ryan O’Neal. In Puzo’s book, Michael called himself ‘the sissy of the Corleone family’. He was supposed to be short, dark-haired, subtly handsome, not at all threatening to others. This description did not correspond to the people the study wanted. But it didn’t mean that it had to be me either,” the actor explains in his memoirs.

Al Pacino, who published his memoirs at the age of 84 after being about to die from coronavirus in 2020he was 31 years old when he filmed The Godfather. Until then, his career in cinema was limited to his fleeting appearance in the film I, Natalia now his role, now the protagonist, in Panic in Needle Park. Added to Paramount’s reluctance and his lack of experience in film was another factor that made things even more complicated for Coppola to have the Michael Corleone he wanted: Al Pacino did not want to do a screen test for the role, much less even, fly to the West Coast to do it. “I didn’t care if it was The Godfather. I didn’t want to go to California. But Marty Bregman told me: ‘You’re going to get on that damn plane.'”

The phrase from Martin Bregman, a decisive producer in Al Pacino’s career, was accompanied by a gift to temper the actor’s fear of flying. “Then he brought me a pint of whiskey to drink on the flight, and I went there,” Pacino acknowledges in his book.

Salvatore Corsitto and Marlon Brando, in the opening sequence of The Godfather

Alcohol was precisely a bad company – it was not the only one – for Al Pacino during the filming of The Godfatheras he himself recognizes in his memoirs.

«It took a great effort for me to transform into Michael Corleone. I had to look presentable, and that didn’t come naturally to me. They forced me to look presentable. He arrived every morning to play Michael, and he arrived with two or three different faces. One on each side of my head and the third in the center. Some nights I slept very little or not at all. Other nights, I had drunk so much, and had gotten into so much of everything I could get into, that my camera was askew. Dick Smith, the fantastic makeup artist, had to reconstruct my face again. And when I got out of the makeup chair, I had become Michael,” he explains. Al Pacino, who earned his first Oscar nominationin the category of best supporting actor, for The Godfather.

The wedding sequence from ‘The Godfather’

The first scene of The Godfather that rolled Al Pacino It was the wedding sequence. “It lasted about a week in Staten Island,” the actor recalls. “Diane (Keaton) and I spent the first few days laughing together, we had to play that opening wedding exposition scene from the screen test that we hated so much,” Pacino recalls. “Based on that scene alone, we were convinced that we were in the worst movie ever made, and when we finished filming at the end of the day, we would go back to Manhattan and get drunk. Our careers were over, we thought,” adds the actor in his book. They couldn’t be more wrong.

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