The production of The Godfather began in 1971 under intense pressure from Paramount Pictures. The studio executives did not want Francis Ford Coppola to direct the film. They only hired him because he was a young Italian-American who would work for a low salary. Coppola fought with the studio daily over his creative choices. The studio wanted a cheap gangster movie, but Coppola wanted to create a complex family drama.
The Battle for the Lead Actors
The casting of the lead roles was the most difficult part of the pre-production process. Paramount executives strongly opposed the casting of Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone. They claimed he was difficult to work with and no longer a box-office draw. Coppola insisted on Brando and arranged a secret screen test. Brando used black shoe polish on his hair and stuffed cotton balls into his cheeks to look older and more intimidating. When the executives saw the footage, they finally agreed to hire him.
Al Pacino was also a controversial choice for the role of Michael Corleone. The studio referred to him as “that little dwarf” because of his height. They wanted a more established star like Robert Redford or Warren Beatty. Coppola almost lost his job defending Pacino. During the first few days of filming, the studio remained unhappy with Pacino’s quiet performance. Everything changed during the filming of the restaurant scene where Michael kills Sollozzo and McCluskey. Pacino’s intense performance convinced the studio that he was the right actor for the role.
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Realism on the Set
Coppola used several techniques to make the film feel authentic. The cat held by Marlon Brando in the opening scene was a stray that Coppola found wandering around the Filmways Studio in Harlem. The cat purred so loudly that the crew had to re-record Brando’s dialogue in post-production. The cat was not in the original script. Brando simply picked it up and kept it in his lap during the shoot.
One of the most famous props in the film was the severed horse head found in Jack Woltz’s bed. The production team initially used a fake head made by the art department. Coppola found the fake head unimpressive and decided he needed a real one. The crew contacted a dog food factory and asked for the head of a horse that was scheduled to be slaughtered. They packed the real head in ice and delivered it to the set for the filming of the scene.
The actor who played Luca Brasi, Lenny Montana, was a professional wrestler and a real-life mob bodyguard. He was so nervous about acting opposite Marlon Brando that he fumbled his lines during his first scene. Coppola liked the nervous energy and kept it in the movie. He even added a scene showing Luca Brasi practicing his speech to show that the character was intimidated by the Godfather.
The Lighting and the Oranges
Cinematographer Gordon Willis changed the way movies were lit. He earned the nickname “The Prince of Darkness” because he used very little light on the sets. He purposefully kept the eyes of the characters in shadow to suggest that they were hiding their thoughts. This went against the standard Hollywood practice of lighting every actor’s face clearly. Willis and Coppola wanted the film to have a dark, moody look that felt like a period piece.
The art department used oranges as a recurring visual motif. Oranges appear in almost every scene where a death or a tragedy is about to occur. For example, Vito Corleone is buying oranges when he is shot in the street. Oranges are also on the table during the meeting of the Five Families. The crew did not originally intend for the oranges to have a symbolic meaning. They simply used them to add bright spots of color to the dark, brown-toned sets.
Creating Part II and Part III
When it came time to make The Godfather Part II, Coppola initially refused to direct. He suggested that Martin Scorsese should take over the project. Paramount eventually convinced Coppola to return by giving him total creative control and a massive budget. This film was one of the first major sequels to use “Part II” in its title. The studio thought the title would confuse audiences, but Coppola insisted on it.
Robert De Niro played the young Vito Corleone in the sequel. He had originally auditioned for the role of Sonny Corleone in the first film. To prepare for the role of young Vito, De Niro moved to Sicily for several months. He lived among the locals to learn the specific Sicilian dialect and gestures. He studied Marlon Brando’s performance from the first film to ensure his voice and movements matched the older version of the character.
The production of The Godfather Part III in 1990 faced its own set of challenges. Robert Duvall did not return as Tom Hagen because the studio refused to pay him a salary equal to Al Pacino’s. This forced the writers to kill off the character of Tom Hagen off-screen. Winona Ryder was originally cast to play Michael’s daughter, Mary Corleone. She arrived in Rome to film but pulled out of the project due to exhaustion. Coppola cast his daughter, Sofia Coppola, as a last-minute replacement.
Filming for the third movie took place largely in Sicily. The climactic opera sequence was shot at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo. The production had to work around the schedule of the opera house. The crew spent weeks filming the complex sequence where multiple assassinations happen during the performance of Cavalleria Rusticana. The final scene of the trilogy, showing an elderly Michael Corleone alone in a garden, was filmed at a villa in Sicily. This location was the same house used in the first film for the wedding of Don Tommasino.
