‘Platoon’: The Oscar-winning classic that almost starred Al Pacino
Though he has not always made the wisest career choices, Jack and Jill being a prime example, Al Pacino remains nothing short of a bona fide cinematic legend.
From early successes in the 1970s to the peak of his commercial and critical powers, the Italian-American icon has enough bangers in his back catalogue to occupy any film fan for at least a month, but if you can believe it, his CV could have been even more stacked.
Pacino’s career is littered with missed opportunities. Alongside the many great characters he has gifted to cinema across his lengthy career, we also could have seen his take on Ted Kramer, Axel Foley, or even Han Solo. One sliding doors moment would have brought him into contact with one of the greatest and most controversial directors of all time: Oliver Stone.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Stone revealed that Pacino had been in contention to play a starring role in his ‘Best Picture’-winning Vietnam War drama Platoon. He would have portrayed Staff Sergeant Barnes, the domineering commanding officer, eventually played by Tom Berenger. According to the polarising filmmaker, Pacino and Berenger weren’t the only big names who could have brought Barnes to life.
“There were others, too, because there were so many layers of time with this film,” he recalled. “It was written in ’76 and was almost made then by Sidney Lumet and Pacino. Then there was a period in ’84 when Michael Cimino was going to produce it, and Emilio Estevez was going to play the role, actually. [Kevin] Costner passed on it, I believe, because his brother had been in Vietnam.”
Stone had been working on Platoon as far back as 1968, 18 years before it actually came out. He wrote a screenplay initially called Break, which was based on his own experiences serving in Vietnam. This would evolve into the film we know today.
Stone was initially only meant to serve as a writer on the project, with the great Sidney Lumet acting as director. Pacino, who was fresh off the success of the first two Godfather movies, was attached as a way of grabbing studio attention – alas, this failed to materialise, and the script sat unmade for another few years.
If Platoon had been made in 1976, then Pacino would have been roughly the same age as Berenger was when he played Barnes in 1986, and since he would have been in his mid-40s by the time the movie was made, perhaps Stone felt he was too old to play a soldier serving on active duty.
It would take another 13 years for Pacino and Stone to finally work together on a project, although it couldn’t have been more different from Platoon – the Oscar winner played American Football coach Tony D’Amato in the sports drama Any Given Sunday, and while the movie was met with a decent reception, it never came close to the heights of Platoon. The director would find the film so “exhausting” that he decided to reevaluate his entire career. Maybe it’s for the best that this collaboration didn’t happen sooner.
