Francis Ford Coppola nearly fired Al Pacino from The Godfather a week into shooting: 'You're not cutting it'

The Godfather made Al Pacino a star, setting him on a path toward one of the most singular and inimitable careers in Hollywood history. It was also so difficult for the actor to make that he was nearly fired multiple times.

Pacino recalled the rocky road to cinematic glory in his new memoir Sonny Boy. "You know how much you mean to me, how much faith I had in you," Pacino recalled his director, Francis Ford Coppola telling him only "a week and a half" into shooting. "And Francis said, 'Well, you're not cutting it.'"

Pacino continued, "I felt that one in the pit of my stomach. It's when it finally hit me that my job was on the line. I said to Francis, 'What do we do here?' He said, 'I put together rushes of what we've shot already. Why don't you take a look at it yourself? Because I don't think it's working. You're not working.'"

This wasn't even the first time Pacino was almost axed from the film, and it wouldn't be the last. Pacino began his discussion of his experience shooting The Godfather by writing, "Paramount didn't want me to play Michael Corleone. They wanted Jack Nicholson, They wanted Robert Redford. They wanted Warren Beatty or Ryan O'Neal."

It didn't matter that in Mario Puzo's source novel, Corleone crime family heir Michael was described as "small, dark-haired, handsome in a delicate way, no visible threat to anybody." As Pacino wrote, "That didn't sound like the guys that the studio wanted. But that didn't mean it had to be me."

Pacino explained that the studio had "rejected Francis's entire cast," including James Caan and Robert Duvall, who were far more established than Pacino, who by then had only appeared in a single scene of the Patty Duke comedy Me, Natalie and the addiction drama The Panic in Needle Park. The weight of the entire Godfather story rested on Pacino's shoulders, so his performance on set after Coppola eventually won the battle with Paramount was, well, paramount.

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But coming from the Method school of acting developed by Lee Strasberg, who taught Pacino at the Actors Studio in New York, didn't set Pacino up to be able to dive into a character as quickly as his director needed him to.

"It was impossible for the impact of the role to come through," he wrote. "My interpretation of Michael was like planting a garden; it would take a certain amount of time in the story for the flowers to grow."

The first sequence shot for the film was the wedding of Don Vito Corleone's (Marlon Brando) daughter Connie (Talia Shire) to the Judas Carlo Rizzi (Gianni Russo). Pacino learned quickly that Coppola's budget did not allow time to watch his star's flowers grow, so Pacino would need to develop a new style.

"Back in Hollywood, Paramount started to look at the film that Francis had shot, and they were once again questioning whether I was the right actor for the part," Pacino wrote. Coppola agreed, and in grand high Godfather style, invited him to a dinner with the full Coppola family, where he "didn't invite me to sit down with him," and told Pacino to watch the rushes and retool his approach.

It was tough to hear, but when Pacino did watch the assembled footage, "I thought to myself, 'I don't think there's anything spectacular here.'" Through a combination of Coppola reorganizing the shooting schedule to give Pacino some more emotive scenes up front and Pacino forcing his trademark ferocity to the surface, The Godfather eventually got back on track.

When the time came to shoot Michael's wedding to Apollonia Vitelli (Simonetta Stefanelli) in Sicily, Coppola was still blowing gaskets over Pacino's unique, often circuitous approach to his performance. But the pair had developed a rapport that allowed Pacino to help them both shrug off Coppola's worries.

Coppola asked Pacino to do three things in Sicily: "First, go over there and speak to the people in the scene. Then, turn away from them and go to your bride and dance the waltz with her. After that, go off with her to the car and drive away." When Pacino informed him, "I don't really speak Italian," "I don't know how to waltz," and "I don't know how to drive," Coppola erupted. "Why did I ever hire you? What can you do?"

"I don't know if it would matter, but I can basket weave, so I'll be ahead of the game when they come to cart me away," Pacino joked, as "the extras broke into laughter," dissolving the tension on set. Pacino stayed on as Michael to the end, and The Godfather released to unanimous acclaim, going on to earn 11 Oscar nominations and win three.