Francis Ford Coppola remembers Robert De Niro’s “unforgettable” audition for ‘The Godfather’
Director Francis Ford Coppola has remembered Robert De Niro’s “unforgettable” audition for The Godfather in a new interview.
The director, whose film Megalopolis arrives in cinemas this week (September 27), said even now, he is still impressed with De Niro’s audition.
“He had an unforgettable audition for Sonny Corleone, that was so in advance of what I even could imagine because he really nailed that kind of a guy,” Coppola recalled at a Q&A before the New York premiere of Megalopolis this week (September 23). De Niro was at the event with Coppola as well as director Spike Lee (via IndieWire).
At the time of his audition, De Niro was an unknown and Coppola actually offered the part of Paulie Gatto in the film after the part of Sonny Corleone went to James Caan instead. De Niro later appeared in The Godfather Part 2 playing a young Vito Corleone.
One line that Coppola remembers in particular is De Niro delivering the line about “getting his brains all over your nice Ivy League suit, Michael”.
He recalled: “I never forgot that. And that’s one of the reasons why I went at this daunting opportunity to have him play the Vito Corleone part that had been made so famous by Marlon.
“I thought I would do the outrageous and have someone other than Marlon play the role. Normally in a movie [at that time] they would have Marlon play it himself, but he wouldn’t look young. It’s like James Dean, in Rebel Without a Cause. I saw it when I was in high school, and there were no guys who looked like him in my high school. But they were very casual about age in movies in those days. I wouldn’t do that. So I said I thought that Bobby could play Vito Corleone as the young man. And he did beyond my wildest expectations.”
You can watch the audition tape here:
The film stars Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina, an architect-scientist who wants to improve a fictional version of New York City called New Rome. Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia Labeouf, and Giancarlo Esposito, among others also star.
But during filming, the likes of Driver were absent from the start due to commitments on other projects.
“I had this extraordinary cast, but a lot of them couldn’t be there from the very beginning, so I couldn’t rehearse with them,” Coppola told IndieWire. “I gave every actor an understudy, and if an actor couldn’t be there I rehearsed with the understudy.”
Despite having to resort to this method of working, Coppola did say by having to use an understudy, “there was a lot of good stuff that came from that that benefitted the movie.”
Megalopolis, which was self-financed by Coppola and took decades to make, received a mixed reaction at its Cannes Film Festival premiere in May. Coppola even shared a new trailer for the film featuring negative reviews on his past movies such as The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
In a two-star review, NME wrote: “The trouble is – and maybe this was also part of the point, somehow – the whole piece is so uneven, that at times it’s akin to watching a toddler being given free rein as an interior decorator. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you always should.”
“All this being said, Coppola deserves a great deal of credit for ploughing $100million of his own money into making his film, his way. Whether Megalopolis is a critical or commercial success remains to be seen but it’s strange enough to surely have a long life as a cult film.”
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Elizabeth Aubrey
NME
