Francis Ford Coppola’s operatic mob drama, “The Godfather,” premiered on March 24, 1972. The landmark film, up there with “Citizen Kane” in terms of cinematic style an…
Caan, who turns 82 on Saturday , spoke to The Post in a wide-ranging interview about his memories of filming “The Godfather,” which airs somewhere on television virtually every day — in all of its iterations — and will be re-released Tuesday in a“One of the things that made ‘The Godfather’ successful, besides brilliant directing and writing and wonderful actors … was that everyone really enjoyed making it, and that comes off on the screen,” Caan said.
Caan recalled how Coppola asked him to loosen up Lenny Montana, a hulking former pro wrestler and bodyguard for the Colombo crime family making his screen debut as gruff, feared Corleone enforcer Luca Brasi —“He knocks on the door and he says, ‘Don Corleone, I am honored to be here on the day of your daughter’s wedding, may her first child …’ He did it a couple of times, the door opens, with camera on the other side of the door with Marlon.
“So I get a piece of tape and put it on his tongue … boom, they say ‘Action!’ and that’s when he says, “Don Corleone” — he sticks his tongue out and everybody falls down laughing. He was smiling. He was happy. Marlon’s line was, ‘Luca, my most cherished friend,’ and when he did that scene he had “F–k you” written on his tongue, too.”where Sonny beats up his pregnant sister’s husband, Carlo“The stick I threw at [Carlo] when he’s running away, that wasn’t in the script,” he said.
“The [FBI] guy took a picture of me with one of those old square box cameras,” he said. “This was not written in the script [but] I got so f—king hot that I grabbed his camera and smashed it on the ground. I took like $40 out of my pocket and kept walking — because, in my neighborhood you paid for it. It didn’t matter what you did, but you paid for it.
“We didn’t really have a big budget and we added to it constantly,” he said with a chuckle. “They said, ‘The shoes are not in the script’ and I said, ‘A lot of Italian guys in my old neighborhood, they have maybe two suits to their name but they’ve got 10 pairs of shoes.’ So I went to The Bronx one day and bought those black-and-white shoes for $10 and wore them in the movie.”
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