Camera operator John Chapman, who would later be a cinematographer (Taxi Driver), remembers what he calls “the marvelous operatic fights” between Willis and Coppola.24 The camera crew knew that Willis had small confidence in Coppola. He appeared insecure to the tough New York crew. They even made snide remarks about him that he sometimes overheard. “They made me feel like an outsider. I remember sitting in the restroom near the sound stage, hidden in a stall, when two guys walked in,” he recalls in the documentary. One of them said, “Coppola will never make another big picture. Everyone agrees that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s overwhelmed by the job.” Coppola continues, “I was so embarrassed that I lifted my shoes up, so they couldn’t tell who was in the stall. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in myself. I was only thirty years old. I was just hanging on by my wits.”
One day Coppola and Willis had an especially acrid disagreement about a particular camera setup. It degenerated into a shouting match that peaked with Willis bellowing at Coppola, “You don’t know how to do anything right!” With that, he retreated to his trailer and refused to come out. When Coppola decided to go ahead and shoot the scene, Willis was nowhere to be found. The camera crew froze. He asked Chapman to take over, but Chapman declined to shoot the scene in Willis’s absence. He was not prepared to get caught between two higher-ups. Coppola was beside himself. “Fuck this picture!” he shouted. “I’ve directed four movies without anyone telling me how to do my job.” He then stalked off the set. Shortly afterward, a resounding bang reverberated from the direction of Coppola’s office. “Oh my God!” the assistant director exclaimed. “He’s shot himself!!”25 In actual fact Coppola, while blowing off steam, had kicked a hole in his office door, and he was sitting inside when the production manager came to investigate. To smooth things over, the crew took a picture of the ruined door and gave it to Coppola as a gag gift.
An uneasy truce was established between the director and the cinematographer, and filming went on. Gradually both men gained a modicum of respect for each other’s talents, but Coppola says in his commentary that they did not really get along well until Godfather II. Despite their differences, they did work well together. “I agreed with Gordy on how the film should look,” states Coppola in his commentary. For example, in order to evoke the films of the 1940s, the movie’s time frame, they used grainy film stock like old period photographs. Willis says the overall look of the picture is a sort of “1940s New York grit.” What’s more, they devised a sinister, shadowy atmosphere for the interiors in which dangerous people like the godfather are only partially visible.
Thus in the opening scene the godfather sits in his office doing business shrouded in darkness, while his daughter’s wedding reception is in progress in the rainbow-hued garden outside. “The idea was that this was a character who didn’t always let you know what he was thinking,” says Willis. So sometimes he was sitting in the shadows where one could not see the expression on his face. The low-level lighting emphasizes the deception and secretness of this dark underworld. The don is the personification of evil, says Willis, so he wanted to keep him in menacing shadows.
The murky, under-lit look of these scenes was daring and unconventional at the time. As the rushes were shipped to the studio in Hollywood, the report came back, “The camera is always focused on the dark.” Studio moguls, accustomed to ultra-bright lighting in films, were disturbed by such scenes. “I got a lot of criticism because of the juxtaposition of the bright, kodachromy stuff for the wedding reception with the dark office where sinister things were happening,” Willis concludes. One of the executives said that the murky photography made him think that he had worn sunglasses to view the rushes. “But in my mind and in Francis’s mind the contrast between the happiness outside” and what was going on inside “was quite clear.”26
Unlike Willis, Dean Tavoularis, who was responsible for set design, had a harmonious relationship with Coppola. The Godfather was his first Coppola film, and he went on to design the two sequels, as well as Apocalypse Now. Tavoularis was glad that Coppola had held out for setting the movie in the postwar period, because he finds period films challenging—he has to be vigilant, so that every detail of the sets fits the historical setting of the story. In fact, Tavoularis’s attention to historical detail gave the film the authentic look of the decade covered by the story, from 1945 to 1955. “You can’t, for example, just put a can of soup on a shelf,” he says in the documentary. “It has to be the right can of soup.” Being a stickler for detail and thus vividly creating the historical era in this film and his subsequent Coppola films placed Tavoularis at the head of his profession.
During the course of the three-month shooting schedule, most of the time was spent on the 102 New York locations. Another two weeks were spent in Taormina, Sicily, a village near Palermo, which represented Corleone, the birthplace of Vito Corleone. Coppola’s stock with the suits at Paramount steadily rose and fell in the course of production as he sought to appease the people in power—who were monitoring his progress during production—while still attempting to make the movie his own way. For example, he steadfastly refused to have Willis use more light in the don’s dark study.
Moreover, through the grapevine he learned of what he considered to be a palace revolution in the making. He was convinced that film editor Aram Avakian, with the support of assistant director Steve Kestner, was fomenting a conspiracy to have him ousted as director. Avakian’s defection from Coppola’s camp was a real blow for the director, since Avakian had edited his first mainstream feature, You’re a Big Boy Now. Avakian put out the word that the footage Coppola was giving him to edit would not cut together. That is, there was not enough footage shot from different angles to enable the editor to assemble a coherent sequence in the editing room. With Kestner’s encouragement, Avakian phoned Evans from New York. “Bob, shot-by-shot it looks great,” he said, “but it cuts together like a Chinese jigsaw puzzle.” He continued, “The guinea [Coppola] doesn’t know what continuity is.”27
For the record, Coppola did not always feel the need to supply the editor with a great variety of surplus footage in order to ensure sufficient material for the editor to assemble a scene in final form. But he always saw to it that he gave the editor enough footage to cut together a coherent sequence.
By contrast, Avakian favored the kind of director who tended to shoot a scene from every possible angle and then allowed the editor to decide which takes to use when he assembled the whole thing in the cutting room. But Coppola consistently maintained that he wanted to make the movie on the set and not allow the editor to remake it in the editing room. Be that as it may, gossip around the set was that Avakian, who had already directed two features, was angling to replace Coppola as director and that was the real source of his complaints about him.
Evans examined all of the footage that Coppola was shipping to the west coast with another editor, Peter Zinner. Together they replied to Avakian that they were satisfied with Coppola’s work. Evans sensed that “Avakian wanted at all costs to derail Francis, knowing that, with him out, he would have a good shot to take over.”28 He accordingly authorized Coppola to fire the insubordinate Avakian and his ally Kestner. “Like the godfather, I fired people as a preemptory strike,” Coppola says in his DVD commentary. “The people who were angling the most to have me fired, I had fired.” Avakian was replaced by Zinner and William Reynolds, Kestner by Fred Gallo.
Coppola felt that he had won a battle, but he had not won the war since some studio officials still harbored misgivings about the young filmmaker. Given the pressure he was under, Coppola sometimes felt like throwing in the towel just to get the ordeal over with. He recalls in his commentary that his secretary told him, “Don’t quit—let them fire you.” He explains laconically, “If I quit, I wouldn’t get paid. If they fired me, I would.” Marlon Brando, who knew about the effort of Avakian and others to unseat him as director, told the studio “that he would not continue to work on the picture if I was fi
red.” Brando, Coppola emphasizes, really saved his neck.29
Still Coppola continued to be demoralized by the unsettling feeling that he had to keep proving himself to the powers that be. “My history with The Godfather was very much the history of someone in trouble,” he recalls. Even in the best of circumstances directing a major film “is like running in front of a moving locomotive. If you stop, if you trip, if you make a mistake, you get killed. And The Godfather was worse than most.”30 One evening at the end of an arduous day of filming, he outlined for one of his assistants the foolproof way to direct a movie: “Have the definitive script ready before you shoot”; keep rewrites to an absolute minimum; and “work with people you trust and feel secure with.” Upon reflection, he added, “I have managed to do neither of these things on this film.”31
Although there was no longer any question of the studio taking Coppola off the picture, Evans complained that Coppola was too timid in portraying violence in what was, after all, a gangster picture. Coppola was distressed to hear that Evans was going to send a second unit director to the set to beef up the violence in the action sequences yet to be shot. It was at this point that a scene came up in the schedule in which the pregnant Connie’s brutish husband Carlo (Gianni Russo), a cheap bookmaker, beats her during a domestic quarrel. In order to satisfy Evans that this scene was sufficiently violent, Coppola surreptitiously went to the set on a weekend with his sister Talia Shire and his nine-year-old son Gio, who was standing in for Russo, to stage the scene.
“We worked out as much of the action as we could think of,” Coppola recalls in his DVD commentary. “My son was whipping his aunt with a belt, and she was breaking dishes.” Talia Shire notes in the documentary that one of the ideas that cropped up while they were blocking out the scene was that “we thought how pitiful it would be that she was pregnant, and she tried to hide behind the flimsy curtain as Carlo beat her.” Coppola says that they laid out the scene on Saturday and filmed it on Monday. “So this scene was directed by a filmmaker who knew an action director was arriving on the set unless he got plenty of action into the picture.” At all events, when principal photography wrapped on July 2,1971, Coppola was still at the helm.
The movie opens with Connie’s wedding reception in the sundrenched garden of the don’s estate. As noted earlier, it offers a sharp contrast to the somber scene in his study, where the godfather sits in the dark recesses of his inner sanctum, stroking his cat and listening to petitions being presented to him by his associates. He is following an ancient custom that dictates that a godfather must seriously consider any request for help made to him on such a festive occasion. From the first the film establishes the two “families” depicted in the movie: the outer family of wives and children in a congenial atmosphere of family occasions and celebrations, and the inner family comprising the men who conduct the family’s dirty business in secrecy. William Reynolds, who edited the opening sequence, says, “It was an interesting problem to keep the wedding and the indoor scenes going at the same time.”32
Vito Corleone is a calculating man who has always run his empire of crime with the efficiency of a business executive. Whenever he encountered resistance from someone with whom he wanted to make a deal, the don simply extended to him what he ominously terms “an offer he couldn’t refuse” and got what he wanted.
The filmgoer is afforded a salient example of how the don implements this policy in the episode in which Don Corleone intimidates Hollywood producer Jack Woltz (John Marley) into giving a part in a picture to singer-actor Johnny Fontane (Al Martino), one of the don’s “godsons.” He does so by arranging to have the producer’s prize stallion decapitated, and its head placed in Woltz’s bed.
“In the book the horse’s head was on the bedpost,” Coppola points out in his commentary, “but I thought it would be more horrible if he at first sees some wet blood on the bedsheets and fears that he has been stabbed. Then he pulls back the blankets and sees the horse’s head.” Coppola’s staging of this scene is an improvement on the manner in which Puzo handled it in the book, as the novelist was the first to admit.
“Actually I did get a lot of complaints from animal lovers about the horse’s head,” Coppola observes. “But we got the head packed in dry ice from a dog food company after the horse had already been slaughtered. So my reply at the time to all of the angry pet lovers was that it was their fault—the horse was killed to feed their puppies and not because of my movie.33 Furthermore, Coppola still cannot understand why people were more outraged by the head of a dead horse in the movie than by the three dozen people murdered in the picture.
There was another problem associated with the Woltz sequence. When the novel was published, it was widely rumored that the Johnny Fontane character was based on Frank Sinatra. When Johnny entreats Vito to get him a part in a war movie that he needs to resuscitate his ailing career, many readers thought of how Sinatra lobbied to get the role of Maggio in Fred Zinnemann’s film From Here to Eternity (1953) in order to revive his fading career. Sinatra personally berated Puzo, when he encountered him in a restaurant, for apparently implying that he got the role he wanted in From Here to Eternity through the intervention of the Mafia.
Director Fred Zinnemann told me that he cast Sinatra in that picture because he admired Sinatra’s acting skills. Indeed, Sinatra won an Academy Award for the film. “At no time was a horse’s head involved in the casting decision,” he affirms. “The author of The Godfather was using poetic license.” Coppola confirms in his DVD commentary that “Mario concocted a fictionalized picture of Sinatra in the book.”
The awesome Don Vito is the object of the envy and the hatred of some other mafiosi, who fear that he is becoming too powerful. Accordingly an assassination attempt is made on his life, which leaves him incapacitated for some time. Sonny, his oldest son (James Caan), rules in his stead for the duration of his illness. Michael, Don Vito’s youngest son (Al Pacino), just home from serving in the army during World War II, is anxious to prove himself to his father. He gets the chance to do so when he convinces Sonny to let him even the score with the family’s enemies by killing the two individuals responsible for the attempt on their father’s life: drug kingpin Virgil “Turk” Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) and Captain McCluskey (Sterling Hayden), a corrupt cop.
In one of the most riveting scenes in the picture, Michael successfully carries out his plan to gun down both men in a Bronx restaurant. Sound engineer Walter Murch (Rain People) remembers that Coppola wanted musical accompaniment to this scene only after Michael has committed the murders and is leaving the restaurant. So, as Murch notes in his foreword to this book, he decided to add a sound effect just prior to the murders. He was aware of the elevated train tracks near the restaurant, so he employed the “screeching effect as the train turns a difficult corner” to symbolize Michael’s state of mind. He is irrevocably turning a difficult corner: “This is the first time he has killed anybody face-to-face.”34 In short, the grating sound of the train’s brakes is a metaphor for Michael’s anxiety, implying his apprehension as the moment of the massacre draws near. Murch’s superior work on The Godfather and other Coppola films placed him at the head of his profession.
Before Michael shoots the two men at close range, “he tries to summon the nerve to stand up and start firing,” writes Karen Durbin. “Pacino’s dark eyes dart around frantically in his otherwise immobile face. His whole future—his rise to power and his incalculable loss of humanity—is anticipated in that moment.”35 Little wonder that this scene helped to convince the Paramount bosses that perhaps both Coppola and Pacino knew what they were doing.
After he liquidates Sollozzo and the rogue cop, Michael escapes into temporary exile in Sicily in order to be out of the reach of reprisals. While in Sicily Michael meets and marries Apollonia, a beautiful peasant girl. Despite the bodyguards that surround Michael and his new bride, Apollonia dies in an explosion that had been intended to kill Michael. Embittered and brutalized by this never-ending spiral of
revenge, Michael returns to America, where his tough methods of dealing with other mafiosi continue to impress his father, and he gradually emerges as the heir apparent of the aging Don Vito.
Friction between the Corleones and the other Mafia clans continues to mount, and the volatile Sonny is gunned down as the result of a clever ruse. He is lured into making a hurried trip to New York from the Corleones’ compound on Long Island without his bodyguard. En route he stops to pay the toll on a causeway, where he is pulverized by an execution squad with submachine guns. A barrage of bullets blasts Sonny’s Lincoln Continental and riddles Sonny’s body as he writhes in agony.
The tollgate massacre was inspired by the death of the outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in Arthur Penn’s film Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Penn depicted the ambush of Bonnie and Clyde by police officers as a montage sequence, which became known as “the ballet of blood,” and Coppola’s tollgate ambush is equally stunning. “My Dad used to say, ‘Only steal from the best,’” says Coppola in his commentary.
Coppola was not satisfied with the last conversation in the movie between Vito Corleone and Michael in the don’s garden, which occurs just before the don’s demise. In it Vito passes on the leadership of the Corleone family to his son. The scene as originally written appears in the shooting script dated March 29, 1971, which is on file in the Paramount Script Repository. It fails to convey clearly the transition of power from one generation to the next. Coppola turned to Robert Towne, a renowned script consultant, to rewrite the scene.
“Towne needed to create new material that combined … a subtle transfer of power, expressions of love, respect, and parental regret,” Lebo explains. “Vito is obliged to pass the cup, and Michael is obliged to take it.”36 Towne’s rewrite, as it appears in the published version of the screenplay, includes Vito’s explanation to his son of the life that the don has lived:
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