Al Pacino has revealed the movie he seriously wanted to win an Oscar for.
The star is promoting his book Sonny Boy this week in the UK and while he has had quite the decorated career, it was one role that he loved above all else – Scarface.
Pacino played Tony Montana in Brian De Palma’s movie, immortalizing the phrase “Say hello to my little friend.” Yet Scarface was completely snubbed by the Academy.
This morning on the BBC Today program, Pacino named the movie as the one he wished he’d got an Oscar for. “I would have liked to have even got nominated for that one,” he said of Scarface.
As it turned out, he was to win his Oscar a decade later for Scent of a Woman, while he has been nominated a further seven times including for the first two Godfathers.
Pacino made headlines over the weekend when an extract from the upcoming autobiography revealed how close he came to being fired from The Godfatheras he recalled how Paramount questioned whether he was right to play Michael Corleone in the feature adaptation of Mario Puzo’s book.
This morning on the BBC, he suggested that Robert De Niro could have been the one to replace him.
“Bob De Niro comes to mind,” he said. When pushed on how the man who went on to win an Oscar for his role in The Godfather Part II could have been the one to take his place, he added: “Sure, why not. I’m not irreplaceable.”
Pacino spoke to the BBC about his early experience on The Godfather. “When your director talks to you and says you’re not delivering and you hear the chirping all around you start to feel like, ‘I don’t think I’m wanted here’,” he added. “I didn’t know whether what I was doing was right or wrong but they were losing patience.”
Everything changed when director Francis Ford Coppola “put the gun in the toilet,” he added, a reference to the famous bathroom scene.
