The iconic ‘Scarface’ scene co-directed by Steven Spielberg: “We did a few shots”
The New Hollywood era was a transformative time for cinema, although it’s often easy to gloss over the fact that this was such a collaborative period in American cinema, which almost feels like a lost art these days.
While filmmakers like Robert Altman and Dennis Hopper were considered early proponents of this pioneering movement in Hollywood, they were slightly older than the group of keen cinephiles who were known as the ‘movie brats’, who defined the 1970s, with names like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Brian De Palma deemed major figures of this era, and they were all pals, too.
Their friendships were vital to the development of popular American cinema because, rather than battling it out to become the best of the best, they actively helped each other to bring their films to life, such that Spielberg, for example, played a role in assisting Scorsese while he was in the post-production stage of Taxi Driver.
That’s not the only film he had an uncredited behind-the-scenes role on, though as a few years after the New Hollywood phenomenon came to its official end, De Palma made an opulent blockbuster about the dangers of getting too caught up in the world of money, drugs, and crime: Scarface. A classic gangster tale, the 1983 film reflected American cinema’s transition into a new blockbuster era, although it is still imbued with the artistry that defined the movement.
It of course starred Al Pacino as Tony Montana, and he delivered many iconic lines in the process, most notably “Say hello to my little friend” in that climactic shootout scene near the end of the movie. Interestingly, it was this scene that featured the assistance of Spielberg, who seems to have always been trusted by his contemporaries to give his own two cents on their films; I guess, following the success of Jaws, no one could doubt him.
De Palma explained how Spielberg came to help out in an interview with Cinema Garmonbozia, “Well, what happened when we were doing the shootout, Al grabbed his gun and grabbed it by the barrel, which was red hot and seared his hand, and he had to go to the hospital and we couldn’t shoot with him for two weeks. So basically, I had two weeks to shoot everything but Al. So, needless to say, I shot every conceivable way somebody could shoot at somebody else while I was waiting for my star to return.”
With Pacino out of action, he had to do what he could to keep shooting without halting production, and luckily, Spielberg appeared on set to visit his friend, and he soon became a well-needed helping hand.
“Stephen wandered over, we did a few shots: ‘What do you think about this Steve, should we put another camera up here?’ ‘Why not?!’ I mean every body was shooting people, shooting at people,” he added.
In another interview, De Palma reinforced the importance of collaboration and outside perspectives, explaining, “I gave him one of the units to shoot the Colombians coming up the staircase, so we were just shooting people getting shot for a couple of weeks. We all had great respect for each other’s work, and we were just trying to help each other out when we would see things that we thought could be improved.”
