Brando (47 page)

   When I was nominated for
The Godfather
, it seemed absurd to go to the Awards ceremonies. Celebrating an industry that had systematically misrepresented and maligned American Indians for six decades, while at that moment two hundred Indians were under siege at Wounded Knee, was ludicrous. Still, if I did win an Oscar, I realized it could provide the first opportunity in history for an American Indian to speak to sixty million people—a little payback for years of defamation by Hollywood. So I asked a friend, Sacheen Little Feather, to attend the ceremony in my place and wrote a statement for her to deliver in my name denouncing the treatment of American Indians and racism in general. But Howard Koch, the producer of the show, intercepted her and, in his wisdom, refused to let her read my speech. Instead, under great pressure she had to adlib a few words on behalf of the American Indian, and it made me proud of her.

I don’t know what happened to that Oscar. The Motion Picture Academy may have sent it to me, but if it did I don’t know where it is now.

   Mario Puzo sent me a copy of
The Godfather
shortly after it was published, along with a note saying that if a movie was ever made from the book, he thought I should play Don Corleone, the head of the New York Mafia family he had written about. I read the note but wasn’t interested. Alice Marchak remembers my throwing it away and saying, “I’m not a Mafia godfather.” I had never played an Italian before, and I didn’t think I could do it successfully. By then I had learned that one of the biggest mistakes an actor can make is to try to play a role for which he is miscast. You have to take a few risks now and then, but some parts you shouldn’t play no matter how much they pay you, just as some roles are best left alone because they’ve already been done unforgettably by someone else. Only a foolish actor, for example, would try to succeed Jimmy Cagney as George M. Cohan, Robert Donat as Mr. Chips or Charles Laughton as the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

But Alice took the book home, read it and said she thought I should take the part if it was offered me. She didn’t change my mind, though I did call Mario without having read the book and thanked him for his note. Mario, who had sold the film rights to Paramount, began writing a screenplay based on the book and called me from time to time and encouraged me to reconsider, without telling me that he was lobbying on my behalf at Paramount, where, he later informed me, executives were dead set against my playing the role. The principal resistance came from Charles Bluhdorn, head of Paramount’s parent company, Gulf + Western, and Robert Evans, the chief of production. Bluhdorn believed some of the stories he’d read about my supposed excesses on
Mutiny on the Bounty
, and since Paramount had lost a lot of money recently, he didn’t want to risk losing more on the
The Godfather
. To Evans I looked too young to play Don Corleone, who aged in the story from his late forties to his early seventies. I was then forty-seven.

When Mario sent me the finished screenplay, I read both it and his book and liked them. By then Francis Coppola had signed on as director and was beginning to rewrite portions of Mario’s script. He also said that he wanted me to play the part,
and suggested that I audition for it to convince the executives at Paramount. I told him I had my own doubts, but said I’d let him know.

I went home and did some rehearsing to satisfy my curiosity about whether I could play an Italian. I put on some makeup, stuffed Kleenex in my cheeks, and worked out the characterization first in front of a mirror, then on a television monitor. After working on it, I decided I could create a characterization that would support the story. The people at Paramount saw the footage and liked it, and that’s how I became the Godfather.

A month or two before we were scheduled to start shooting, someone at Paramount—I think it was Evans—said that I looked too heavy to play the part, so I went on a diet. But I lost too much weight and had to put twenty pounds back on before the picture could start.

From the start, the real Mafia took a strong interest in our depiction of the fictional one, much of which was filmed on its turf in Little Italy in New York City. It sent a delegation to Bluhdorn and, I was told after the picture was finished, he agreed to meet certain conditions to obtain its cooperation, including a promise not to mention the word “Mafia” in the picture. I’m sure they let him know that it wouldn’t be difficult for their friends in the New York labor unions to tie up shooting, and as partial payment I suspect that Paramount promised them some jobs on the picture. Several members of the crew were in the Mafia and four or five mafiosi had minor parts. When we were shooting on Mott Street in Little Italy, Joe Bufalino arrived on the set and sent two envoys to my trailer to say that he wanted to meet me. One was a rat-faced man with impeccably groomed hair and a camel’s-hair coat, the other a less elegantly dressed man who was the size of an elephant and nearly tipped over the trailer when he stepped in and said, “Hi, Mario, you’re a great actor.”

When Bufalino arrived, the first thing I noticed about him
was that one of his eyes looked to the left and the other to the right. I didn’t know which one to look at, so, trying not to offend him, I alternated between them. As soon as he sat down, he started complaining about how badly the U.S. government was treating him. Wrapping himself in the American flag, he said he was a good American and a good family man, but the government was trying to deport him. Throwing up his arms, he said, “What do I do?”

I didn’t have an answer, so I didn’t say anything. Then he changed the subject and in a raspy whisper said, “The word’s out you like calamari …”

This startled me. Somehow he’d learned that I often ordered a calamari lunch from one of the Italian restaurants on Mott Street.

Then, as if the two of us were involved in a conspiracy, he said, “You know, Mario, I’d love to have you come over and meet the wife. One night the three of us could all go out for dinner. I’d like you to meet my family.”

“Mr. Bufalino—”

He waved his hand and said, “Call me Joe.”

“Well, Joe, see this script?” I showed it to him, riffling through the pages we were going to film that day. “Joe, this is just today; these are only the lines I have to learn for today, and it’s really hard. I’m not running around chasing girls. I just sit in this trailer learning lines.”

Bufalino seemed disappointed. “Well,” he said, “maybe we can make it for lunch sometime.”

I didn’t know what to do next, so I said, “Have you ever seen a movie set?”

“No, I’ve never been on one before.”

“Well, allow me,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs and I’ll show you around.”

I led him upstairs through a tangle of cables to the set of the office of the olive-oil company used in the picture. Standing
close to me, he looked around and said, “I don’t know how you keep from goin’ nuts, with all these people and all these wires and everything …”

“I agree, Joe. The whole thing is really cockeyed, isn’t it?” Then I looked into his cocked eyes and realized what I’d said. I spun around, trying to divert his attention to something on the set and to get a glimpse of his reaction peripherally. For a moment he blinked and I thought I saw a hurt look flash across his face, but the moment passed, and I babbled a mouthful of mush to fill the air with words, not knowing what in the world I was saying.

At last Joe smiled, thanked me for the tour and left me to get ready for the next shot. “See you, Mario,” he said. “Don’t forget the wife and I would still like you to have dinner with us.”

   There were some terrific actors on
The Godfather
, especially Robert Duvall and Al Pacino. Bobby Duvall is one of those actors who never stop taking dares, which very few actors do. They work so hard at becoming successful that when they reach the top they become cautious and try to do the same thing over and over again because they’re frightened of playing a part in which they might fall on their faces. Duvall takes chances and has fallen on his face, but far more times than not he has established a characterization that is not Duvall. He’s a wonderful actor. The same can be said of Al Pacino. When I met him on
The Godfather
, he was quite troubled. Since then he’s improved and, like Duvall, has shown that he is willing to take a chance and not be afraid where he’s going to land.

At one point Charles Bluhdorn threatened to fire Francis Coppola—I don’t remember why—but I said, “If you fire Francis, I’ll walk off the picture.” I strongly believe that directors are entitled to independence and freedom to realize their vision, though Francis left the characterizations in our hands and we had to figure out what to do. I threw out a lot of what was in the script and created the role as I thought it should be. When you do this, you never know whether it’s going to work; sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. But after I had read the book, I decided that the part of Don Corleone lent itself perfectly to underplaying. Rather than portraying him as a big shot, I thought it would be more effective to play him as a modest, quiet man, the way he was in the book. Don Corleone was part of the wave of immigrants who came to this country around the turn of the century and had to swim upstream to survive as best they could. He had the same hopes and ambitions for his sons that Joseph P. Kennedy had for his. As a young man, he probably hadn’t intended to become a criminal, and when he did, he hoped it would be transitional. As he said to his son Michael, played by Pacino, “I never wanted this for you. I wanted something else. I always thought that you’d be governor or senator or president—something—but there just wasn’t enough time.… There just wasn’t enough time.”

I thought it would be interesting to play a gangster, maybe for the first time in the movies, who wasn’t like those bad guys Edward G. Robinson played, but who was a kind of hero, a man to be respected. Also, because he had so much power and unquestioned authority, I thought it would be an interesting contrast to play him as a gentle man, unlike Al Capone, who beat up people with baseball bats. I had a great deal of respect for Don Corleone; I saw him as a man of substance, tradition, dignity, refinement, a man of unerring instinct who just happened to live in a violent world and who had to protect himself and his family in this environment. I saw him as a decent person regardless of what he had to do, as a man who believed in family values and was shaped by events just like the rest of us. The people who joined the Mafia in those days did so because they were set upon by people who wanted to take advantage of them. There was a war in Little Italy; members of a group called the Black Hand were extorting money from immigrants, who had to pay to safeguard their families and to make a living. Some knuckled under, but others like Don Corleone fought back, and this was the story of
The Godfather
. He would not surrender to the men who demanded a piece of everyone’s action. He was forced to protect his family, and in the process he gravitated into crime.

At the time we made the film in the early seventies, there were not many things you could say about the Mafia that you couldn’t say about other elements in the United States. Was there much difference between mob murders and Operation Phoenix, the CIA’s assassination program in Vietnam? Like the Mafia, it was just business, nothing personal. Certainly there was immorality in the Mafia and a lot of violence, but at heart it was a business; in many ways it didn’t operate much differently from certain multinational corporations that went around knowingly spilling chemical poisons in their wake. The Mafia may kill a lot of people in mob wars, but while we were making the movie, CIA representatives were dealing in drugs in the Golden Triangle, torturing people for information and assassinating them with far more efficiency than the Mob. I can’t see much difference between the assassinations of gangsters like Joey Gallo and the Diem brothers in Vietnam, except that our country did it with greater hypocrisy. When Henry Cabot Lodge went on television and explained the deaths of the Diem brothers, you knew he was flat-out lying, but people didn’t question him because we all believed the myth that the United States was a great country that would never do anything immoral. In many ways people in the Mafia live by a stricter code than do presidents and other politicians; I wonder what would happen if instead of having them swear on a Bible, we required politicians to promise to be honest at the price of having their feet encased in cement and dropped into the Potomac if they weren’t. Political corruption would drop dramatically.

•  •  •

Thanks to a trick I stumbled on while I was making
The Young Lions
, I wasn’t completely honest with Joe Bufalino when I told him I had to memorize my lines that morning he showed up on the set. When I first made movies, I memorized my lines from the script like other actors, or if the script was weak I’d improvise dialogue but still memorize it. As mentioned earlier, I learned on my first picture,
The Men
, how easy it was to spoil your effectiveness in a picture by overrehearsing and digging so deep into a part before filming began that you had nothing left to give when it counted. This had taught me how fragile a characterization can be on film and the importance of spontaneity. So after a while instead of memorizing my lines by rote, I started concentrating only on the meaning or thrust of a line during a scene, working from merely a suggestion of what it was about, and then improvising speeches as I went along so that they seemed spontaneous. The words might vary a little from those in the script, but audiences didn’t know it.

On
The Young Lions
, I discovered an even better way to increase spontaneity. In that picture I had to rewrite a lot of the dialogue as we went along, and one day I didn’t have time to memorize my new lines for one scene, so I wrote them on a piece of paper, pinned the paper to the uniform of one of the other actors and read the lines. The camera shot over my shoulder, showing my face in despair while I read. There was a practical advantage to what I had done because it saved a lot of time. You can easily spend three or four hours trying to memorize lines for a scene, and in order to prepare, some actors go around all day muttering them at the edge of the set. There are other things I would much rather use my time for than memorizing lines, so after
The Young Lions
I started reading dialogue from notes in every picture. Sometimes, with their permission, I wrote my lines on actors’ faces or pinned cue cards on their costumes, or placed them offstage where I could see them.