Al Pacino, the 82-year-old actor, has revealed the difficulties he had in being accepted by Paramount for the role of Michael Corleone, in the film The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
“Only Francis (Ford Coppola) wanted me in the film, no one but him. Paramount didn’t want me, so it was a difficult time,” Al Pacino explained, during an interview with GQ.
According to the actor, Coppola has always been interested in him, though he had to face a number of obstacles to finally end up convincing everyone else that he was the one for the role.
“I remember Paramount taking me on because Jerry Schatzberg, my great friend and director, gave them eight minutes of the film. Panic in Needle Park (1971); when they saw it, they hired me,” Pacino added.
they almost kicked him out
However, though they were convinced by her performance in that film, they still had doubts until the shooting started. “One morning, after two weeks of shooting, when I arrived on set I found out they were going to fire mebecause they didn’t really care what they were seeing,” she said.
It seems that the conflict was entrenched the way Pacino chose to portray Michael Corleone.
“I thought a lot about this role, because I had to play it a certain way. I realized that the power of the character was in the transition from this guy that you don’t really know who he is and where he’s going and then before you know it he’s this leader, not being able to follow that transformation.” Pacino explained .
Now, Michael Corleone is an iconic character. He is a ruthless mob boss whose greatest tragedy is that he never wanted or asked for the life he is ultimately forced to live. A person who has several large complex layers. And to successfully portray, the actor chose to touch the heart of Michael’s personal story and showed him as an ever-evolving man.
But it just so happened that when Pacino set out to portray his vision of Michael on film, Paramount wasn’t convinced. They weren’t satisfied with the tone the actor was setting for the character, which is why, after two weeks of filming, the company was determined to scrap that material and cast a replacement.
Coppola’s intervention
This led to Francis Ford Coppola asking Pacino to review the footage that had been shot. What the actor saw, however, didn’t dissuade him from his vision of how to develop the character of Michael. “I saw the footage, which didn’t look good or great or anything, but it wasn’t bad either,” he added.
Today we can say that, fortunately, Pacino was not fired for his way of interpreting the role and was able to play Michael in a somewhat terrifying way, but which paradoxically still evokes the sympathy of the public today. . “I loved helping create a kind of enigmatic personPacino concluded.
Decidedly, Michael Corleone is one of the more complex and nuanced characters Within the history of cinema and everyone who had doubts about Pacino’s suitability for the role most likely recognized that he was the man they were looking for.
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Source: Clarin
