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Although Al Pacino will always be synonymous with his breakthrough performance in The Godfather (1972), Francis Ford Coppola‘s acclaimed mafia drama nearly replaced him.
In his new memoir Sonny Boy, which is now available, the Academy Award winner recalled Paramount “questioning whether I was the right actor” to play Michael Corleone in the feature adaptation of Mario Puzo’s book and how he was ultimately able to prove himself.
“Paramount didn’t want me to play Michael Corleone,” he wrote in an excerpt shared by The Guardian. “They wanted Jack Nicholson. They wanted Robert Redford. They wanted Warren Beatty or Ryan O’Neal. In the book, Puzo had Michael calling himself ‘the sissy of the Corleone family.’ He was supposed to be small, dark-haired, handsome in a delicate way, no visible threat to anybody. That didn’t sound like the guys that the studio wanted. But that didn’t mean it had to be me.
“It did mean, however, that I would have to screen-test for the role, which I had never done before, and that I would have to fly out to the west coast to do it, which I just didn’t want to do. I did not care that it was The Godfather. I was a bit afraid of flying and I didn’t want to go to California. But my manager, Marty Bregman, said to me, ‘You’re getting on that fucking plane.’ He brought me a pint of whiskey so I could drink it on the flight, and I got there,” added Pacino.
Although Pacino admittedly thought Coppola had “gone too far” in campaigning for him, the actor recalled the “unpleasant feeling” of walking into the audition room and realizing he wasn’t the only one up for the part.
“But here’s the secret: Francis wanted me. He wanted me and I knew that,” wrote Pacino. “And there’s nothing like when a director wants you. He also gave me a gift in the form of Diane Keaton. He had a few actors he was auditioning for the role of Kay, but the fact that he wanted to pair me up with Diane suggested she had an edge in the process. I knew she was doing well in her career and had been appearing on Broadway in shows like Hair and Play It Again, Sam with Woody Allen. A few days before the screen test, I met Diane in Lincoln Center in New York City at a bar, and we just hit it off. She was easy to talk to and funny, and she thought I was funny too. I felt like I had a friend and an ally right away.”
After a week and a half of filming, Paramount was “once again questioning whether I was the right actor for the part,” Pacino recalled, adding: “Finally, Francis determined that something had to be done. … At this point we had been shooting The Godfather for about a week and a half. And Francis said, ‘Well, you’re not cutting it.’
“I felt that one in the pit of my stomach. It’s when it finally hit me that my job was on the line,” he wrote.
Although Pacino is unsure whether Coppola did it “deliberately,” the director “did move up the filming of the Italian restaurant scene, where the untested Michael comes to take his revenge on Sollozzo and McCluskey. That scene was not meant to be filmed until a few days later, but if something hadn’t happened to let me show what I was capable of, there might not have been a later for me.”
Fortunately for Pacino, the scene showed off exactly why Coppola casted him. “Then Francis showed the restaurant scene to the studio, and when they looked at it, something was there,” he wrote. “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.”
The Godfather earned Pacino his first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, going on to land a Best Actor nod for The Godfather Part II (1974).
