The Godfather "When the Shooting Stopped"

[Music] i had seen several rough cuts and obviously i loved the movie i mean i thought it was brilliant i was here in san francisco editing the film yeah that worked good when bob evans told me that francis if you bring the film down to la and show it to me and it's over two hours and ten minutes we're going to yank the film and bring it and finish cutting it in la which is something i really didn't want i wanted to stay in san francisco because i had control of it he said you know they're going to take this movie away from me if it's one minute over what is in the contract and they're waiting to do that so we removed about half hour and brought it down to paramount and showed it to them and evans was very grave and he looked at me and he says you know you shot a movie but you brought me a trailer and we're taking the film to la so i figured oh i get it if i had shown you the 2 hour and 45 version you're taking it to la and i show you the two hour 10 version you take so you were going to take it to la no matter what i did so i shrugged and i just put the half hour back into it when they saw it short even they realized that they couldn't stand by their contract that actually it was really a very very good movie [Music] films before that if they were over two and a half hours long had an intermission and i think it was evans's decision uh not to let them off the hook he said no because we were ready to put an intermission in after the killing of seleza that was where it was going to go that those big operatic cords were going to say intermission and then the montage that followed that would be to get you back into the movie and evan said no we're not going to have an intermission it's too powerful we don't want to let them off the hook [Music] nino rota wrote the music nino was the composer for fellini and francis had great admiration for all of nino's tracks and he wanted that kind of sound for the film of course it's one of the most identifiable pieces of music that exists for motion pictures but it was not well received by the studio when it was first heard the reaction was get rid of it it's wrong for the film and the focus came on the horse's head seen it was one of the things that evans mentioned i hate that music and we thought well what's there to hate but i looked at it later um and as it was written and in fact it it got too ominous too soon so i ordered up another print of the opening trumpet and thought maybe if we use that as the opening piece of music [Music] and just faintly hear that music and hear the crickets and then at a certain point we can make a crossfade to the music as it was written when you first noticed that there's blood on the sheets you're hearing actually two pieces of music at the same time it just makes you feel kind of queasy and you don't know why [Music] and then once the sheet gets pulled back [Music] so i prepared this um piece of recut music and called up evans office and said i'd like to show mr evans something that we've an experiment that we've done with the horses had seen [Music] it finished the theater stayed in darkness for a moment and he said it's great it's great get me a telephone i would love to see all the scenes that were never included because there's a very brave thing he did in terms of time and jumping time he's in sicily but when he suddenly comes home kaye is walking with all these school kids and michael pulls up in the car and gets out and he and kay see each other and a lot of time has passed long have you been back i've been back a year and michael in one cut looks like the michael that we're about to see in godfather two it's good to see you okay whatever scar tissue has grown to clog one of the arteries to his heart i'm working for my father now okay it happened off camera he's been sick and maybe some stuff on the cutting room floor or with just an audaciously brave time cut i thought you weren't going to become a man like your father that's what you told me but we see him in sicily and he loses his wife and the next time we see michael corleone he is the godfather that we are going to witness throughout the evolution of that picture and right into the next two films the reason i made the godfather 2 was because i'd always wanted to do an original personal art film about a father and a son at the same age i think the dramaturgy of godfather two is just flimsy enough that it needed the juxtaposition of the two eras that one helped the other godfather two maybe is more francis ford coppola's movie because it takes huge chances in in changing the form of storytelling and and altering the the common narrative michael say goodbye usually when you're editing a movie you find the internal pace of it and it's a building process that pace can accelerate or slow as the story dictates but usually it's it's a pace that builds and then delivers you to the end of the film because of the structure of godfather 2 and the difference in the pace of the two internal stories one was always doing a change up on that pace and often it would pull the rug out from under your feet and ultimately that was the difficulty in the structuring of the film how you could still keep the audience emotionally involved in the film by still keeping the integrity of the material of course when we finished it and first showed that people didn't like it generally the response was oh well it's not as good as the first one i remember one screening i showed it and that was that reaction i was so embarrassed i at this party i just went and hid under the bed and i just watched everyone's feet because i could hear their comments about it you know and then finally i got these ideas and with my editors i worked on it for like a feverish five days and made 120 picture changes when you shorten the story and keep cutting away from it you limit emotional involvement in francis's ultimate decision was that we would try and cut back and forth fewer times to keep the audience involved and then we previewed it in san diego and the reaction was much better [Music] it was more of a hollywood tradition in the storytelling with godfather one and there was an anti-hollywood approach to the telling of the second godfather story [Music] finally the picture came out and it got not good reviews but then little by little over the months i've started hearing you know the second guy you know i like that even better than the first one and then of course by the end of the year uh when it won all these oscars i mean again i was astonished for a second time all right [Music] i remember working on on the beginning of godfather 3 while lisa fruchmann was working on the end of godfather 3 after mary's death and michael screaming at this horrible thing that had happened [Music] and as editors do they play the scene over and over again and so during the course of the day i heard that scream and other screams many many times that planted the seed for an idea which was the inverse the opposite of the subway sound in godfather 1. in that scene we have a very emotionless face and yet the sound is this intense screaming of metal and there's a wonderful juxtaposition between his seeming passivity compared to what clemenza asked him to do and this screaming sound and here at the end of the film is kind of the opposite it's this is the scream that in a sense he should have screamed back when he committed that first murder which caused his whole life to turn upside down and to create this nightmare that was his life and now the nightmare has really come true his daughter's dead the very the family that he was trying to protect is dead oh god oh god so i thought since he's got diabetes and trouble with his heart maybe this will kill him so what would happen if we pulled the screen out so that you saw a face and you saw somebody exerting a tremendous amount of effort but you didn't hear anything and that gives us the opportunity to cut to a number of the other participants we see each of them wondering what's going to happen [Music] and then he collapses and that allows us also to uh do something that was that came up in the post-production which is to go back to him dancing with the women in his life [Music] [Music] observing a man's decline is often a little more fascinating than watching the rise of a career the fact that you love the first god father so and you love brando with the whole family and then yet when you sit back and you realize the life that they lead and the choices that they've made michael is you know the moral justice that comes with those acts you

Channel: Jack Traven

Views: 401,981

Rating: 4.8473363 out of 5

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Id: lAUpAA3qltw

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 02 2017