The performance Al Pacino wishes he could do over: “I think it offset everything”
Al Pacino rarely put a foot wrong early in his career. His first film, 1971’s The Panic in Needle Park, was a harrowing, unglamorous exploration of heroin addiction, a baptism by fire for the young actor if ever there was one. It was a pivotal role. A year later, when Francis Ford Coppola was trying to cast Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather, he screened the movie for studio execs to stop them from casting Warren Beatty or Burt Reynolds in the role. A great service to us all.
The Godfather changed the course of cinema history and, by extension, Pacino’s life. Playing the youngest son in the Corleone crime family, he got to portray the greatest evolution on screen of any of his co-stars, starting out as an earnest young marine with a Dartmouth education who eventually turns into one of the most iconic on-screen villains of all time.
There aren’t many movies as beloved or revered as The Godfather. Like Citizen Kane, it is frequently held up as the single greatest film ever made. Coppola defied the odds when The Godfather Part II turned out to be just as successful. Michael’s progression from reluctant don to ruthless kingpin made for an impressive follow-up. In contrast, The Godfather Part III is a famous letdown. Coppola didn’t want to make it, and it shows.
The film focuses on Michael’s attempts to transform his criminal empire into a legal one, with a smattering of papal misdeeds along the way. It isn’t a disaster by any stretch of the imagination, but it is the ugly stepchild of the trilogy, an okay film that can’t even hope to cling to the coattails of its illustrious predecessors. There are many quibbles that one might have with the film. Endless exposition. Sofia Coppola. A script that is trying to do far too much in a runtime that outstays its welcome. For Pacino, though, the absolute limit was the hair.
For most actors, hair and makeup are just part of the gig. You get paid a few million to do your job, and the hair and makeup department gets paid significantly less to do theirs. Not everyone wants to be like Christian Bale, but it’s to be expected that you will have to undergo some sort of physical transformation to get the job done. But for the final instalment of The Godfather series, Coppola wanted to do something very different with Michael Corleone. After two movies in which the character sported sleek, dark locks and a side part, the director wanted to show the brand new direction of the kingpin with, of all things, a buzzcut.
Pacino was pissed. “I resisted it,” he said, revealing that Diane Keaton, who was his girlfriend at the time and played his estranged wife in the film, was even more appalled. “It was a mistake,” he continued. “It was the antithesis of what that character was and of how I saw him. Worst of all, how I really saw him. I think it offset everything.” He acknowledged that such a small issue really shouldn’t derail the actorly process, but admitted that it had an impact on his performance nonetheless.
Believe it or not, Pacino’s reaction to the hair was far from the most explosive. Dick Smith, the legendary Oscar-winning makeup artist behind The Exorcist, Amadeus, and the first two Godfather movies, quit the production over it. In later years, Coppola couldn’t really explain why he had been so strident about keeping the buzzcut. “I didn’t know why I was so sure I was right to do it that I would even go up against someone I was so grateful to as Dick Smith,” the director told Deadline in 2020, adding, “He never spoke to me again.”
