Al Pacino nearly got fired while filming “The Godfather.”
The studio had not wanted Pacino for the iconic role of mob bosses son Michael Corleone to begin with, preferring either Ryan O’Neal, Robert Redford or Warren Beatty.
But Pacino had one thing in his favor — director Francis Ford Coppola was in his corner him.
However, shortly after shooting began, problems immediately arose.
They had been filming for about a week and a half and word got around that Paramount was unhappy with Pacino’s performance, the actor recalls in his memoir, “Sonny Boy.”
Francis Ford Coppola summoned Pacino for a meeting at a Lincoln Center restaurant and dropped a bomb.
“You know how much you mean to me,” the director said, “how much faith I had in you. Well, you’re not cutting it.”
Coppola showed Pacino footage the following day and the actor had to agree that there wasn’t “anything spectacular here.”
The “Serpico” star explains that he was underplaying Michael on purpose.
“My idea was that this guy comes out of nowhere,” he writes. “That was the power of this characterization. That was the only way this could work: the emergence of this person, the discovery of his capacity and his potential.”
Thankfully for Pacino, Coppola moved up filming the iconic shooting scene “to give the doubters back in Hollywood some incentive to believe in me and keep me in the picture.”
It’s unclear whether Coppola did it for Pacino’s benefit, but it certainly did the trick.
The “Scarface” star writes that he, Al Lettieri who played heroin trafficker Virgil Sollozzo and Sterling Hayden, who played crooked cop Captain McCluskey, spent 15 hours filming the scene where Michael shoots both of them at point blank range.
Pacino notes that both Lettieri and Hayden were “precious to me.”
“They knew I was going through a difficult time, feeling like I had the world on my shoulders, knowing that any day the axe could fall on me…Sterling and Al Lettieri helped keep up my morale; they set a one and were role models for me.”
“Because of that scene I just performed, they kept me in the film,” he added.
Pacino attended the premiere in Times Square with his then-girlfriend, Jill Clayburgh, his grandmother, aunt and cousin.
“Then we got to our seats, but I didn’t watch the movie,” he writes. “I didn’t want to see the finished product. As soon as the lights went out, I went out.”
He left the theater and went to a bar around the corner with producer Al Ruddy and a couple of people who worked on the film and processed to get “soused. That was the perfect word for it – soused – when you can’t drink anymore and you keep drinking anyway.”
Pacino admits that he didn’t see the beloved classic until there was a screening for its 50th anniversary in 2022.