“I always thought it was a satire”: Oliver Stone names the unlikely inspirations behind ‘Scarface’
Controversy has regularly followed Oliver Stone throughout his career, but he never bought into the belief that Scarface glorified or glamourised a life of crime when he didn’t view it as a story to be taken particularly seriously.
Although he was relatively new to the business when he was tasked with writing the screenplay, he was still an Academy Award-winning writer, having scripted Midnight Express for Alan Parker. Stone only had one directorial credit under his belt, and the schlocky psychological horror The Hand was nothing to write home about, but it was clear he knew his way around a compelling character and a memorable set piece.
After all, his previous commission before Scarface had turned Arnold Schwarzenegger into a star when he co-wrote Conan the Barbarian, so Stone had proven himself to be nothing if not adaptable. It was a gangster flick and a remake at its core, but he nonetheless decided to find his way in through completely different angles.
Serious crime stories could never be done better than Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, even if the comparisons were going to be impossible to ignore when Scarface starred Al Pacino as an ambitious criminal mastermind who has no limits on what he’s planning to achieve.
The partnership of Stone and director Brian De Palma was never going to shirk away from violence, given their respective track records, but at no point did the former see it as being a realistic parable. Instead, he pitched Scarface as somewhere between fantasy and a stage play, an interesting perspective considering how iconic it became.
“I always thought it was a satire. I never saw it as threatening to be reality,” he told Jeremy Smith. “It never sought to be The Godfather. I think Brian was the right director for it because he has the necessary sarcasm. There is a lot of humour in the film, but it was sort of lost at the time because of the bloodbath, the violence and the viciousness of the characters.”
To find his throughline, Stone decided to channel the spirit of William Shakespeare for Tony Montana’s ruthless rise to power and the hubris that ultimately causes his downfall. He then looked towards a play written by a German about an Italian-American mobster trying to control a cauliflower racket in Chicago in the 1930s for something rooted in a world not too dissimilar to Tony’s.
“My model with it was twofold: one was Bertolt Brecht’s Arturo Ui, and the other one was Richard III,” Stone said. “Those were the models, and they were not exactly reality models. But the film was attacked for being literal.” Common sense would perhaps dictate that the original Scarface would be one of the primary touchstones for the remake, but instead, the writer took his largest cues from two plays that were markedly different but equally evocative of its twisted take on the ‘American Dream’.
