When Robert De Niro lost out on Al Pacino’s role in ‘Any Given Sunday’: “He was asking for a lot of money”
In the late 1990s, Al Pacino was on a career hot streak. Between ’95 and ’99, he starred in Heat, The Devil’s Advocate, and Donnie Brasco, which all brought huge returns at the box office. Even when he made a movie that wasn’t quite as big a commercial hit, such as The Insider, it became a critical darling and was nominated for a host of Academy Awards. Therefore, his asking price was likely substantial when he was approached to star in a sports drama directed by one of the industry’s most well-known firebrands. Fascinatingly, though, it must have been considerably less than what Robert De Niro was demanding at the time – because he was offered the role and wound up pricing himself out of it.
During this period, Oliver Stone made Nixon in 1995 and U-Turn in 1997 and was pondering where to go with his next project. He was put in contact with sportswriter Richard Weiner and the retired San Francisco 49ers tight end Jamie Williams, who had come up with a treatment for a movie about a young black NFL quarterback. At that time, Stone’s co-producer Eric Hamburg believed “a football movie would appeal to him” largely because “It’s sort of like Platoon but on a football field.”
That script was eventually titled Monday Night, but as it was being written, Hamburg happened to read a book called You’re Okay, It’s Just a Bruise by the Las Vegas Raider’s team doctor, Rob Huizenga. “It was from that point of view: the abuse of medicine and the abuse of the players,” Hamburg told The Ringer. Stone quickly bought the rights to that book, because an idea had occurred to him: “It could be done if we combined these stories.”
Amazingly, though, a third script by playwright John Logan, about a lonely football coach, would then enter the fray. Stone became the puppet master, combining the scripts of three different writers and the best parts of the non-fiction book into one screenplay entitled Any Given Sunday, while also adding new material. “I expanded it even further and made it about the owners,” Stone revealed. “I had all these characters, the players’ stories.”
So, armed with a script, Stone set about casting the lead, the struggling Miami Sharks coach Tony D’Amato. His first port of call was De Niro, who by that point wasn’t on anywhere near as big a hot streak as Pacino. After Heat, he made a lot of movies, but only Sleepers and Analyze This could have been classed as hits. Still, by that point, his fee for most films had risen to a reported $14 million, and he must have asked for something in that range when he spoke with Stone, who baulked.
“I remember talking to him, and he came very close,” Stone admitted to Entertainment Weekly, “but he was asking for a lot of money, and it complicated the movie at that price.” However, he was slightly less diplomatic when he spoke to The Ringer about De Niro’s demands, claiming, “He asked for quite a bit of money, which shocked me because we didn’t have that money in the budget.”
Luckily, Stone already had a pre-existing relationship with his next target: Pacino. He was the screenwriter of Scarface, of course, and he nearly collaborated with the Godfather star on Born on the Fourth of July, too. As fate would have it, though, they were actually working on another project while Stone was developing Any Given Sunday, as it is common for directors to have several irons in the fire at any one time.
“He had been attached to another movie that Oliver was going to do called Noriega, about the dictator of Panama,” Hamburg revealed. This proposed project got to the stage of a table read of the script – but then everyone lost faith in it. As Hamburg put it, Pacino and Stone “decided the tone wasn’t working”. However, Pacino’s recollection was a lot funnier. He hilariously deadpanned, “We read Noriega out loud with a lot of people. Once we heard it, it was clear what to do…We decided to move to something else.”
That “something else” was Any Given Sunday and Tony D’Amato – a role Pacino wasn’t too greedy to play, unlike his old Heat co-star.
