The Making of Scarface (1983) ,- AL PACINO Interview, + Cast

please welcome Steven Bauer Michelle Pfeiffer why DePalma Al Pacino so why don't we start at the beginning which would be with the person who discovered the idea of this film and that would be how could she know how did how did you come to think of this well I was on a rare occasion in those days I was in Los Angeles and I I there was a few of us five or six of us walking up sunset and in those days there was a movie house called a Tiffany and in it was a movie playing directed by Howard Hawks starring Paul Muni and it was called Scarface and I had heard about that film my entire life I just was stunned by it I was stunned by the story and completely taken by Paul Muni performance after I saw that I thought I just want to I want to be him you know I want to be Paul Muni I want to act like that I want to try or something yeah of course it was a great leader ected film to Howard Hawks was and was Howard Hawks and and so afterward I called Martin Bregman now Marty Bregman who is I've been in five movies with you know Martin Bregman Dog Day Afternoon Serpico Carlito's Way sea of love it just is endless and he was my my go-to partner and I just said Marty you ever hear of a movie called Scarface and I don't remember what he said I know he was in some dark apartment for some reason I could just feel it on the phone I thought it was the apartment I had become familiar with and I said are you all right he said yes because he's three hours ahead I was in LA I said I just saw this film Scarface with Paul Muni I can can you find out more about it because I think it's a movie we should make I think we can make it together so he said Scarface and something and started looking into it and that was all he needed because after he saw you know he got people involved in one of the first people that were was involved was Oliver Stone I love a stone wrote this you know I wish he was here tonight and and that was that was the start of it and then we had Sydney lament for a while who whose idea it was actually to make it Cuban with the boatlift there in the eighties he said yeah because in a way Paul Muniz character was an immigrant from Italy and this was so it was that that that that transaction and then things happened and that got separated and then the great Brian De Palma was taken on as amazing so and the risk followed I'd they had me and they then got everybody else Michelle and Steven and Elizabeth and all the great actors in his in this piece I just came and they just and in those days we actually rehearsed a lot was shocking yet and of course Steven I have to say this now while we're in this sort of chained you know that that it was it was it was Steven that really helped me a lot with the Cuban Todd and we spent how many months do you cause I'm really Cuban that's what he said he was really cubed yeah yeah when we first got together they finally put us together and I go into this office and there he is waiting for me after all this build-up from the guys from from Bregman and from and from Brian and and we smile and we fall in love and everything and then but al goes I just gotta ask you something why is your name Steve power if you're really Cuban why Steve power I said it's my stage name no one can pronounce it every ax I'd say very yeah can you now I can't we can you're always teaching me something everybody that's what he would do when we were together we spent literally months to you yeah you've been once well if we had that luxury though didn't we yes week which I don't know I don't know that people have that now I don't do movies anymore but those no it is different that it is different today they don't have that we had a couple of months to be together the whole summer actually all summer yeah and we took I lived in Malibu in a little hovel on PCH and then al took house a beautiful house and I would come over every day for breakfast and then people would come by Johnny Carson and mighty Sheen and and and all he's green know Johnny Carson used to walk by you and you're near me we never said hello he walked for Nadia she would come by Marty would come over yeah but we spent every day for just about a month just not reading the script yeah just talking about our lives is the secret that's how when people say how do you guys have that chemistry because we spent all that time talking about our lives in Cuba previous to the first shot in what he taught me was that will imbue your performance and so that was very easy and cool and we did it every day for about a month and then Brian had us actually gave us the luxury of doing rehearsals here's a question you all have had children and when you were making this movie you might not have thought that someday you would have to say that you made a movie in which [ __ ] is used 226 times or 1.3 to [ __ ] a minute but who's counting no it got counted the question is what did you tell your kids when they said what did what is movie Scarface what did you tell them well in those days I would imagine that [ __ ] was used a lot yeah unlike today just by movies I think my like kids did nothing about it when I they saw it they didn't even mention it I chose so that was not surprising somehow I don't know this is 35 years ago but it was big enough but it was but it was but it was singular enough that the critic at the time the Time magazine critic I remember Richard Schickel are you probably long gone anyway he made a point of it he counted and that was part of his review really why do you think it was used so much I wonder it's an interesting thought as to what what was it and put there to do was it to heighten the already heightened vision of Brian's and and in general all of us because I think that that was part of it I think that that bombast was part of what we were trying to say with the movie as as as it was bigger than life and it was operatic and brutal so we come now to Brian in the original had it come sooner or later Brian in in the original Scarface when a character was killed there was an X on the screen was there not you've got an X rating yes and you got it three times that's correct and then you changed it to so it could get an R no and then you release the x-rated no he just fooled them I would submit it to the ratings board I had battled with the ratings board through a whole bunch of movies I had made and this was our last skirmish and I kept on submitting versions of it and they say it's the next so changed it a little bit took a few more things out when I submitted it a second time it got an X then I submitted a third time and I think they were upset about the hits in the clown remember the clown it shot the very bothered by the a very very unpleasant very violent it's just too much so at which point I said I've had it with these people I'm not taking anything that more out and I told Marty and Marty said well we'll go to war with these people and that's what we did and we've got a war we're gonna war and to make sure that everybody understands that I they said okay then you we were gonna go to war with the third version I said no no no no we're gonna put the movie exactly the way I originally cut it if I got a nix on the third I got an X on the second I got an X on the first we're going with the original version and they said you can't do that and I said why not they had they didn't have an answer for that and ultimately we had to appear Marty organized the very good presentation in front of the whole board and we won was that one of the great moments that we had we beat the censor board so Bryan checkoff says if you see a gun in the first act if it's fire than the second act at the start of the film you have a chainsaw there's nowhere you can go from there but more did you ever sit what was going on did you think this is like very over-the-top no no that was an Oliver script that he had you know followed reporters in Florida this was based on an incident of the you know chopping people up and changed so I wasn't dumping them in the garbage yes but they don't put this they don't usually put this in the movies yeah it was a first well I don't usually have over 200 [ __ ] in a movie either thank you I thought you had to show that these were a different kind of gangsters and so let's show in the beginning what kind of violence you're going to be dealing with Sean as the father of a daughter I'm concerned with body image the preparation for this film what did you weigh I don't know I mean you were I was playing a cocaine addict to my point yeah so that was part of the physicality of the part which you have to consider yeah so but I do remember you know the movie was only supposed to be what a three month four month of shoot it ended up being and then of course I tried to time it so that as the movie went on I became thinner and thinner and more emaciated the problem was the movie went six months eight months it I was starving by the end of it because the one seeing which was the end of the film where I needed to be my thinnest it was like it was next week and then it was next week and then it was next week I literally had members of the crew bringing me bagels because they were all worried about me at health and I was getting I think I was living on tomato soup and control can you remember your first meal after the shoot no it was probably a Mexican food Koby chips and guacamole or something like that at Lucy's Ella dope I'm curious since you are Cuban since you are Esteban Ernesto at Chavarria Sampson by birth and you came here when you were four years old and lived in Miami how did the Cubans take to you playing this role I didn't tell anybody really the extent of the mayhem that we would be a part of but people knew in a sense they just didn't know that we were gonna depict what was actually going on in the city they were there the murder the the body count in Miami at that time and if you see that we were actually shooting while that was still going on and a lot of the old-school Cubans who are concerned with me and what I tried to convey to them was relax man it's a movie you know just take it easy and be happy for me so you know as as Steven just said this is a movie but you were in another movie which is bigger than all the other movies ever put together in the history of Godfather and you have lines in that movie that are memorable and yet the line that is most memorable comes from this movie what do you do when people come up to you and say could you say that line for most say hello to my little friend yes I say hello that's an all of us thumbs out there somewhere I must say Oliver Stone so as he did so many wonderful lines in this in this movie you know and it's it's it's it's caught on in such a way and we all have experienced it you know this wasn't the way it started because when Scarface first came out it was extremely controversial you can imagine this kind of movie and it stays in our in our lexicon in a way and it's around and it's a part of our culture in a strange way is a good very interesting book written about it called Scarface nation as to some of the reasons they think it is and they still come away not knowing why why it is why it's still here and why it still lives by language welcomes iconic white dialogue becomes like and why this kind of spirit in the movie why this kind of thrust in a movie stays so somehow relevant you know well there's another line in the movie which could perhaps suggest this like for this year who put this thing together me me who do I trust me who does it sound like let's see George Washington okay that comes to mind let's try an easier question 400 who's more evil Tony Montana in this movie or Satan in the devil's advocate well we know it's Satan in the devil's advocate and here's the reason because that's really the devil yes you know I wanted to say in that gunfight because I think what I wanted to say it because it's a very interesting story that you know the gunfight at the end they whatever you want to the finale yes this is an opera and I remember firing off rounds and and machine and I fired about 30 rounds and somebody then shot me and I got hit and I flew in the air and landed and you know I'm still sort of alive and ready it was a lot of support there you know well that cocaine really keeps you going and so there I was and when I grabbed the the barrel of the gun I just fired my hands stuck to it it just stuck to it and so I remember someone had to get me you know and then it was over and we had to go to the hospital with burns for a great two weeks off and then so Brian you've got two weeks off the film but here's the thing I was in the hospital and I'm standing there like you know and I get all this blood this blood all over me nurses coming back and forth and I'm standing there like this with Polat holding my hand up and finally they wrap it up and stuff you know and this nurse comes up to me later and she says you're al pacino I said yeah yeah versus I thought she was some scumbag I said I mean it there's something there you know I mean interesting so Brian a couple questions what did you do during the two weeks that the movie was off we shot everything that al was shooting so you see those 8,000 kids come in and try to shoot him we shot everything away from Al that's why there's so much shooting because we just kept shooting yeah all those guys also little guys creeping up and I had I've read that Steven Spielberg took one shot on this movie I look really closely I couldn't tell what it was what was it I don't know Steven was on the set one day and we had like four cameras running and Steven with the mirrors he was he was shooting one of the cameras you know because we used multiple cameras when the kids ran in and shot toward us let's talk about themes for a moment Oliver Stone wrote Scarface in a few years later he wrote Wall Street to some degree that the same movie are they not their movies about greed is that do you think what the movie is ultimately about what's your sense of it well I've always been interested in making movies about people that start rather humbly and then acquire a great deal of power and then ultimately isolate themselves and sort of live in their own world could that be anything we're experiencing now comfort zone Michelle comfort zone there's a a remake of this movie that's been discussed the cones have done a script it goes back and forth who knows could you see a remake of this film in which the Tony Montana character is female No no I think it's quite remarkable that the movie we made is a remake of a really great movie that's really hard to do yeah so Brian if you were making the movie now would you have Tony Montana be Russian would he be Mark Zuckerberg I thought Oliver had a very fantastic idea you know making with these Cubans coming to America and I like obviously making gangster movies with you know gangsters that are a Latin American because not only do you have the guns you have the beautiful colors and you also have the dancing Michelle you've described your role in this movie as a set piece right you're the arm piece you're the female person who gets acted on but you've also said that owning and claiming your performance within that is important what is it like to claim your performance against what Al is doing well I get asked a lot what did I learn from working with one of the greats like Al Pacino and I have to say one of the things that hit me the strongest from the beginning was watching him fiercely protect his character and really at all costs and without any sort of apology and and I have always tried to emulate that and I try to be polite about it but I think that that's I think that that's what really makes great acting you know and I think it's and so I I really tried to emulate his process and you know the other thing about Elvita is that you know because I remember at the time even then I kind of got a lot of questions about well you know you're playing you know somebody who's subservient what is what what sort of message is that sending to women and and I was also in my early 20s I hadn't actually thought about that a lot at the time but I mean I really feel that sometimes you can do a lot more for a cause by actually I mean being an artist it's really presenting to people what is the truth and not sugar-coated and I felt that by allowing people to observe who this character is and the sacrifices that she's made said more than getting up on any soapbox and sort of you know you know preaching to people and it's so beautiful in Soho so subtle whip we have time for one more question I guess how it goes to you so yes what did you take away from this movie what did you learn about yourself as an actor as a person and as a there's a significant figure in the world there's that that's three questions okay let me ask it another way okay you make a lot of movies and sometimes you get a feeling that this what you're doing is really really good did you have that feeling oh I see what you're saying I did have a feeling I must say this it's true because there are certain roles you feel that you can find that that channel we all have them sometimes they come a little more a little less but with Scarface I must say there was something about the preparation there was something about the text and Bryan working together with every that I found that that channel in myself that I felt this is about something that I really want to say in some way and I think basically that's what we all feel and sometimes we don't do it here consciously it comes unconsciously but you you feel you you're on some track and and because it's there's also roles you play that you go off the track but with Scarface I felt consistent in a certain way about can I can I just said that that a lot of times you find yourself with the the director that the the captain of the ship has an agenda that is not necessarily yours or the or even the cast they've got their own separate agenda and to Brian's credit what I've always felt through the years watching the movie over and over again and in the editing of course and he was there he was with he was editing the movie is that he had the wisdom and the innate feeling that the actors he chose to tell this story knew what the they were doing right Brian and you let us go you let us go you let us fly yeah yeah but the amazing thing to me is seeing this movie again and again is the extraordinary performances I mean you just look at these actors so but you let us fly here we are all these years later still captivated let us thank these people oh thank you thank you for coming [Applause]

Channel: Big Dream Factory

Views: 288,683

Keywords: The Making of Scarface (1983) - AL PACINO Interview + Cast, The Making of Scarface (1983), - AL PACINO Interview, + Cast

Id: oUY8NFkD_M4

Length: 27min 7sec (1627 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 02 2019