Al Pacino pushed to cut 'bulls---' Dog Day Afternoon scene with Chris Sarandon in Marilyn Monroe drag

When Al Pacino is not afraid to stand his ground to defend the integrity of his on-screen characters, even if that means butting heads with his director.

In his new memoir Sonny Boy, Pacino shared that his experience making 1975's Dog Day Afternoon was generally great, but "there was one thing that bothered me." He explained that the script originally contained a scene in which, "in the middle of this whole hostage crisis, Sonny's lover, Leon, played by Chris Sarandon, comes to the bank dressed as Marilyn Monroe, and they kiss outside in front of everybody."

Pacino recalled thinking, "This is absurd. It didn't happen that way," referring to the real life events that inspired the movie. "I guess the filmmakers wanted to pump up the volume on the situation, but it was bulls---," he surmised.

Dog Day Afternoon is about a bank robbery gone awry. Mid-way through the film, it's revealed that the primary robber, Pacino's Sonny Wortzik, was motivated to commit the crime to pay for his partner Leon's gender affirmation operation. The film was inspired by the real story of John Wojtowicz, who robbed a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank in Brooklyn in 1972 to finance a similar operation for his partner Eden.

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When Pacino saw the way director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Frank Pierson had embellished the details of John and Eden's real story, he thought, "Not only was it not true, it was overly exaggerated - a comedic send-up of some sort that minimized the situation."

Pacino said he got into a "big argument" about it with his manager, Pierson, and Lumet. "I said, 'We are dealing with human beings, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual. We're just human beings.' I thought, Why are we talking about this? Would the cops have let that kind of display take place?"

He elaborated, "In our film, the police allow Sonny and Leon to have a phone call in which they are effectively telling each other goodbye. This film was based on a true story, after all, and I did the research and found that they made a phone call. They didn't kiss - they didn't even touch. No one was dressed up as Marilyn Monroe. It never went down like that."

The Oscar winner wrote that he and Sarandon had "rehearsed together and had already been filming for several weeks by that point," so the director "let us work out the dialogue of that phone call through improvisation, which he would then use to write the scene."

Pacino described the re-write as "Lumet magic," but it's as much, if not more, a credit to Pacino's integrity. He called his Dog Day Afternoon character's sexuality "a complex thing," writing, "What I interpreted from the screenplay was that he is a man with a wife and kids who also happens to be in an affair with a person who identifies as a woman, and who today we would understand is transgender. But knowing this about him didn't excite me or bother me; it didn't make the role seem any more appealing or risky."

He explained that, "Though I may be a kid who started in the South Bronx, I had been living in [New York City's East] Village since my teens. I had friends, roommates, and colleagues who were attracted to different people than I was attracted to, and none of that was ever rebellious or groundbreaking or unusual. It just was."

Pacino took on a number of potentially controversial queer roles over the course of his career, from the ambiguously gay undercover cop Steve Burns in Cruising, to the real-life closeted arch-conservative Roy Cohn in Angels in America.

"Perhaps at the time of Dog Day Afternoon it was an uncommon thing to have a main character in a Hollywood movie who was gay or queer, and who was treated as heroic or worthy of an audience's affection," Pacino wrote. "But you have to understand that none of that enters into my consideration." For Pacino, it's all about being "an actor portraying a character in a film," "playing the part because I think I can bring something to the role," and "[finding] as much humanity as there is that I can portray."

Sonny Boy is out now.