Watch Al Pacino and Christopher Nolan discuss ‘The Godfather’
With 12 films under his belt and status as one of the greatest living directors, it’s easy sometimes to forget that Christopher Nolan was a fledgling director once upon a time. In a relic from the turn of the millennium, during a conversation promoting the release of Nolan’s third feature Insomnia, we’re reminded that the director was once a fresh-faced, dewy-eyed filmmaker – especially by the way he earnestly listens to Al Pacino recount a poignant story from his time on the set of The Godfather.
“Coverage is important in making a movie,” Pacino began. He highlighted the risk of becoming so engrossed in the action that the crucial camera angles could be overlooked, stating: “Sometimes when you’re on it, when you’re doing it, when you’re in the middle of it all, you forget that. You want to get a thing moving, but you never know if you can get that angle, if you miss that angle…”
Pacino recalled a day when he was shooting a funeral scene with director Francis Ford Coppola for the 1972 mobster epic. “We lost the light. There was some light left, but it was six o’clock. In those days, the studios and the producers were right there,” Pacino explained, underscoring the rigidity of Paramount’s shooting schedule and their vigilance when it came to wrapping for the day.
Recalling how he felt “rather good about finishing”, considering he’d been acting all day and had no idea what went on “behind the camera”, Pacino explained how he saw Coppola, in deep distress, sitting on one of the gravestones. “A real gravestone. And he was crying, literally sobbing. And I went over and said, ‘What’s the matter, friend?’.”
Pacino relayed the director’s distressing response, imitating a tearful Coppola: “‘They won’t give me another set-up!’ And he was crying about it. And I thought, ‘This is how much it meant to him’. That extra set-up, you know? For people who don’t know, it can make the difference in a scene because he had planned it and storyboarded it.”
Turning the conversation towards Nolan’s techniques, Pacino asked him, “Did you storyboard Insomnia?” Nolan responded, “You know, we only storyboarded some of the action scenes. But I tend to do a lot of that in my head, and I don’t shot list very much either.”
For someone who’s given us the likes of Inception and Interstellar, it’s unsurprising that such a cinematic genius can retain such a wealth of information in his brain alone. Pacino, on the other hand, was recently praised by the director for his ability to project a performance specifically for the camera.
Nolan, despite giving us some of modern cinema’s most intricately designed and meticulously composed films, interestingly revealed he favoured an element of spontaneity in his directorial approach: “I like to see what you guys are going to do with it,” he said.
With his feverishly anticipated next film Oppenheimer out on July 21st, boasting a rich cast including Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh, fans only have a few more days to see Nolan’s direction back in action.
