From the start, the real Mafia took a strong interest in our depiction of the fictional one, much of which was filmed on its turf in Little Italy in New York City. It sent a delegation to Bluhdorn and, I was told after the picture was finished, he agreed to meet certain conditions to obtain its cooperation, including a promise not to mention the word “Mafia” in the picture. I’m sure they let him know that it wouldn’t be difficult for their friends in the New York labor unions to tie up shooting, and as partial payment I suspect that Paramount promised them some jobs on the picture. Several members of the crew were in the Mafia and four or five mafiosi had minor parts. When we were shooting on Mott Street in Little Italy, Joe Bufalino arrived on the set and sent two envoys to my trailer to say that he wanted to meet me. One was a rat-faced man with impeccably groomed hair and a camel’s-hair coat, the other a less elegantly dressed man who was the size of an elephant and nearly tipped over the trailer when he stepped in and said, “Hi, Mario, you’re a great actor.”
When Bufalino arrived, the first thing I noticed about him was that one of his eyes looked to the left and the other to the right. I didn’t know which one to look at, so, trying not to offend him, I alternated between them. As soon as he sat down, he started complaining about how badly the U.S. government was treating him. Wrapping himself in the American flag, he said he was a good American and a good family man, but the government was trying to deport him. Throwing up his arms, he said, “What do I do?”
I didn’t have an answer, so I didn’t say anything. Then he changed the subject and in a raspy whisper said, “The word’s out you like calamari …”
This startled me. Somehow he’d learned that I often ordered a calamari lunch from one of the Italian restaurants on Mott Street.
Then, as if the two of us were involved in a conspiracy, he said, “You know, Mario, I’d love to have you come over and meet the wife. One night the three of us could all go out for dinner. I’d like you to meet my family.”
“Mr. Bufalino—”
He waved his hand and said, “Call me Joe.”
“Well, Joe, see this script?” I showed it to him, riffling through the pages we were going to film that day. “Joe, this is just today; these are only the lines I have to learn for today, and it’s really hard. I’m not running around chasing girls. I just sit in this trailer learning lines.”
Bufalino seemed disappointed. “Well,” he said, “maybe we can make it for lunch sometime.”
I didn’t know what to do next, so I said, “Have you ever seen a movie set?”
“No, I’ve never been on one before.”
“Well, allow me,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs and I’ll show you around.”
I led him upstairs through a tangle of cables to the set of the office of the olive-oil company used in the picture. Standing close to me, he looked around and said, “I don’t know how you keep from goin’ nuts, with all these people and all these wires and everything …”
“I agree, Joe. The whole thing is really cockeyed, isn’t it?” Then I looked into his cocked eyes and realized what I’d said. I spun around, trying to divert his attention to something on the set and to get a glimpse of his reaction peripherally. For a moment he blinked and I thought I saw a hurt look flash across his face, but the moment passed, and I babbled a mouthful of mush to fill the air with words, not knowing what in the world I was saying.
At last Joe smiled, thanked me for the tour and left me to get ready for the next shot. “See you, Mario,” he said. “Don’t forget the wife and I would still like you to have dinner with us.”
There were some terrific actors on The Godfather, especially Robert Duvall and Al Pacino. Bobby Duvall is one of those actors who never stop taking dares, which very few actors do. They work so hard at becoming successful that when they reach the top they become cautious and try to do the same thing over and over again because they’re frightened of playing a part in which they might fall on their faces. Duvall takes chances and has fallen on his face, but far more times than not he has established a characterization that is not Duvall. He’s a wonderful actor. The same can be said of Al Pacino. When I met him on The Godfather, he was quite troubled. Since then he’s improved and, like Duvall, has shown that he is willing to take a chance and not be afraid where he’s going to land.
At one point Charles Bluhdorn threatened to fire Francis Coppola—I don’t remember why—but I said, “If you fire Francis, I’ll walk off the picture.” I strongly believe that directors are entitled to independence and freedom to realize their vision, though Francis left the characterizations in our hands and we had to figure out what to do. I threw out a lot of what was in the script and created the role as I thought it should be. When you do this, you never know whether it’s going to work; sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. But after I had read the book, I decided that the part of Don Corleone lent itself perfectly to underplaying. Rather than portraying him as a big shot, I thought it would be more effective to play him as a modest, quiet man, the way he was in the book. Don Corleone was part of the wave of immigrants who came to this country around the turn of the century and had to swim upstream to survive as best they could. He had the same hopes and ambitions for his sons that Joseph P. Kennedy had for his. As a young man, he probably hadn’t intended to become a criminal, and when he did, he hoped it would be transitional. As he said to his son Michael, played by Pacino, “I never wanted this for you. I wanted something else. I always thought that you’d be governor or senator or president—something—but there just wasn’t enough time.… There just wasn’t enough time.”
I thought it would be interesting to play a gangster, maybe for the first time in the movies, who wasn’t like those bad guys Edward G. Robinson played, but who was a kind of hero, a man to be respected. Also, because he had so much power and unquestioned authority, I thought it would be an interesting contrast to play him as a gentle man, unlike Al Capone, who beat up people with baseball bats. I had a great deal of respect for Don Corleone; I saw him as a man of substance, tradition, dignity, refinement, a man of unerring instinct who just happened to live in a violent world and who had to protect himself and his family in this environment. I saw him as a decent person regardless of what he had to do, as a man who believed in family values and was shaped by events just like the rest of us. The people who joined the Mafia in those days did so because they were set upon by people who wanted to take advantage of them. There was a war in Little Italy; members of a group called the Black Hand were extorting money from immigrants, who had to pay to safeguard their families and to make a living. Some knuckled under, but others like Don Corleone fought back, and this was the story of The Godfather. He would not surrender to the men who demanded a piece of everyone’s action. He was forced to protect his family, and in the process he gravitated into crime.
At the time we made the film in the early seventies, there were not many things you could say about the Mafia that you couldn’t say about other elements in the United States. Was there much difference between mob murders and Operation Phoenix, the CIA’s assassination program in Vietnam? Like the Mafia, it was just business, nothing personal. Certainly there was immorality in the Mafia and a lot of violence, but at heart it was a business; in many ways it didn’t operate much differently from certain multinational corporations that went around knowingly spilling chemical poisons in their wake. The Mafia may kill a lot of people in mob wars, but while we were making the movie, CIA representatives were dealing in drugs in the Golden Triangle, torturing people for information and assassinating them with far more efficiency than the Mob. I can’t see much difference between the assassinations of gangsters like Joey Gallo and the Diem brothers in Vietnam, except that our country did it with greater hypocrisy. When Henry Cabot Lodge went on television and explained the deaths of the Diem brothers, you knew he was flat-out lying, but people didn’t question him because we all believed the myth that the United States was a great country that would never do anything imm
oral. In many ways people in the Mafia live by a stricter code than do presidents and other politicians; I wonder what would happen if instead of having them swear on a Bible, we required politicians to promise to be honest at the price of having their feet encased in cement and dropped into the Potomac if they weren’t. Political corruption would drop dramatically.
• • •
Thanks to a trick I stumbled on while I was making The Young Lions, I wasn’t completely honest with Joe Bufalino when I told him I had to memorize my lines that morning he showed up on the set. When I first made movies, I memorized my lines from the script like other actors, or if the script was weak I’d improvise dialogue but still memorize it. As mentioned earlier, I learned on my first picture, The Men, how easy it was to spoil your effectiveness in a picture by overrehearsing and digging so deep into a part before filming began that you had nothing left to give when it counted. This had taught me how fragile a characterization can be on film and the importance of spontaneity. So after a while instead of memorizing my lines by rote, I started concentrating only on the meaning or thrust of a line during a scene, working from merely a suggestion of what it was about, and then improvising speeches as I went along so that they seemed spontaneous. The words might vary a little from those in the script, but audiences didn’t know it.
On The Young Lions, I discovered an even better way to increase spontaneity. In that picture I had to rewrite a lot of the dialogue as we went along, and one day I didn’t have time to memorize my new lines for one scene, so I wrote them on a piece of paper, pinned the paper to the uniform of one of the other actors and read the lines. The camera shot over my shoulder, showing my face in despair while I read. There was a practical advantage to what I had done because it saved a lot of time. You can easily spend three or four hours trying to memorize lines for a scene, and in order to prepare, some actors go around all day muttering them at the edge of the set. There are other things I would much rather use my time for than memorizing lines, so after The Young Lions I started reading dialogue from notes in every picture. Sometimes, with their permission, I wrote my lines on actors’ faces or pinned cue cards on their costumes, or placed them offstage where I could see them.
On The Godfather I had signs and cue cards everywhere—on my shirtsleeves, on a watermelon and glued to the scenery. If it was a long day and the director reshot a scene many times, I might know the lines by the end of the day, but I didn’t have to memorize them in advance. I also discovered that not memorizing increased the illusion of reality and spontaneity, a step beyond the groping for words and so-called mumbling that some critics complained about in A Streetcar Named Desire. Everything about acting demands the illusion of spontaneity. When an actor knows what he’s going to say, it’s easy for the audience to sense that he’s giving a writer’s speech. But if he hasn’t memorized the words, he not only doesn’t know what he’s going to say, he’s not rehearsed how he’s going to say it or how to move his body or nod his head when he does. Whereas when he sees the lines, his mind takes over and responds as if it were expressing a thought for the first time, so that his gestures are spontaneous.
Later, when I was making another picture, a stinker based on a novel by Steve Shagan called The Formula, I got rid of the notes and began using a better method to accomplish the same purpose: speaking my lines into a miniature tape recorder, then hiding it in the small of my back with a wire connected to tiny speakers that I stuck in my ears like hearing aids. When I was acting, I turned the tape recorder on and off with a remote hand switch, listened to my voice and repeated the lines simultaneously in the same way that speeches are translated into different languages at the UN. It took a little practice, but it wasn’t hard, and because the earphones were small and hidden, audiences didn’t know the difference. Subsequently I came up with a still better system: instead of a tape recorder, I hid a microphone under my clothes over my chest, put a two-way radio in the small of my back, and taped sending and receiving antennas on my legs. From about a hundred yards offstage, Caroline Barrett, who succeeded Alice as my assistant, now reads my lines to me into a microphone. As she speaks, I hear them in my earphones and repeat them. Since she also has a two-way radio, Caroline can hear my voice, as well as the voices of the other actors in the scene, and simply follows the script line by line. When I repeat the lines simultaneously, the effect is one of spontaneity.
People often say that an actor “plays” a character well, but that’s an amateurish notion. Developing a characterization is not merely a matter of putting on makeup and a costume and stuffing Kleenex in your mouth. That’s what actors used to do, and then called it a characterization. In acting everything comes out of what you are or some aspect of who you are. Everything is a part of your experience. We all have a spectrum of emotions in us. It is a broad one, and it’s the actor’s job to reach into this assortment of emotions and experience the ones that are appropriate for his character and the story. Through practice and experience, I learned how to put myself into different moods and states of mind by thinking about things that made me laugh or be angry, sad or outraged; I developed a mental technique that allowed me to address certain parts of myself, select an emotion and send something akin to an electrical impulse from my brain to my body that enabled me to experience the emotion. If I had to feel worried, I’d think about something that worried me; if I was supposed to laugh, I thought about something that was hilarious.
Sometimes, however, I had to experience an emotion I hadn’t felt, like the reaction to dying; then I just had to imagine it. At the end of The Young Lions, I was shot fatally in the face. It was a wound, I decided, that would cause my blood to flow out of my brain, and that was how I would die. I imagined how I would be affected by blood suddenly draining out of my brain: I’d feel energy ebbing out of me, then for an instant realize that I was mortally wounded and that my life was over—all this within a few seconds. In the death scene in Mutiny on the Bounty, I wanted to appear to be in shock from having been fatally burned. I asked the crew to make a lot of ice; then I lay on top of it until my body was chilled and I was shivering and shaking and my teeth were chattering. While my body was responding physically to the cold, I also thought about how much I loved the Tahitian woman I had fallen for, what it was about her that I loved, and then about the pain, amazement and surprise of dying.
The bed scene in The Men also taught me to save my performance for the close-up, which usually comes at the end of the day. In a long shot you don’t have to worry much about getting your emotions right; the physical action is what counts. The camera is so far away that it won’t see the emotions you’re supposed to experience, though I learned that it’s always wise to check what’s behind you; in a scene with a busy background, audiences can easily lose you, so you have to do something to help them focus on you.
In a medium shot, your body language and gesticulations become more important, though you have to turn up your emotions a little. But it’s in the close-up that you really crank it up. The acting you do there is best conveyed by thinking, because if you’re thinking right, it will show. If you’re not thinking right, if you’re busy acting, you’re dead.
Correction: “think” is not the right word; you experience the emotion you want to convey. That’s when you reach into your spectrum of emotions and send a signal from your brain to execute one of them. The close-up says everything. It’s then that an actor’s learned, rehearsed behavior becomes most obvious to an audience and chips away unconsciously at its experience of reality. The audience should share what you are feeling in a close-up. I have often reminded myself that I wasn’t working in “motion words,” but in “motion pictures.” The close-up reveals your thoughts and feelings by the expression on your face, whether it’s the raising of an eyebrow, chasing a piece of food around your mouth with your tongue, or making a tiny, fleeting statement by frowning. In a close-up the audience is only inches away, and your face becomes the stage. In a large theater it is the entire prosce
nium arch, so that no matter what you do, it becomes a theatrical event. When your image is so large and the audience has such an immediate perspective, the actor can enable the audience to experience his emotions in an intimate and personal way if he does his job right.
But as I’ve said, there are some parts where less is more, and underplaying is important, and never more so than in the close-up, when your entire face fills the screen. An example is the scene in The Godfather in which Don Corleone dies while playing with his grandchild in a garden. A few moments before he collapses, he surprises his grandson by stuffing a piece of orange peel into his mouth to simulate a set of teeth. I invented that business with the orange; I simply made it up on the spot. I used to do the same thing with my own kids; it’s funny under almost any circumstances because it changes your personality hilariously, but in that scene it had a resonance that made the Godfather more human, and it was the kind of thing I thought the gentle character I had in mind would have done.
When I saw The Godfather the first time, it made me sick; all I could see were my mistakes and I hated it. But years later, when I saw it on television from a different perspective, I decided it was a pretty good film.
I had a lot of laughs making The Godfather. Mafiosi were always dropping in to watch us, and there were a lot of playful high jinks. In a scene in which the Godfather’s family bring him home from the hospital after a failed assassination attempt, they must carry him up a flight of stairs on a stretcher, and before we did the shot, I told the cameraman to give me three hundred pounds of lead weights. Then I hid them under my blankets, which made the stretcher weigh over five hundred pounds, but nobody knew this except the cameraman and me. My family started carrying me up the stairs, but they couldn’t make it; they were strong, but before long they were wringing with sweat, huffing and puffing and unable to get up the stairs. I said, “C’mon, you weaklings, I’m gonna fall off this thing if you don’t get me up there. This is ridiculous!”
Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Page 34