Al Pacino recalls meeting Godfather costar Marlon Brando covered in chicken cacciatore: 'Gobble gobble gobble'

Leave the gun, take the cacciatore.

Al Pacino reflects on talking to Marlon Brando for the first time on the set of The Godfather in his upcoming memoir, Sonny Boy, saying the On the Waterfront actor behaved so bizarrely that he barely remembers what they talked about.

After he was briefly introduced to him at a cast dinner, Pacino said he was forced to have lunch with the star playing his father after director Francis Ford Coppola insisted on it.

"I actually didn't want to talk to him. I thought it was not necessary," Pacino writes of the encounter in a new excerpt from the book published in The Guardian. "The discomfort I felt at just the thought of it — 'You mean I have to have lunch with him?' Seriously, it f---ing scared me. He was the greatest living actor of our time. I grew up on actors like him — larger-than-life people like Clark Gable and Cary Grant. They were famous when fame meant something, before the bloom went off the rose. But Francis said 'you have to' and so I did."

Pacino said his first proper conversation with the Streetcar Named Desire actor occurred on the set of the scene in which his character Michael Corleone visits his father, Vito, in a shady abandoned hospital. "He was sitting on one hospital bed, I was sitting on the other," he recalled. "He was asking me questions: Where am I from? How long have I been an actor?"

Unfortunately, Brando munching on his meal made it difficult for Pacino to focus. "He was eating chicken cacciatore with his hands," the Dog Day Afternoon star remembered. "His hands were full of red sauce. So was his face. And that's all I could think about the whole time. Whatever his words were, my conscious mind was fixated by the stain-covered sight in front of me. He was talking — gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble — and I was just mesmerized."

Pacino was also troubled by the mess. "What was he going to do with the chicken?" he wondered. "I hoped he wasn't going to tell me to throw it in the garbage for him. He disposed of it somehow without getting up. He looked at me in a quizzical way, as if to ask, 'What are you thinking about?' I was wondering, 'What is he going to do with his hands? Should I get him a napkin?' Before I could, he spread both his hands across the white hospital bed and smeared the sheets with red sauce, without even thinking about it, and he kept on talking."

The Heat star was flabbergasted by Brando's carefree (or careless?) behavior. "I thought, 'Is that how movie stars act? You can do anything,'" he remembered. "When our lunch was over, Marlon looked at me with those gentle eyes of his and said, 'Yeah, kid, you're gonna be all right.' I was taught to be polite and grateful, so I probably just said thank you to him. I was too scared to say anything at all. What I should have said was, 'Can you define "all right?"'"

Pacino remains in awe of Brando's performance in The Godfather, which he thinks is the primary reason for the film's lasting resonance. "Marlon showed me generosity, too, but I don't think he saved it all for me, because he shared it with the audience," he writes in Sonny Boy. "It's what made his performance so memorable and so endearing. We all fantasize about having someone like Don Vito we can turn to. So many people are abused in this life, but if you've got a Godfather, you've got someone you can go to, and they will take care of it."

He continued, "That's why people responded to him in the film. It was more than just the bravado and the boldness; it was the humanity underneath it. That's why he had to play Vito larger than life — his physical size, the shoe polish in his hair, the cotton in his cheeks. His Godfather had to be an icon, and Brando made him as iconic as Citizen Kane or Superman, Julius Caesar or George Washington."

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Pacino's new memoir ,Sonny Boy, hits shelves Oct. 15.