It might now be his most famous movie, but Al Pacino had a rocky start to The Godfather—to the point that the film’s director told him he wasn’t meeting the mark.
Pacino’s breakthrough role was as Michael Corleone in The Godfather Trilogy, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. For his acting in the series, Pacino was nominated for two Academy Awards, two Golden Globes and two BAFTAs.
However, the star has now revealed that there was initial resistance to him playing the role from Paramount Studios, leading to director Coppola inviting him to a restaurant to tell him he wasn’t “cutting it.”
Speaking on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast to promote his new autobiography, Sonny Boy, Pacino told O’Brien that one day Coppola requested he meet him at the Ginger Man restaurant in New York.
“He [Coppola} tells me ‘you know, I had faith in you’ and I said ‘yeah I know,’” said Pacino. “He says, ‘well you’re not cutting it’ and I thought oh what do I do now, what do I say now. I said ‘well, I guess that would be a problem so tell me what you mean.’”
Pacino then details that Coppola showed him the rushes (film footage that had already been shot) at the Paramount Theatre.
“I went and saw the rushes and I’m seeing the tapes of different things and I’m thinking well that is not spectacular but why should it be. You see I was hoping that I could blend in with the scenery and not be seen specifically. I just wanted to blend and be natural.”
“So of course I said to Francis – naturally the actor’s instinct – ‘yeah I see what you mean.’ That always quiets everybody down,” Pacino told the podcast.
From that moment on, Pacino says he thought he was “out” of the film, but he managed to redeem himself with the rushes of the iconic restaurant scene in which Michael Corleone shoots Sollozzo and McCluskey, despite twisting his ankle in the process of filming it.
Going into more detail about this moment in his book, Pacino writes: “Francis showed the restaurant scene to the studio, and when they looked at it, something was there. Because of that scene I just performed, they kept me in the film.”
“So I didn’t get fired from The Godfather. I just kept doing what I did, what I had thought about on those lonely walks up and down the length of Manhattan. I did have a plan, a direction that I really believed was the way to go with this character. And I was certain that Francis felt the same way.”
Newsweek has emailed Pacino’s representatives for further comment.
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