This is Francis Coppola, and I'm here to give you my impressions,
my memories, my feelings about the third film in what became a series.
This film is titled The Godfather Part III.
Ironically, the real title that Mario Puzo and I had given this film
was The Death of Michael Corleone.
Usually sequels of films in the past had independent titles,
or at best it was The Bride of Frankenstein.
The notion of the more literary Part II
had never really happened in this country,
and The Godfather Part II was the innovating film.
Ironically, many years later,
it's an indication of my lessening influence
that Paramount prevailed and the film, against our wishes,
was called The Godfather Part Ill,
but I would like to have the audience think of the films, really,
as two sequels and an epilogue.
As we begin the story of the third film,
there were the haunting images of the Corleone compound on Lake Tahoe,
that really we shot as a kind of pre-unit even before we made the second film.
It was that estate that I stumbled upon one day with some friends,
that seemed to suggest to me, especially in that it was in ruin,
that there had been a powerful family, perhaps, who had lived there.
Indeed it was true, it was the Kaiser Estate,
and in a period in the '60s, perhaps, they were there with their young people
and their speedboats, and enjoying the boathouse
and the parties and the dances,
but now, as I discovered the estate,
it was being swallowed up by the lake,
and it was a ruin.
It suggested to me that perhaps this was the ruin of the Corleone family,
and although we had originally thought to begin the film
much as we had begun the first Godfather,
in fact, in general our plan was to have this epilogue
be more like the first Godfather than the second Godfather,
which of course was told in two time periods.
But originally we were going to begin just on the business deal
of the Cardinal coming to Michael Corleone
and making his plea
that the Vatican had gotten themselves in a bit of financial difficulty.
But later my collaborator, Walter Murch,
felt that we might be better off to stress more the family and the personal side
before we got into the business.
You know, the famous sentence, "It isn't personal, it's only business,"
well, in this case we wanted to say, "It isn't business, it's only personal,"
which of course is the real truth of Don Corleone's famous line.
We eventually decided to begin in a ceremony
in which Michael was to be honoured by the Church
for his wonderful charitable gifts of the Vito Andolini Foundation
and as Michael is given this wonderful award from the Church,
we realise that he's a man who almost has used this occasion
to pull back his family,
which effectively he has lost due to his deeds.
And however good his deeds meant to be,
they were not good deeds, they were evil deeds,
and consequently as we see him,
even in his Commendatore finery
receiving the highest award the Vatican can bestow,
his face is a mirror of his soul.
It's ravaged and sickly, and very, very heartbroken,
because what he values the most
is the thing that he has lost.
But he has his children.
And his children at this point, I would think,
to Michael, mean everything.
His daughter and his son.
The Michael that we're dealing with is very different than the Michael we know,
and interestingly enough,
one of the toughest decisions and most heated debate
was over Al Pacino's hair in this film,
because I felt as though it would be truthful
to show that Michael was no longer that same handsome young man
with the beautiful hair which Al has and which is so well known,
but he had more of that steel, man-approaching-GO crew cut.
When I cut Al Pacino's hair it was almost like cutting Samson's hair,
'cause it meant that this would not be the Michael Corleone
that the audience had come to love.
This was a man, really, more in a crisis.
That was more interesting to me because I was in a crisis.
I, at this point, was very much like Michael Corleone.
And so when I thought of making a third film,
I only could imagine we had to deal with Michael Corleone as an older man.
Now, obviously this flies in the face of
a conventional notion of movie-sequel making,
in which you try to really hang on to the successful formula.
In the case of The Godfather,
what made the Godfather films so successful to popular audiences
was how this figure, Michael Corleone, seemed always to come on top,
and I was viewing Michael from a much different perspective,
more how I felt about myself, at the age I was,
trying to understand, really, what is important in a man's life,
beyond fame, beyond wealth.
Those things don't seem to really fulfil,
and I knew that what does fulfil are your children
and seeing the life of the family go on.
Whenever I meet someone and they tell me,
"Oh, I have six children and I have 23 grandchildren,"
I say, "Oh, you're a very rich man."
And they look at me and say, "Oh, no, no. Not really,"
and I say, "Oh, no. You're a very rich man."
And my mother, you see her singing behind Eli Wallach,
my father you see to the left of the frame conducting the band.
This really was the last time I was to be with my mother and father.
My father passed away shortly after this,
on the night of the Academy Awards, hit by a stroke,
by the shock of not having won the Best Song category.
How typically wonderful of him. He died in the way he lived.
Vincent is the son of Sonny Corleone, with Lucy Mancini.
We remember in the first Godfather, Lucy was one of the bridesmaids
and I imagined that there would be a classic character,
the bastard son of Sonny who, on one hand,
brings vitality and youth and strength, very much like the old Sonny
and on the other hand is a dark sheep.
He wasn't raised in the comfort and the affluence
of the immediate Corleone family.
Obviously we had to interweave the beginnings of a conspiracy, of a plot.
So we introduced Joe Mantegna as Joey Zasa,
interwoven with all of this legitimacy and wealth,
there still are the vestiges of the mob world.
Ah, there's my little granddaughter Gia, the little pink girl on the floor,
as a little baby.
Don Novello plays a kind of family PR fellow,
handling the journalists so that it all comes out right for Michael,
because above all, what he craves
is the legitimacy that his father had wished for him.
And we have the little girl cousins, carrying notes to the older boys.
Of course, Vincent is so handsome and one of the cousins, Mary,
has always had a shine for him
and just like an awkward 17, 18-year-old,
she comes and flirts with him
and of course, my own daughter Sofia, plays Mary Corleone.
It's one of my favourite parts of the film, because she is so real.
She is not an actress. She wasn't an actress. She was an art student.
But she was Mary Corleone, and I can remember as kids,
them interacting and having little crushes on their cousins
and it was all so unacceptable and so naughty, but they did it,
and flirted and of course, this was the basis.
It was really Sofia that was what I had in mind
when I created the character of Mary, the kind of apple of her father's eye,
who would be able to be the one to give the cheque
of all the enormous amount of money they were going to bestow.
It moves me to this day to see that scene and her little playful banter,
so real and...
It's true, you know, Sofia came in for tremendous criticism,
because she was plunged into an important role
without really having the credentials,
but mainly because I had seen the story that way,
and at this point, I was making the movie out of characters
who were in fact my sister or my father or my mother or my daughter.
And since I meant Sofia to be the vulnerable one
who would ultimately express the great tragedy of Michael Corleone,
I chose to give my own, and indeed, just as in the story
it was Sofia that they shot the bullets at,
but they were really shooting them at me,
and I knew that.
But I'm thrilled to have captured the reality of the family
by having Sofia play this part,
despite really what was a conspiracy on many people's behalf
and all culminating in that first article in Vanity Fair,
Tina Brown's Vanity Fair magazine, that just pointed the world at Sofia
as if to say, "Look, he's vulnerable here. Kill him here."
And that is what the film ultimately was about,
that there is no worse way to pay for your sins
than to have your children be included in the punishment.
Obviously when you attempt a work of many characters
with serious themes,
certainly that interweave personal feelings,
psychological, perhaps, feelings and plot and action,
one tempts a notion of going where Shakespeare went
and few, if any, people ever can be compared to Shakespeare.
In fact, that is the subject of Goethe's The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister,
as he compares himself really against this extraordinary genius of our time.
One can be guided by Shakespeare and I looked in Shakespeare for inspiration
in the story of an elderly man trying to assure some place for himself
in the midst of a family in which certain people were true and faithful
and others were more manipulative,
trying to gain from the ultimate succession of power and wealth.
My sister, Tally, who had been in all three films,
now was emerging as a stronger figure,
more like that woman in the Scottish play of Shakespeare.
Of course, Andy Garcia as the bastard.
Kay, as the woman who loved Michael Corleone
so deeply and so romantically and so lastingly
and yet was forced to turn against him
because of the horror that he became in her eyes.
All of these were the potential that I hoped I could,
with Mario's great collaboration,
that I hoped that I could weave together into a satisfying drama,
even though it would not really be able to repeat the classic Godfather formula,
which is Michael in the end beating all his enemies and emerging triumphant,
because, indeed, this film was about the death of Michael Corleone.
Also, many of the family friends, who had important functions...
Al Martino as Johnny Fontane, now singing in his inimitable style
a song that our family jokingly referred to as Za Zeach His Own.
I had to get Za Zeach His Own into the film
because after all, that's what we sang in our house.
And of course, the son, the little boy, Franc D'Ambrosio,
who just like Michael, might have had the resistance
to tell his father that he would go his own way,
this boy also tells his father, but for another reason,
because just as my family was made up of artists,
I would imagine that, "What if a young man in the Corleone family
"wanted to pursue an artistic career?"
And I always thought it would be interesting if one day,
out of nowhere a young man came along,
sort of like Mario Lanza did when I was a kid
and wanted to be an opera singer
and that would present Michael with a real dilemma,
because as much as he might want to suck his son in to be with him,
shoulder to shoulder in this new charitable vision that Michael had
to pay back these enormous amounts of money,
to undo the way that they were earned,
he could never fully capture his son, because his son was an artist
and artists really do stand alone
and work to other motivations than other people.
An artist is alone in his desire to pursue the beauty and the tradition
that the artist's tradition lays before him
and would never be involved,
be a lawyer or be a businessman, as Michael seems to hope for him.
This was such an interesting experience,
because really it was many years after the first two films had been made
and really it would never have been made
except for the difficulties and the aftermath
of that extraordinary period of productivity,
which took us through two Godfather films, The Conversation,
Apocalypse [Vow and then ultimately,
what I like to think of as "the ping-pong shot,"
that everyone was able to slam down
and put me into a position of great debt and servitude,
which is of course, where they like artists to be.
I always joke that if you ever want to understand who's running the world,
or at any time in history who's running the world,
just check who's employing the artists and it will tell you.
So to revisit this material was so interesting
because not only were we going back to the story of this family,
we were working with it with characters that we had begun
who were young people. Al Pacino was a young man.
Diane Keaton was a young woman. Everyone, my sister was a young girl.
I was young. My father was young.
Everyone was young and here we worked on these films
and now, many years later, we're all going to be brought together again.
In fact, I was in Rome, working on a different film, a personal film,
which I hoped to make, one called Megalopolis,
and you know, we were in a position of somewhat limited resources,
and Paramount proposed the idea of a third Godfather
and they had a script. It was a very different kind of a script.
It didn't have very much in it about Michael Corleone at all.
It tended to be more about the Vincent Mancini character,
or a character like him,
and really featured more a similar story of...
Except now drugs and cartels
and pretty much echoing the kind of story it had done before.
And I felt, "Well, gee, if you're going to go back,
"let's go back and really make Michael Corleone be the central character."
Indeed, he always was the central character,
so how could you make another film
without showing what had become of him
and in what ways he paid for his sins?
I like to think that at the end of Godfather Part II,
when you see those final images of Michael,
that he's sort of been given his comeuppance.
It's pretty clear that he's lost everything and he's punished.
And then I began to feel, well,
maybe he wasn't punished enough for what he did.
I mean, he killed his own brother. He killed countless other people.
You know people who kill, I mean, if you could just take two minutes
before you pull that trigger or make that decision
and realise how many people you're killing.
It's not just the person you're killing, that person has got it easy.
It's the mother and the father and the brothers and the friends
and the people who love them.
Any death is a hundred deaths and more hours of heartbreak
than you can almost count.
So I have very, very strong feelings about those people who,
for their greed or for their self-interest,
would use violence and use horror and use terror indiscriminately
without thinking what they're doing to so many people.
So I really... Especially that Michael was a good man,
and a young, attractive, and promising young man,
his conversion from a good man to an evil man
is more horrible than just some cretin who never had a moral idea in his eyes.
So I just felt that Michael had to be punished.
He had to die, and not in an easy way, to express how I felt,
although I had great sympathy for him,
because in many ways I felt I was like him in my own category,
not as a criminal, but in a person who had gone, really,
from a sort of innocent guy who just loved movies
into something involving power and influence.
So I did, as with all characters, Mr Kurtz and Mr Tucker or Mr Corleone,
I have tremendous personal feelings myself that I might be like them.
George Hamilton was styled after any number of Hollywood lawyers.
And a very funny situation, I'm trying to get his hair to be grey.
It turned orange, it turned red.
Obviously, The Godfather was a famous movie
and many people were anxious to participate.
You'll notice in the family scene,
as another indication of the Corleones' power,
and the parallel with the Coppola family,
you'll see Willie Brown,
who is of course, now the mayor of San Francisco,
but a very charismatic and important person in California politics
and was friendly with our family.
My brother August worked with him
to create the wonderful Fine Arts Film Building in San Francisco State
and again, like the Coppolas, these people would wander in and out
and Willy Brown came to Rome to be in this scene.
It was a collection of important people,
people from the Vatican, people in politics, family friends,
and uncomfortably for Michael,
the vestiges of his father's early gang origins
as different small-time hoods, such as a kind of Joey Zasa,
more in the fabric of the hoods, perhaps, in the '70s and '80s
who were taking over,
who were really kind of a new breed of tough businessmen.
Obviously these types of wise guys have been portrayed
in many wonderful movies, notably Marty Scorsese's films.
I sort of had, in this picture, the obligation to try to do it all,
to satisfy myself with a personal story
of a man about my age at the time of the story, Michael Corleone,
who no longer had the passion for success
and to beat everyone, and to get richer.
But was more thinking of the things that really matter, which is to say,
your relationship with your children,
or the lack of relationship with your children.
I myself have never allowed that to happen.
Joe Mantegna was an actor I had known for years before.
A wonderful person I have always enjoyed,
and it was really just a question of trying to find a role
that would be suitable for him
and try to be a little bit of the more well-dressed don of the era, in the '80s.
Bring that sensibility into the mix of this chronicle, really,
that kind of spans so many years.
This picture also had another very difficult handicap, if I may call it that,
is that it had to be made, really, in a rush.
From the time we started the movie
till the time it actually came out in the theatres,
I remember on Christmas Day,
was less than a year,
although even in the scriptwriting phase, I said,
"What's the difference if it takes another six months?"
It would give me and Mario a chance to hone this complicated material,
but the company needed the film that December
and my requests ultimately were shrugged away
by the then-head of the corporation in New York,
who I don't feel understood anything about the Godfather films
or why they were successful.
It was clearly more for the stock price.
Ultimately I think they were correctly assessing
that unless they had some big windfall,
that the company was vulnerable and it would be taken over.
And indeed it was.
And so I had no strength to be able to ask that the film be delayed six months,
which caused me a lot of fear and frustration
because I didn't feel I had it all quite together,
especially the ending,
which I spent countless nights staying up over
and trying to reconcile in my mind as to what would be appropriate,
although I must say that I'm extremely happy with the ending of this film
and the way it echoed the other Godfathers
in terms of an ending sequence that was interposed
or parallel-cut with another event,
in this case the opera Ca val/aria Rusticana.
Interesting in this scene of Joey Zasa confronting the bastard Vincent Mancini,
there is an incident where he bites his ear.
That Ks fight out of Cavalleria Rusticana
when the same thing happens between Turiddu and Alfio,
and I've often felt that the music from Cavalleria Rusticana and the story,
rustic chivalry and the strange Sicilian notion
of revenge and insult,
this peasant village mentality,
really runs through all of the Godfather stories,
and of course, maybe any modern Italian mafioso story
and so I was very anxious to...
Since I had this third opportunity to make a film
that hadn't been something I really thought was ever going to happen,
that I could really use Cavalleria Rusticana,
as part of, now, a story of the family as they were on the highest, here,
of economic and social success.
When they were truly wealthy and truly powerful
and truly longed to be out of the criminal milieu.
The notion of the family photograph as also an indication of who's included
and who's not included.
As you recall in the first Godfather, they took the family photograph
and the father was very anxious that Michael be included.
In this case, the fact that Michael includes this kind of rough son,
illegitimate son of his brother Sonny into the family obviously echoes that,
but also portends that some of the story is going to deal with this collision
between the old ways, the old passions, the old gangster behaviour,
and the new sophistication.
That's my dad, as I always remember him, conducting the band.
He never missed a cue in all my knowledge in doing things with him,
since I was a young kid.
But on this picture, he missed a cue
and when he missed that cue, and I said,
"Dad, you missed the cue," he says, "No, no, no. I didn't miss the cue,"
and I said, "Dad, you missed it."
And he sloughed it off but I knew then, if my father would miss a cue,
that he didn't have much longer to be with us, and he didn't.
Now Sofia was going to dance with Al Pacino,
neither of whom could dance,
and quite on her own,
my little granddaughter Gia ran out on the floor and wanted to dance with Sofia
and didn't want Sofia to dance with Al and all through the scene,
the big ending, you could see Gia, very, very upset
that Sofia was dancing with Al,
and just held onto her and held onto her.
It was so real.
You know, when you use non-actors and you encourage them to play with you
and to participate with you as, in effect, Sofia was,
you get something that isn't poised and slick.
You get something that's real and that's what, of course, I was going for.
It's hard for me to imagine now
the Corleone family at this level of wealth.
I mean the Coppola family became successful,
but not to the point where you could give a $100,000,000 cheque to charity,
although it would be a nice thing to do.
But it was fun to put our family in some sort of context with this family,
although there was much tragedy to come.
You know when film sequels are made,
they're made because above all the studio wants to basically
keep mining the same mine and make the same movie,
because works of art as money-making endeavours
are extremely problematic.
You don't know when you give someone some money to write a script
or some people to get together and make a film, you have no idea
whether what they're going to come up with will please an audience
to the extent that would make that audience come to see it.
So the studio ultimately is in the position of wanting to repeat
what they have that's successful, try to do it as much like it,
and that's why you have these successions of sequels...
Or even when they're not sequels, you watch a movie,
I mean, it isn't surprising to see a movie and realise it's the same plot
that you had already seen in another film.
So I realised that of course, in this film,
although my heart more was with the family and the children of the story,
that I really had to have action and the type of gangster violence
that people might have expected from the previous Godfather.
And of course, Vincent Mancini was the vehicle,
because he was young and a hothead,
when he was put in the situation with this lovely journalist,
somewhat wilful journalist played by Bridget Fonda,
he had to demonstrate the kind of cool, calculating personality,
that maybe you would have thought of from Sonny, or in some sense, Michael,
in that he would even say, "Ah, she means nothing to me.
"What do I care? Kill her if you want, I don't care."
Yet, he had to turn out to be something of a hero
and win the audience's attention as a man of action
because Michael wasn't going to be that kind of man of action any more
and I couldn't think of, nor was I interested in, making him that.
I was interested in the man's sense of what he had done with his life,
rather than how he was going to beat his new adversary.
So Vincent Mancini was clearly the young man who was going to,
in a funny way, parallel the Michael Corleone story of the earlier films
and show that rise to power through his cunning and his bravery.
It's funny. I mean even as a director,
I had become like Michael and I really wasn't interested in the blood hits
and how could we dream up some spectacular way to shoot somebody
that no one had ever seen.
I just... To me, now, at my age, the idea of being out on a set,
and having to tell the actors how to hold their gun as they run into the room
to cover the FBI guy, I mean I just could not possibly be interested in that,
and no doubt that's a great weakness,
as is, in this film, Michael's lack of interest in those things,
which gave Connie Corleone the chance to emerge as a strong woman,
almost like the original Godfather.
I heard from Mario Puzo that the real person he based Don Corleone on,
and all those sayings and that wisdom,
that the real person he based that character on was his mother.
It's interesting that there are many things
that my power and youth and passion and clout got me through
in Godfather II say, where actors would say,
"Well, I'm not doing it unless you pay me so much money,
"or I won't participate,"
that I was able to very nimbly avoid the problems in this third Godfather,
I didn't have the power any more.
So when I said, "Oh, it has to be called The Death of Michael Corleone,"
which puts the whole film in a totally different context,
or if Robert Duvall told me, "Oh, well, if I'm going to be in the film,
"I want to be paid as much as Al Pacino,"
or whatever he told me, I don't even remember.
But I no longer had the persuasiveness or the...
They didn't fear me, to use a phrase from the movie.
So I ultimately lost Robert Duvall very late in the game.
He was very pivotal to me, because he was a brother.
He was really from the first movie in the family
and I greatly reduced the role of that lawyer.
My idea was that Robert Duvall was the character
who had become very close
to the charities and the Vatican
and who had, as a brother,
brought to Michael this opportunity to work with the Vatican Bank
and when I lost that, I did a very fast rewrite
and tried to approach it a different way,
making the character of the lawyer less a family character
and more like the kind of lawyers I had met.
But when you lose someone in your family,
to me, it's the loss that keeps on losing.
You don't lose them once. You lose them every day from then on.
It's over and over, because everything is different than it would have been
had you had that son or father or brother.
In this case, losing Robert Duvall to play Tom Hagen in this new modern story
was a profound loss to me and to this movie.
Here we are in a scene that really was the beginning of the whole movie.
This is the scene where the representative of the Vatican Bank,
custodian and businessman for the Vatican,
explains his dire problem to Michael Corleone
in the hope of getting the Corleone family to bail them out.
This material on the Vatican, it's very hard for anyone,
especially when dealing with the Vatican,
to say something is true or not true.
But anyone who has read any history knows that anything anyone has said
about the Vatican over the thousands of years, that it was true.
The Vatican was as much an institution of secular activity...
I mean Borgias were popes.
Every possible conceivable crime and horror
was committed within and without those halls.
So we're dealing with a fact
and I would respectfully submit
that everything I put into the film dealing with the Vatican,
its manipulation of money,
the shadows around the death of the Pope of that era,
I felt was true and learned of that from people who told me.
Not the least of whom told me the very strange manipulations of the fact
that the Vatican Bank for a while owned Paramount Studios,
something that I just took great glee in thinking about,
given that it was Paramount Studios
who wanted so badly to make this picture,
for whatever their financial reason was.
And way back at the time that I was making the first Godfather
when I went up in the elevator to visit Charlie Bluhdorn,
I would see mysterious men,
some of whose names are now legendary,
who played a role in the enormous scandals of a later period
with the Vatican Bank and who ended up dying either by hanging
or by a sort of mysterious execution.
So, I feel that what I did
in trying to take the corruption and financial power
and improprieties to the highest level of one of our highest spiritual institutions
was justified by personal information and things and people I saw.
An interesting note of the actor playing the Cardinal.
Obviously he is a kind of villain,
although a supposedly sympathetic one,
but he's Donal Donnelly, and when I was a young filmmaker,
I desperately wanted to have him play the leprechaun
in the film Finian's Rainbow,
and I tried so hard to convince the studio
that the character of Og the Leprechaun should be shy
and almost frightened of his own voice
because he was the one they sent after Finian,
and of course the studio was sure that the best person was Tommy Steele,
who was the least shy person I have ever known,
very talented but the least shy.
And I wanted Donal Donnelly,
so years later I had the pleasure of casting Donal in quite a different part,
but those are the little footnotes that you bump up against that are amusing.
The scene of the Banco Immobiliare takeover
was the first scene we shot on this Godfather Ill picture,
and of course, it's always a very frightening time.
Making sure that everyone looks well and that the characters all seem to
suggest who they are.
There were some interesting people who were extras in that scene.
One is Gregory Corso, who is the famous
and very, very interesting Beat poet, friend of Kerouac
and Allen Ginsberg, he's in there.
I'll point him out when he pops up.
This was the first day that, I think, Sofia...
No, we shot Sofia later, because at the time of shooting this
we thought Winona Ryder
was going to play the part of Mary Corleone
and so we had to go back and save the alleged place.
That's Gregory Corso coming. He just passed away this year.
That's Helmut Berger playing... I forget his name now in the story.
But he was... I thought Helmut was appropriately sinister
and very much like the real-life figure that he's meant to stand for,
and the man who was standing in the elevator
when I went up to the top of the Gulf and Western Building.
This particular scene was very traumatized
for a lot of reasons.
It had to do with the fact that they didn't tell me
that they were ready for the scene and the ADs, who,
especially in New York, tend to be like jocks,
just kind of pulled her up there and stuck her in there
with the photographer and they said, "Okay, do the scene."
And they didn't... They wanted to get the lighting or what have you.
And Sofia was a young kid and I was furious
that they didn't have me go up and prepare her for the scene
rather than traumatize her in the way they did.
So whenever I see that scene...
That scene was in and out of the picture and it obviously is not
as good a scene as some of the earlier ones.
So, it annoys me that that was done.
Movie crews can be like football players most of the time.
You have to realise that Sofia had by now become
a cause célébre, the publicity of a father who had
put his daughter in the movie, seemingly irresponsibly,
but my standpoint is that we only put Sofia in the role
because the day before we were to shoot it with Winona Ryder,
Winona Ryder dropped out and there was absolutely nothing left
to shoot without the character of Mary because we had been
stalling, waiting for a month
and the studio wanted me to close down and was like
sending me lists of young women...
Wonderful actresses like Madeleine Stowe
and other women who were the talented, beautiful actresses of the day
but I very much wanted an 18-year-old.
Someone that I believe could be a girl like Sofia.
So, pressed with the pressure from the studio to want to stop shooting
for three weeks to search for a more conventional kind of actress,
I just basically exercised my rights to put someone in the film
that I thought would be best.
That decision was then vilified and became a story in itself,
but it's a decision that I've never regretted and as I watch the film here,
and I get to see Sofia and how real she was,
just like the kind of kid she was supposed to be.
I'm happy I made that decision,
although Sofia is of course now
a woman of 29 and a successful director.
It's great for me to have this record of her,
when she was a kid, and even though it was rough on her
and to this day, follows her, I think very unjustly,
I'm thrilled to have this great home movie
that I can look at her as I remember her at that age.
This is an interesting notion, the Vatican would not allow us
to depict us going into the Vatican, and there was a big fuss about it
and we were there shooting, and no one knew what to do
and so what I did is I went on the public street, by the Vatican,
and last minute, just had them set up
the costumed guard, and the crossing gate,
but it was really just going down the street.
Had nothing to do with the Vatican.
So it looked as though the car was going in,
but of course it wasn't.
You know, these institutions tend to, through the idea of...
Although they're public institutions, be it the army or the Vatican
or anyone, nowadays, they choose to control their image
by giving you access or not giving you access
and since they owned the Vatican and have for several thousand years.
Though it's...
I don't know how legal that is, really, if you read the history.
Nonetheless, they control it
and then they're able to perpetuate their position.
This was a fabulous room in a great palace
where we were able to introduce what was something
similar to the power struggle in Italy at that time.
This is old history now, but there was, in those days,
a very mysterious Masonic group known as P2,
and it was perhaps an alliance of very powerful
Catholic businessmen, who were in control of things
and this was the almost mysterious
Mafia-like organisation on a higher level.
I felt that the story of the Corleone family
seems to be a continual rise, up higher and higher into politics,
into, you know, the very citadels of power,
such as the Vatican and organisations of foreign businessmen
and it was just more of the same, that the higher you go,
you just run into the Mafia, in a new form.
Not the Mafia in actuality but in terms of practises
and it's very interesting to me that wherever I go I am told,
be it the Mayor of New York or... People tell me things, of how,
"Saddam Hussein loves The Godfather and always, to his inner circle,
"quotes the lines of the Godfather."
And so in a funny way, it's true that the higher you go
in this politics and language of power,
you run into the same stuff that is going on,
when people are fighting over a couple of city blocks.
This character, of course, was meant to
portray a highest level of power in politics,
and all Italians know
who this man is meant to be by a quote that is given
at the end of the picture which he is very famous for,
as well as for his thick glasses.
But I was always very surprised when this movie came out in Italy,
how none of the Italian journalists or people were the slightest bit shocked
by any of the allegations it was making about
the involvement of their government with the Mafia,
or in the possibility that their pope was murdered.
And the truth was that they sort of... It was old news.
They sort of all have known about it
and digested it and so there was nothing the slightest bit controversial
about it in this movie.
That is Martin Scorsese's mother, Katy,
a most wonderful lady and a great cook and a wonderful actress
and really a delightful, delightful lady that we've lost.
But I'm so happy to have her in the movie,
so I know I can see her, if I miss her.
When I was talking to George Lucas recently,
and we were talking about an actress and discussing her,
about how beautiful she was and George looked at me and said,
"Yeah," he said. "She's okay. But Sofia, she's really beautiful."
I found Andy Garcia just a very, very nice young man to work with,
very talented, very self-motivated,
very much working for the project.
I do have to say that in my career, one of the joys of my career,
of all the different movies I worked on,
is the cast have always been my greatest friend,
or my greatest allies.
They've always helped the project and always with such intelligence
and self-sacrifice.
I really, almost unanimously throughout my career on all the projects,
I found that to be the case and here was Andy,
working with this now-controversial daughter of mine,
who had never really acted except as a child,
when she was the little sister in Peggy Sue Got Married
or she was in Rumblefish.
Sofia was always like my good luck charm
to have her be in my movies.
And Vincent was so kind to her in the midst of the raging controversy
that we tried to make this movie with.
I loved the story of the daughter who has a crush on her cousin,
because indeed, the Coppolas, my side of the family,
really come from a union of two cousins.
My great-grandmother was a young girl in the south of Italy
who was very talented with embroidery and crocheting
and would occasionally scratch her nose with her darning needle
and her nose became infected.
And the doctors, of course, of that day only knew to amputate it.
And so my... This beautiful young woman had no nose
and she was forced to marry her own cousin,
so that someone would take her and so my whole line,
my grandfather, Augustine Coppola, was born of two cousins,
which of course, certain aunts and relatives said,
"Yeah, that's why the whole family is crazy."
So that love between the cousins, I found especially intriguing,
but I think Michael's real desire not to allow a sanction,
that love she had, was because he knew that as far as he had come
from his father's roots, that era before World War II,
the part that will never be made, that was written but will never be made,
the rise of the Corleones. Mario used to say, "Yes, the good years,
"when we killed everyone and no one killed us."
But Michael knows that Vincent is a throwback to that
and for his daughter to love him and perhaps marry him,
that it would put her in danger.
Ironically, who put her in danger was him, himself.
Here we have a scene in which Joey Zasa
tries to enlarge his piece of the crime family,
senses that Michael has lost interest.
I feel you can tell, I have always said that
you know whether a man is on his way up or on his way down.
I myself, you know, in years past could say, "You know, I clearly am
"so full of anxious passion to do these movies.
"I'm certainly on the way up," and just as I record this,
equally, I'm on the way down, because I don't have the passion
for the kinds of things that you must do in movies,
to have them be popular today.
I feel the only thing that could give me that passion
is if I would be allowed to try to explore something new,
but to be condemned to make the same movie,
over and over again, it's sort of like Jean-Paul Sartre.
It's sort of like somebody's idea of hell,
that you have a medium, the cinema,
which maybe we've touched 8% of what its language is
and what it can do.
And to be told by the people who own it, who make money with it,
who buy jewellery for their wives with it, that,
"No, you can't any more experiment with it.
"You can't take it into new territory.
"You must do the same thing over and over again."
That is a bitter, bitter pill to swallow.
Obviously, the big scene like this harkens back to earlier Godfathers
when we have the so-called five families, the old Mafiosi,
clearly this is the old kind of story in which Michael Corleone
usually proves to outsmart them all.
There were many obligations to try to have this film,
not only have some of the values that I've been talking about
that were personally more important to me,
but we had to drum up interesting violent sequences or action sequences.
We had to kill a bunch of people in a way we hadn't killed them before,
so we just did our best. And I kind of went to my...
"I've got to kill 20 people.
"God, I hate doing scenes where I've got to kill 20 people."
Unless it was really something totally...
That I'd never imagined before.
And in the scene we had this idea that,
"Well, if you were in the top of some Las Vegas hotel,
"how would you wipe out,
"as was Michael's style to do, all the opposition at once?
"What if the tables were turned and a guy like Joey Zasa,
"this more new-style mobster
"in more the image of the Teflon Don of fame,
"how would he approach this?" And I thought,
"How intriguing it would be if just suddenly,
"everything just started vibrating and you didn't even know why
"and the walnuts were rolling on the table
"and the oranges were rolling off the table
"and turned out that the bad guys had just engaged a helicopter,
"they'd just fly right up to the window and machine-gun everyone."
So that's the way we thought we would go
and we would perhaps never show the helicopter.
That would be sort of far out,
for filmmakers always love to do things without showing anything
and usually those are the best things, but in this case,
we did break down and got some extra shots,
I believe, of the spectre of the helicopter.
Of course, Vincent Mancini senses something wrong,
especially when this wily old guy with one foot in the grave,
kind of goes out of the room, to try to mollify Joey Zasa.
Vincent, who's sort of closer to the street,
senses something amiss that perhaps even Michael doesn't.
But Michael doesn't care about this stuff any more.
Michael doesn't care about
the gain of having this turf or that turf.
This is an interesting little custom that I think someone told me about,
that at these parties they would just pass around
a tray of beautiful jewellery and watches, probably hot,
and anyone could take what they wanted.
There's the vibrating which just starts in now,
out of the glass window was this notion
of wiping out all of your opponents in one easy move.
And of course all Michael has to really
lead him to freedom would be this young nephew.
The incident of the coat, it was something I read about
that this one guy really was so hung up on getting his coat
that he ends up getting massacred with the others.
It's a little bit based on Apalachin,
I think, when the FBI came upon all of the Mafia leaders in one place,
eating steaks and having a good time.
So we imagined, how can we make an unusual sequence
that could live up to some of the violent sequences in the earlier Godfathers.
Violence is a hard thing to do, you know.
It's a... Without repeating yourself.
That's a funny statement, "Violence is a hard thing to do
"without repeating yourself."
In the end, it's about flesh being torn, and blood. I hate it.
Michael, here, is clearly not the guy in command of...
His wits are not as tuned to survival as his young nephew is.
The younger Michael perhaps would have outsmarted them.
And I ultimately feel that's what audiences
who saw this picture wanted him to do.
They wanted to see the old Michael who just was one step ahead of them
and it was hard to have him be that and at the same time,
be more concerned with matters of his heart and his soul.
This scene echoed, quite a bit, Godfather I,
where after an attack,
the family sat around in the apartment, had bodyguards.
Here, note that Michael is drinking lots of water
and if you look through the three films, you'll see
he has this tremendous thirst to drink water.
This is his diabetes.
Now I had made two Godfather films after really only
intending to make one, not even very happily doing that
as it turned out, and making a second one,
which was a very happy experience for me,
because we were able to do it without any interference
and many years later, just as Michael
feels anxious to want to get on with your life
and to mature and to try to be a better man,
a better artist, you get pulled back into something of your youth.
The past is always having a war with the future.
I find I try so hard to be in the future and to think of new things
and new thoughts, and always, I'm pulled back by the past.
As I sit here, recording this commentary,
what is it other than being pulled back into something of the past?
Because no one is ever interested in the future, except artists, really.
Artists are the ones who want to step forward, move on,
but every other part of society wants them to stay back
where everyone is all huddled against the storm, the past, you know.
They call it the present, but it's the past.
Now characters like Neri, played by Richard Bright,
are emerging as the Caporegimes.
Talia herself is the main Caporegime in the family
as they plan to brace themselves
against this very, very well-organised and financed onslaught.
Here, of course, Michael really shows his vulnerability.
He is a man very sick from diabetes.
And I think this type of thing, to try to express Michael's
ultimate ageing and disillusion, is what people did not want to see.
They don't want to see Michael Corleone as a mortal,
as a man struggling with what is a horrible disease.
They want to see him cool and always on top of his enemies
and I think that was one perhaps strong way
that in pleasing myself, I disappointed my audience.
I feel it would have been a wonderful dimension
that the character that, I think, George Hamilton valiantly played...
Because people felt it was very inappropriate that he be cast.
He's such a wonderfully funny person and charming person.
The notion of having him be in a Godfather film
was considered inappropriate.
And I think he valiantly played his part,
but you can see how much more complex
it would have been had it been Bobby Duvall,
who was the family lawyer arranging these
high-level machinations with the Vatican.
And partly being even suspect.
Of course, with the Godfather stories it's always a puzzle
as to who is really responsible.
Obviously we know that Joey Zasa, played by Joe Mantegna,
was the front man, but you always wonder,
"Well, who's really behind it? Who's really the villain?"
We've learnt from previous Godfather films,
that it's never the one that you suspect.
There's always someone higher up, very high up.
Here, Tally begins to emerge as a...
I guess like the Caporegimes, there was originally Tessio and Clemenza
and here you have Tally, or Constanza,
and Neri as the two main lieutenants who are trying to...
Much as in Godfather I, when Marlon Brando was
attempted to be killed and the family was
trying to protect him and trying to protect themselves.
There is a parallel throughout this movie with Godfather I,
more than the other work I did on the films.
And whereas, for some reason, it was all right to see Marlon Brando,
as Vito Corleone, the first Godfather,
in a state of weakness and illness,
it doesn't feel right to a certain interpretation of The Godfather
to ever see Michael Corleone in this status,
although to me, what is about to happen here is
the beginning of a rebuilding of what really means most to him.
I have no doubt that Michael,
despite the limitations of his Sicilian-American upbringing
and how men are supposed to be and how women are supposed to be
and wives are supposed to be, he really loved Kay,
much as Diane and Al really love each other
or loved each other or probably will always love each other.
I felt we were dealing with real things in the context of this romantic novel.
And I wanted to look at Al more like
a Marlon Brando figure in the first Godfather,
although that character, Don Corleone, in all of this jeopardy was at peace
because although he had done terrible things,
somehow he had managed to outwit the devil.
He had managed to emerge,
though a murderer and a gangland leader
and obviously a person who... You would have to say an evil man,
he managed somehow to have us feel that he was a good man.
This scene once happened to me. I remember it very vividly.
I shot it just the way I remember it,
my son and my daughter, coming in at a time
when it looked pretty bad for me
and for our family.
It's very touching to me to have been able to encapsulate
something that I really remember, with fiction, albeit with my daughter.
There was always something intriguing to me
of the Italian girl who was privileged,
who, as we see there, had a beautiful Alfa Romeo sports car
and was so fashionable and yet
drawn to these mean streets,
these rank hangouts, to pursue the cousin she loved,
even though it was very, very dangerous and forbidden by her family.
I find the story of Mary Corleone and her
relationship between her father and her cousin,
were very moving to me, to think what that must really mean.
Go against your father's will because you love your cousin.
For those of you who want to learn how to cook,
and I always felt The Godfather at least should give a recipe
every once in a while, this is a pretty authentic method of rolling gnocchi.
The whole secret of rolling gnocchi really is
the touch when you flip them over with your finger.
You can do it with a fork, too.
Gnocchi is made with an equal part of flour and mashed potatoes,
a little bit of salt, and you create the dough,
it's really a potato dumpling, and then you roll it out
in these long tubular strips as you'll see them do.
Then with a knife cut them into little three-quarter-inch sections
and then you have to have the touch. So you need your cousin
to help guide your finger as you flip it around.
You get a little dimple in the gnocchi
and that's what makes them more tender
so they're not just like little pellets of lead
when they come out of the water.
When they're cooked they'll rise to the top,
so you don't have to dump the water. You can just scoop them off the top.
And, you know, most gnocchi in restaurants are too soft and mushy.
My gnocchi, I don't know why, are just a little more firm,
but this is how you roll them.
You see the little dimple?
That's the secret, that little dimple when they flip over.
I find this love story so sweet, you know, so touching to me.
And both of them so young and...
I mean this holding of her hand
is just going to make such unhappiness for the two of them,
it makes me want to cry.
Nothing but trouble will come from this.
And tragedy.
Here we are on very familiar turf.
We're at the Vesta of San Gennaro.
The policemen on horseback is an important element
that's established earlier and of course, you know,
Joey Zasa, like any number of civic-minded men of affairs,
John Gem or others,
you know, really always tried to reward the neighbourhoods
and throw festivals with fireworks
and I think that's what Joey Zasa is doing here.
The society of Anthony Meucci is going to raffle off a Cadillac.
Meucci, for those who don't know, is the Italian-American
who invented the telephone, they say before Alexander Graham Bell.
At any rate, the two of them long have been associated
with the invention of the telephone
and Italians always like to say that it was really Meucci.
But many great technological inventions have more than one inventor.
Television has three or four that I can think of.
These great innovations come about of the times
and sometimes more than one person thinks of them, so, yes, it's true.
Meucci was an inventor of the telephone.
This is Elizabeth Street in New York, incidentally where I live
when I'm in New York myself now.
I have a little apartment at the end of it, maybe I'll see it.
You can see the way the horse is being woven through this,
somewhat hopefully, mysteriously.
The little girl whose face is shocked with...
Her name, I think, was Jessica, a very sweet little girl
and I still get letters from her.
She must be a big girl now.
We always wanted to have a coup de gréce
performed by a guy on a horse, dressed up as a New York cop,
so we got to do it for this movie.
So it was just like Godfather I, while Michael was clinging for life,
or in a weakened state, the family went ahead
and engaged in violence which Don Vito Corleone
would have objected to and now Michael does.
Of course, his sister, Connie,
and his Caporegimes and Vincent himself said,
"What were we to do? They were coming after us."
And Michael seems to understand that it has to end.
That you just can't keep outsmarting your enemy in this
back and forth, Oresteia type of violence begetting violence.
To do that is to sacrifice your youth,
because ultimately it will destroy the future.
Well, in all the trouble spots of the world, I always wonder
in the Middle East and other places, don't they think of their young people?
Don't they think that to constantly trade violence for violence,
only begets more violence,
that they're just eating up their own children, in a way.
But it goes on, even as I'm speaking and will, no doubt, long after I'm gone.
That's a nice set. That's Dean Tavoularis,
once again working with us in Rome,
shooting a film that was supposedly set in New York in Rome.
It would have been wise, had we perhaps had a little budget
to shoot more of a second unit in New York than we did.
We did go around and shoot streets and entrances,
but it would've been nice to have more of the texture of New York in this.
You don't really feel it as much as you should, I think.
Of course one of the exciting things of this movie
was the fact that not only did the cast come back
but all of the main collaborators, those living,
and we had as our director of photography, Gordon Willis.
We had Dean Tavoularis,
for wardrobe, however, we worked for the first time,
with a new designer of the costumes, was Milena Canonero,
picking up from the wonderful work
that Johnny Johnstone had done on the first film
and Theodora Van Runkle had done on the second film.
And also on the editorial team, Walter Murch and Barry Malkin,
long-term collaborators.
And associate editor was Lisa Fruchtman,
who had worked also on Apocalypse Now.
So it was a family,
both in the crew and the team.
The producers were Fred Roos and Gray Frederickson
and then Chuck Mulvehill provided essential productorial services.
So the difficulty had to do with
trying really to get it all done, get it all written,
pull these themes together all in time to be released that Christmas.
I found it really pleasurable to work with Eli Wallach.
His family came to visit one day
and they... Right in front of him, they said, "Oh, don't let Eli overact."
And I laughed and smiled
because I just got such a kick out of what he did.
I suppose one could say that he laid it on a little thick,
but I certainly enjoyed it and if it's a little broad...
It's I who enjoyed it. So I did it.
I always liked Eli Wallach. I loved him in Baby Doll
and he was a pleasure to be around.
I love the idea of a character who's this old, old, old, old man
who's always giving you advice, you know,
like "Well, I don't have much longer to live,"
but really he's going to outlive you all
and he's going to have the last laugh, almost.
His resolution in this movie is particularly amusing to me.
And here in another Godfather tradition
suddenly we're in the beautiful sunny setting of Sicily and...
This was a very beautiful part of the shoot,
because we were really in Palermo
and outside of Palermo where the people are so wonderful.
And anyone who sees this movie
and sees Sicily as a beautiful place,
this is not even a tenth of it.
It is the most beautiful island and such sweet and hospitable people.
I think perhaps that's where the Sicilians get the reputation
as being especially tough, it's only because they are so open,
and so arms-embraced, that if you take advantage of them,
you do something that can only be
responded to with the most harsh response,
because they are very trusting and great people.
These were beautiful settings in Sicily, these wonderful palaces and...
Indeed, many of them were the same locations we used
for the first and second Godfather pictures.
This particular villa where he meets with
the old timers is the very first villa
where Michael had taken his young wife, Apollonia.
Here we have, again, actors from the past.
Franco Citti, who was one of the two shepherds
who had been Michael's loyal bodyguard,
is now back, more elderly.
This is a new actor, playing the part that Corrado Gaipa played,
if you remember, the old uncle who had taken care of Michael
when he stayed at the villa. This is his villa.
The name Lucchesi is the man I referred to earlier,
who was the gentleman with the thick black glasses and represents,
I won't say his name, the highest level of political power at that time in Italy
and only recently has been through many, many inquiries,
regarding his association with the Mafia,
which has all conveniently, seemingly, been dealt with,
but everyone knows the truth.
I feel Al Pacino was very
brave in working with me
to take Michael outside of the pre-fabricated,
Michael Corleone-type role. I mean, starting from day one,
when we cut his hair,
which sort of really determined the course we were going to go.
He wasn't going to be
the Michael Corleone of the other two pictures
who was going to be one step ahead of all the adversaries.
That he was going to be a combination more of Marion's character
in the first Godfather, and a kind of man
more concerned with his hope of redemption,
and hope to be reunited with his family
to a hope of earning back,
if not the respect, but the regard of his wife.
These were his concerns rather than
who was going to control the cocaine business in West Long Beach
or these idiotic concerns that the powerful men of our time are...
Who's going to own cable or who's going to
figure out how they can sell air to people.
Michael's concern is, I think, deeper.
And nothing is higher, I would think for him,
than his relationship with his son,
who, while he wants to be independent of his father,
still wants to express something to his father,
"Accept me and how I'm different, but also,
"understand that it means really more
"that I can go my own way and yet be your son,
"and love you, and respect you as a father."
And I was moved by the thought
that this boy would sing an old Sicilian song to his father
and not even know that it was bringing back memories
of Michael Corleone's young wife,
who had been sacrificed in
the insane warfare between thugs.
At this point, we had the footage of those old movies
and we said, "Oh, people will know that he's thinking of the young bride."
And then we said, "Well, maybe they won't.
"So, what the hell. Let's just cut it in."
And also it was a parallel
to his beautiful daughter, who...
He recognises, and very aptly, that Apollonia was murdered
because she was the wife of a Mafia gangster
and if the love of Vincent
was to not be exterminated, that one day his own daughter,
Mary, would be killed perhaps in the same way
that his young wife was.
These scenes with the kids were very tough.
At this time, in Palermo, there were Paramount executives,
kind of visiting and staying in the hotel rooms
and at that point, Sofia was so frazzled
by the enormous lack of support
that she felt from all these people
and the idea that it had been such a self-serving mistake to cast her.
I remember this scene in particular. The pressure, poor kid.
Sofia showed that she had a lot of strength
and grace during that period and, of course, it didn't stop.
It went on for years, but it was...
This was a tough scene
and her confidence was pretty much smashed at this point,
and the young boy too, you know, who was a newcomer as well.
I think I stole that image from a Visconti film,
the idea that there would be just this old castle
and the curtain blowing
and some rock and roll music coming out.
At this time, in Palermo, I was pretty much
hysterically trying to figure out the ending of the movie.
There had been an ending of the script,
which basically was that sort of Al Pacino and Diane Keaton,
and the characters of Michael and Kay,
have something of a reconciliation
and she does accept him
and when they go to church one Easter,
as they come out of their church,
some gunmen come and shoot him and he falls down
onto the steps, bleeding, and Kay goes up to him and says,
"Michael, Michael, are you dying?"
And he looks at her and says, "No." And then he dies.
Lying to her for the last time.
And I liked that ending and that was the ending
and then I became really troubled
that just to kill him at the end somehow wasn't enough.
You know the movie, in my mind, was The Death of Michael Corleone,
so of course I have that gene injected the wrong way into me,
that if it's going to be called The Death of Michael Corleone,
then of course I'm not going to have him die,
you know, perverse as that might be.
And I just... I don't know, I just couldn't...
I couldn't digest that ending
and it's a little bit like the experience on Apocalypse Now,
where the more I worked on the film
and the more I made it more and more surreal
and more and more kind of philosophical,
the more the typical ending of just a big battle at the end
just didn't satisfy me.
And so I really began to
try to think of another ending, and I went into my typical mode
of staying up all night and writing
and trying to write and talking to everyone
and asking Mario, "What can I do? What can I do for the ending?"
And I must say that, this has happened to me on other films,
and if you want to know which ones,
it happened to me for the ending of The Cotton Club.
It happened to me for the ending of...
Recently, The Rainmaker.
And I really was troubled over the endings, for different reasons.
For The Rainmaker, it was because, in the book,
everyone knew that the kid was going to win the law case.
So what was the drama in a movie?
I just struggled and tried and tried and tried and...
For all of you young writers and stuff,
the amount of hitting my head against the wall
and staying up all night and then hating what I've done
and trying again...
But I must say that I very much
like the ending of this picture
of The Death of Michael Corleone, partly because he doesn't really die.
It's worse than dying.
Here we have this mysterious figure, Mr Lucchesi, and you'll see,
he has these formidable-looking police.
So he's clearly a very important person in the government,
if not the head of the government,
and he clearly is involved
with this traitor, whom we now see as a traitor.
So just as we thought Joey Zasa was just small-fry
in a simple, very shallow level of the conspiracy
that Michael is up against,
not only the highest levels of the Vatican,
but, surprisingly, that also puts him at the highest levels of the Mafia,
which takes him to the head of the Italian state.
The guy couldn't be in more trouble with more powerful people if he tried.
This was a beautiful scene that
Mario had really been the instigator of, as is, of course,
the case with so many of the great scenes of this movie,
where the two plots really come together
and we have Michael's personal story in his desire for,
really, redemption and forgiveness
and to be
taken in the arms of God
and be still welcome as his child.
And equally the high levels of the Vatican,
which is, in fact, so corrupt and has always been so.
And so venal and mercenary.
So it takes you to two places at once,
and this story of the stone, of course is a beautiful...
Says more than I can say about the Church
and the institution of the Vatican.
He is still being ravaged
by the diabetes, as my grandfather was.
He needs to have information to understand
what forces are really ranged against him.
But more important, and again more important to me,
as it was to Michael
is these other issues that a man
sometimes comes to, which are more personal
and more related to,
really, how he stacked up as a man in his lifetime.
A lot of people ask me, "Oh, you know, when you die,
"what do you want on your gravestone? Do you want to be remembered
"for a movie?"
And I look at them and I say, "Oh, you know,
"just put, 'He liked little children,' or something like that."
That's really what I was like.
And this is the point he's at,
except he's not so simple as I am
and he has darker ghosts
to exorcise from his life.
And here we have
the ancient tradition of confession.
But imagine taking Michael Corleone's confession.
A wonderful actor, Raf Vallone,
movie star from years before,
played this scene and contributed so much to this film.
But, you know, those guys watching Godfather movies in New Jersey,
the fellows who know the Soprano family and what have you,
they're not interested
in Michael Corleone's confession, I assure you.
They're interested in what he's going to do to all those guys.
Here, just visually, we wanted to give the impression of
looking through the grating of a confessional.
Of course, they were outside in the garden.
So we shot through the flowers to try to give the sense of the privacy
or the intimacy of a confessional.
I knew men like Michael Corleone, it seemed to me,
those steel-haired, crew-cutted
men who were the leaders of
merchants' groups and Catholic charities,
Knights of Columbus,
former military people.
In a way, Michael is that, isn't he? He is a former military man.
Those are the kinds of strong, steel-like men
that I tried to base him on,
but show him really
in touch with his great, great regret
and his great, great guilt
and the weight of what he had done all his life,
weighing on him with no one, no wife,
to comfort him any more,
because he had also destroyed that relationship.
A project that has so many main characters
needs to provide an introduction for each of them
and ultimately continue their involvement in the story
and then obviously needs an emotional...
If not a resolution, but an emotional culmination.
And, here, given so much that has happened
to Michael Corleone,
his long relationship with his sister,
dating back to where he had her husband killed,
and through the period in the Lake Tahoe days,
when he was so disapproving of her behaviour
and now, almost as a collaborator
in this mob life that she seems to have taken a shine to.
I thought it was moving that she would help him
with his insulin shots.
I confess that this interest in diabetes
comes from my childhood experience with my grandfather, seeing it.
He was blinded from diabetes.
I remember he used to just touch our faces
and cry, 'cause he...
Especially with my sister Tally, because he had seven sons.
He never had a daughter.
Everyone knows that it's so difficult,
chemistry between families, the tremendous love you have,
and yet you have this familiarity, you know them so well.
So that you know their positive issues and their negative issues,
and you have such resentment and jealousy,
and a sense of what wasn't fair,
what was fair.
The relationship with Michael and his sister,
I would imagine, is as complicated as my relationship with my sister,
who is playing his sister.
It's too much for me to think about.
In the great Mario Puzo style,
one must always introduce
an infallible killer.
You know, a killer who's better
than the last infallible killer that had been in the story,
or someone invulnerable.
A kind of Luca Brasi figure
who is so...
So formidable.
This young man is actually a Coppola relative,
albeit his name is Russo,
from the town of Bernalda, where my grandfather was from,
where the cousin with no nose and... He was quite a character.
I didn't know him, obviously, until I went to Sicily
and he arrived in Rome and...
I know enough about
the family from the old country to understand
who his part of the family was and...
So I tried to create a role for him
as the apprentice to this Sicilian
"ace in the hole,"
as Eli refers to him.
Mario's work always has these
forces set in motion, invulnerable killers that you figure,
"Oh my God, as long as you have Luca Brasi on your side,
"nothing can ever happen to him."
And then all of a sudden he kills that guy.
So you don't have him any more and you begin to say,
"My God, we're totally vulnerable now."
On the case of Michael,
he was given these legendary bodyguards
who are the twins, who are two identical twin brothers,
who indeed were twins,
the actors who played them, who also were legendary,
never-can-be-defeated bodyguards.
So you get those kinds of forces in the works
and then you surprise everyone
with who was able to kill whom.
Now we begin to prepare for the end,
with the poster of Cavalleria Rusticana.
It's always a great pleasure for me to see Sofia in these scenes.
I must say it's...
It really warms my heart.
There I have my sister, I have my daughter,
I have Diane, I have Al.
It was an unusual experience working on this film
and to be with them all, and so many years later.
I see in Sofia a little bit of my mother, Italia.
Yes, the third film,
Godfather Part III, or The Death of Michael Corleone,
it's very different than the other two.
It tries to hearken to them
through the many years,
but it's trying to do something quite different.
It's about themes, I think, that are more uniquely reserved for it.
I mean, the fact that the main character performs such a different role
than he does in the other films, where, of course, he's the driving force
that is the opposition to the conspiracy.
In this case, Michael is really made vulnerable
by his own concern for things other than business,
for personal things.
That's the real drawing that my son made for me.
He did that, and it was in Godfather II,
and I'm surprised, when it opened up,
that we still have it.
These are the legendary twin bodyguards.
I thought I had some incident which showed their prowess.
Maybe I didn't have time to include it, but I thought it would be a good idea
to show them do something, like, so spectacular that you figure,
"Well, these guys, no one is ever going to get at Michael Corleone
"while they're around."
There is my little granddaughter, Gia, being carried by my daughter Sofia.
Gia's a nice girl.
She's now 14 years old.
I just saw her.
She's just turning into that kind of lanky, tall teenager.
Here we begin an interlude in which Michael sort of kidnaps Kay
and really was the sequence between them
that leads to a more of a rapprochement, if not a romantic one,
but a spiritual one, in which ultimately then
he was to be shot and that was the end.
And the whole superstructure
that I came up with, with Cavalleria Rusticana,
and the interposing the story of the opera
with the story of the family, with the story of the daughter
being absolutely told not to see the cousin,
all hopefully can be stirred up and then ultimately resolved.
Again, when we shot Sicily we always fought so hard
to have it be sun,
which is not the case, by the way.
So we always had to wait.
This little pathway down to the door is the very same pathway
in a small town in Taormina,
where the men had come to take Vito Andolini to the Mafia chieftain.
So just as Italian-Americans do,
we were visiting the actual places.
This church we used for the scene
when the little boy, Vito Andolini was hidden in the mule,
and taken off to America.
So we did have the great pleasure of going back to these towns...
And I see a donkey going by,
that's probably the director trying to indicate or remind you
of the fact that the little boy had been smuggled,
Michael Corleone's father, had been smuggled out of this very spot.
I'm very interested in time
and in the unity of time and how these things repeat.
This story of the puppet show is so interesting.
It's the story of the Baroness of Carini,
and how she falls in love with her own cousin
and is killed by her father.
I thought I was so fortunate to find an Italian folktale
that is indeed done in puppet show,
that tells the story of
really what is sort of happening in our story,
with the love of Mary for her cousin
and the fact that her father condemns her to death.
These scenes were always such a pleasure for me.
I always would go early, and as I would drive to the location,
I would hear the band rehearsing and I knew that my dad,
who was so fastidious and serious about his work,
that he'd be there, you know, an hour before everyone else,
having found some local musicians
and bringing the arrangements
of the source music that he had just written.
And it was such a pleasure to sit in the chair
while they were rehearsing and put in my two cents
about how they should play the music, which of course, you know,
not being a musician, I'm not very much of an expert at anything.
But it was great, great, great pleasure for me.
Here is the same courtyard where Michael's young wife, Apollonia,
was killed when the car, the Alfa Romeo,
was blown up by
the traitor bodyguard
who was played by Angelo Inf anti.
It is interesting to have the same settings,
the same places.
This is the same room where Michael opened the window
and beheld his young bride and ironically, as life sometimes does,
here is his wife, standing in the same place.
I guess, in life, there is some director who puts people in the same place,
or who creates these
similarities and parallel reminiscences.
In a movie, you need people like myself to do it,
but in life it happens very often.
I found, on this picture, Diane Keaton such an intriguing person.
She really at this point in her life, her career,
is such a
kind of gifted, brilliant woman.
She works very much in solitude
and has techniques to concentrate
and what she gives you is really part of herself.
I guess always, but on this picture all the cast,
all the people coming together, there was a...
You know, they're so much wiser and older and more world-weary.
There's a kind of scepticism that they bring,
that the younger versions of themselves didn't have,
when they were just anxious to be in a project.
And, of course, when you have intelligent people like this,
they all had opinions. They had opinions on everything.
I'm sure, to this day they might feel, "Oh, it would have been better
'just to end the film
"as it was originally at the end of this relationship,"
or not to have cast my daughter
or this or that.
But I was much more aware
of these actors as being really fully-developed
adults with strong opinions, and it makes it a little harder
to direct them because you're constantly trying to
make sure the material is...
I won't say worthy of them, but conforms with their view of things.
Naturally, of course, all actors tend to think that the film is about them.
There's that wonderful line in the movie
where they ask the nurse in Romeo and Juliet,
“What's Romeo and Juliet about?“
and he says, "Well, it's about this nurse."
But that's a good thing, that the cast puts you through that demand,
that they really ask you to think through their characters,
as though they're the only character in the piece.
But, yeah, I ended up on this picture, feeling that
Diane Keaton was some sort of genius or...
That's a word I don't use very often.
What's the next level, you know? Just some extremely
talented, brilliant, intelligent person.
The love of a man and a woman when they have been through
so many years and have seen and shared together
tragedy and shared great fortune,
almost is more difficult than sharing poor fortune.
It's a wonderful thing. It's a heartbreak to me that
so few people are willing to
withstand the difficulties of marriage,
to get to that point when
they're with a partner who's been with them more than half their own ages.
It's a pity
that more people don't
preserve what a long-term marriage can be.
I guess here we're indicating for the first time that,
and of course showing it in regards to Kay,
that things will never change,
that she'll always be the woman behind the door
and that Michael, although Michael has been
pretty not-attentive to business.
He suddenly, I guess, feels that now with killing Don Tommasino
and the fact that they're after him, that he has to.
Here we show somewhat authentically
what the selection of the Pope would be like.
Of course, we've only built a teeny part of a set.
I mean, what you see is what we built.
This is actually a curious plot point, is that this pope,
whom we have had the experience of
knowing is a good man and a spiritual man and a...
Really above any notion of corruption
is now to be the Pope.
It changes the plot, when you think about it.
This is the customary signal of the white smoke
from the Vatican that a new pope has been selected
and the way that it's done, we try always in films
that we work on to be authentic.
I believe these are probably
derived from some of the lines of the real John Paul I.
From all indication, John Paul I was a wonderful man
and a man who was really willing to
march into the future in a good way,
and it was perhaps the reaction
of more conservative elements within the Vatican that...
And also the fact that he was aware
of so much of the financial corruption
that had been evident.
I won't mention names, but in terms of the cardinals
who were entrusted to that,
that perhaps the notion of a truly good, honest pope
would have been anathema to the forces
that had been woven around
that aspect of the Vatican.
Those who wish can read the history of this period
and will recognise many
of the figures that I've tried to depict in Mario Puzo's style,
which is to say, they're sort of like real people,
but not really.
This scene was shot after the film returned from Italy.
It was shot in New York and it was shot because it was felt,
and I didn't disagree, it was felt by the Paramount executives
and by Frank Mancuso in particular...
Who's a very, very sweet and nice man
and a good film executive,
who was in a tough position at that point,
because they really needed this picture to be done
and they needed it to be a big financial performer,
and so they really wanted it to be as much of a thriller
and to focus on the so-called action parts of the plot, the revenge.
Here I have this character who's wailing about his inability to be a good man
in his life, and it was felt that we really needed a transfer of power.
That, "Okay, guys, enough of this guy feeling sorry for himself.
"Let's get Vincent Mancini in there
"and have him be like the old Michael Corleone
"and get in there and kill all the enemies."
So that's what this scene was meant to do.
Of course, working with Al, I was anxious to give Al the opportunity
to use his formidable intelligence and talent
to really express the other personal aspects
and in a sense, it was a welcome opportunity
to let Al hand over the reins to Vincent, knowing that Vincent was a hothead,
like his brother Sonny had been.
We're just going to get this movie back into the kind of plot that, you know,
many people felt it should have had right from the beginning.
I mean, who needs this Michael Corleone mid-life crisis?
Let's get to the good stuff.
Reminds me of the time on the first Godfather film
when they said they were going to send in an action director,
because I was too interested in the family parts.
You can just imagine. What if Michael Corleone wasn't this type of man,
but still had his long black hair, albeit older,
and he's sitting at his desk and he's talking to Vincent
and you figure he's got it all figured out
and he just throws a few clues out there?
That's all I would have had to do to be the old-style Godfather,
but, you know, it didn't seem like that really was what this was about.
So we had gone back to New York after we had a rough cut of the movie
and there's always little things that are left out,
a little shot of this or a little piece of that.
I find in a day you can do 18, 20 pieces if you have just a little column
or a little piece of a door.
At this point, seeing the picture,
I don't even notice those shots any more,
the illusion is so complete, given with the nature of what film is like
and how a piece that you do somewhere else,
thousands of miles away, totally fits in.
This scene signified, of course, in a way, Connie's rise to power,
because she is the sponsor of Vincent
and really very much like the first Godfather
when I remember Marlon Brando was feeding the fish
and Michael was sitting behind the desk.
Michael was then the, kind of, Vincent character
and Clemenza and Tessio were saying,
"Please, Godfather, are you going to be involved in this?"
And Marlon was saying, "Well, you know, just,
"I'm going to feed the fish and you'll do what they say."
Well here we are, several generations later,
and it's really Connie who is taking power
with some of the Caporegimes
and the transfer of power is made.
The family will be saved by Vincent,
who assumes he has now been adopted, he is a Corleone.
He is now clearly the new Godfather,
as this simple ritual has come to mean,
but most important to Al, he has been given this new position
with the promise that he will reject Mary
and will not continue this love affair,
which Michael feels will only lead to her demise,
just as it did to the demise of his wife.
We shot the opera sequence of this film at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo,
a beautiful, beautiful opera house which we are seeing,
and which was in fact under renovation and reconstruction,
so, although we could use the exterior and certain interior portions,
we could not actually work on the stage. It was all totally in reconstruction.
So we shot the family and the guests
and the night of the opening of Cavalleria Rusticana,
with the son of Michael Corleone singing the tenor role,
elsewhere in Rome.
This, interestingly, was a model of the theatre
that we found in a room and we featured it in the lobby.
So once again, in Godfather style, all the principal characters,
all the players are coming together to some big event,
enemy as well as friend,
but now we know that Vincent Mancini, now Vincent Corleone, who is the...
He is the Michael Corleone of the story now,
is in charge, and so the attitude is not so inattentive to business,
that Vincent is there to protect Michael Corleone
and to vanquish these very formidable enemies.
We have the super-duper twin bodyguards who can do no wrong.
We know that there is another killer, Mosca, with his young apprentice
who does the donkey sound.
That's a real song, by the way, but it was useful to remind you,
the audience, who he was in the sea of so many characters.
And here is Constanza, my sister,
bringing a little box of pastry to Eli Wallach,
which I'm sure he's going to enjoy.
This is sad to me, because you know, she's without explanation.
All those stories always break my heart, like in La Traviata or, you know,
whenever there are lovers and then one has to give up the other
and make it look like they don't like him any more,
but they're doing it, really, because they do love them.
In this case Vincent, in order to become the head of the family,
has promised to give up any encouragement to the daughter,
under the watchful eyes of...
And she tries her little 18-year-old tricks with him,
you know, "Hey, you still love me, don't you?"
But you know, it's not to be.
He knows that the father has forbidden it.
Those kind of stories are really sad to me.
So Constanza has brought the cannoli to Don Altobello.
You've got to watch out for cannoli in these Godfather movies.
Those are very, very good cannoli. Those are real Sicilian cannoli.
What is notable about them is
they're not the little narrow ones with the little cream,
these are the kinds...
It's hard for me to see my daughter cry.
The real issue with Sofia's performance, I think, in this movie
was that she had that kind of California-speak when she spoke,
and if you kind of just look at the scene and look in her eyes,
you'll see that Sofia's acting is extremely truthful.
It's what actors call, "She's full." She's there.
And that's worth more than anything.
You would never want your daughter to look at you like that.
So we were inside the Teatro Massimo facing the boxes and the audience.
Of course, not in the stage.
Interesting side note to this was my Uncle Anton,
who conducted the orchestra.
I'll tell some stories out of school.
My Uncle Anton is a great operatic conductor and composer
and my father's younger brother.
And over the years, although as a child I always remembered them so close
and staying up at night
and talking about Puccini and talking about Turandot
and talking about music.
I always was very happy with that relationship.
But over the years, for reasons I don't understand,
they had a falling out.
So often the fallings-out come.
And it was my desire to really see my uncle and my father work together,
and so I used my power, perhaps erroneously.
And my father was totally capable of conducting the opera,
but because he was so busy writing all the music,
I tried to get them to share a few things
and really, I say, selfishly, just so I could sit once again
and have them have dinner and see them work together.
It didn't really work. I mean, they were courteous to each other.
Their wives didn't really get along so much.
And I think my uncle did a wonderful job and it was a good association,
but my father really felt that I had imposed this.
That level of old Italian, they're very possessive about opportunities
and who gets the plums or whatever you want to call them.
So one could say that this was a successful experiment,
but perhaps also it was a very stressful one
and attests to sometimes the fruitlessness
of trying to force relatives to work and be together.
But I thought it was a somewhat authentic production
of Cavalleria Rusticana.
I staged it in a traditional way.
I was anxious to show how the roots of The Godfather
go back to these simple village feuds
and characters that I knew as a child, Alfio and Lola...
And I always love that Turiddu sang that opening aria
backstage next to the harp, you know,
watching the conductor on a television monitor.
You know, it's the Francis desire to show you
how things work in the background.
But I liked this production of the resolution of the story
woven against the simple peasant story of Cavalleria Rusticana,
which I feel is in some ways the basis of so much of what we did
in the first two Godfathers,
musically, as well as the drama.
Cavalleria Rusticana deals with a young man
who comes back from the army
and has a love who is now married to the coachman, Alfio,
and it has to do with jealousy and insult in that rustic setting
and it's all about you resolve things with knives
and you follow the rustic codes of behaviour.
I was in a real pickle with the two super-bodyguards
because on one hand, I had the killer to end all killers, Mosca,
and then I had the great twin bodyguards who were also the greats.
So I had to come up and I must confess that many, many, many, tough nights
of hitting my head against the wall was used
and our stunt coordinator, Buddy Joe Hooker,
came up with what I thought was a very, very ingenious idea,
in which it would look as though
the twins bodyguard had subdued and killed Mosca.
But in fact it was Mosca who had done it
and lured the other one, and so ultimately he wins.
I try little touches, like to have Franc D'Ambrosio as Turiddu
show this type of Sicilian, cocky young man
and pull on his pants the way Sonny used to.
I tried as best I could to integrate the little story of jealousy and revenge
set in a Sicilian setting,
to show how these people really grew out of that.
And like the other Godfathers, there are many threads of possible murders
and resolution of the forces that are arrayed,
and you have New coming "m and you have Mosca setting up,
obviously to assassinate Michael.
You have these various bodyguards interacting,
and you have this ear bite, by the way, just like Joey Zasa.
Vincent recognises it.
That's how I saw it as a kid in Cavalleria Rusticana.
I thought that was really weird, that you would bite someone's ear.
So, now the bullet is almost...
There's my Uncle Anton.
Just as the bullet is about to be really delivered to Michael,
the one bodyguard, his bodyguard, has uncovered the assassin, Mosca,
just as you're in the most dramatic part of the opera.
I think the young man challenges the husband to a duel
and he sort of knows he's going to be killed.
There are many... You know, I hope for many levels here.
The satisfaction of the mother.
You know, mothers love their sons, as do fathers,
but in a different way, and want to see the son go through this difficult moment
of resisting the strong influence of the father,
and the coming into the light.
The knife-killing on stage is echoed by the killing in the boxes.
Well, you all know this, it's pretty evident,
but that was what I had hoped, that it could all...
Here it looks as though Mosca is dead and the twin is pleased
that his brother has done this,
but if you look carefully, of course,
Mosca is alive and just holding him up.
That was pretty clever". That was Buddy Hacker's idea.
The famous Lupara.
All of the symbols that are throughout The Godfather, even in the first ones,
all the seeds are in that opera.
Now here the cast is on the break and so they're in there
looking like shepherds with shotguns.
And therefore, my cousin, the one who makes the song like the donkey,
just looks like one of the actors from the play,
but indeed he has a loaded Lupara, so he is more dangerous.
It's a kind of Pirandello idea,
where the drama of Cavalleria Rusticana
is intermingled with the real story.
No big deal.
Clearly all of the adversaries,
the corrupt priest played by Donal Donnelly,
the nervous banker...
More things are happening at the same time
in the halls of the Vatican where the good Pope John Paul is sleeping.
For his evening cup of tea.
There were many threads of the story to pull together
and of course the concept was to try to pull them all together
interwoven with the opera.
The opera both as the root from which all the Godfather sensibilities stem
as well as the modern history that we were working in,
such as Vincent now killing all of the conspirators
on the financial scam with the Vatican.
There are real people who died in similar ways
as indeed this story is based on, really, the truth.
Even, interestingly enough, you have the procession in the opera
that very much looks like the San Gennaro Festa in New York.
So we were recalling much imagery hoping that it would remind you
not only of this film, but other films.
The death of Fanucci in the second Godfather
or the Festa in the first one.
Now some of the news of these various occurrences
are coming to Michael,
and so Mosca is thwarted just as he was about to...
Having killed the two best bodyguards, the twin bodyguards,
now Michael is taken out of his scope
and he must think of another way to conclude his task.
So everyone is trying to kill everyone, which is typical for these kind of people.
I've always enjoyed working with Italian actors.
As I have said before, they always come prepared with ideas
and they show it to you and then if you don't like it
they'll come up with something else.
They never give you a hassle of having to come up for them with what to do.
Clearly the imagery supporting the very mysterious death of the Pope
with the Passion of Christ
as expressed by these simple villagers, Sicilian villagers,
and the heartbreak
of Vincent's position with Mary,
that he knows he's breaking her heart, but he must.
In order to protect the family he must make that sacrifice.
Another plot line with Connie,
who was always the favourite of Don Altobello,
as he just happily eats away the cannoli she gave him.
The character Santuzza as the spectre of death is everywhere,
mingled with the ritual of the Catholic Church.
This moment, it's sort of as though Connie is killing her favourite uncle
and godfather, actually. I think he was her godfather.
This was an interesting scene, the idea that as all this is going on,
as you recall, Michael has said to the Franco Citti character,
"One day I'll ask you for a service,"
and he goes to the high halls of power and authority
and is totally frisked
so that there is no chance that he has a weapon on him.
Talia was very good in this film.
She was very strong and very...
Almost satanic, the creature she becomes.
These are real quotes from leaders within the Italian government.
For Italian people, it might lead them to guess
who this character is meant to be.
These events depict both historical facts
and, I guess you could say, political fantasy.
As I look back on this film, there's a hell of a lot packed into this opera.
I wanted the film to end as a tragedy in a classic sense.
And in a tragedy, you know, there's always a certain way it's done.
There's someone dead on the steps and the five best friends carry them off,
and it's sort of like Hamlet or something.
I thought those steps were so wonderfully like a classic setting.
The Baroness di Carini. For me, this is the nightmare of nightmares.
They say that art imitates life. It's so unusual how it does. How I've seen it.
But when this film was finished and came out,
it was Sofia that they went after.
Walter Murch took the scream out for the beginning, making it so agonising.
Reminds me of the ending sentiment of The Magnificent Ambersons,
yes, finally, after all of this, over three films
and generations of people working on the film,
Michael Corleone got his comeuppance.
And this is why we felt the film should be called
The Death of Michael Corleone.
Interestingly enough, he dies at such an indeterminate time in the future,
that Mario and I thought, as we discussed the possible fourth film,
that the fourth film would be much more like the second film,
in that it would be told in two time periods.
That one time period would be the period in New York,
sort of picking up from Godfather II
and taking you into the time period of Godfather I.
You would see the Corleone family in its rise to power,
and the main character really would be Sonny Corleone,
and he would be juxtaposed,
very much in the way that the second Godfather was,
with a modern story in which the main character would be Vincent Mancini,
Sonny's son,
and his story would be Vincent,
of course, in a modern period after this action,
in which he had really become the head of the Corleone family
but it had gone into a realm of cocaine
and a dangerous relationship with this tremendous drug trade.
But there would be two stories of what Mario called "the happy years,"
which was the story of the Corleone family coming into power
and indeed Don Corleone, as played by Marlon Brando,
reaching his zenith,
and at the same time the story of the rise.
It was the story of the fall of the family in a modern context,
almost in a story starring Vincent Mancini,
with the haunting he had of this love that he lost
and his ultimate hunting down, almost like a Pablo Escobar,
on the landscape of Colombia,
in which they are hunting down this last gangster mogul.
And there would be one more scene
with Vincent and the old Michael Corleone,
which ironically had happened, really, earlier than his death scene at the end.
So it would be a movie sort of like Godfather II,
that would interpose the rise of the family before World War II
and the destruction of the family in the person of Vincent Mancini,
but ultimately we never really laid out the script,
although there are parts of the old section,
the period before World War II,
but the new section was never worked on.
And Mario Puzo unfortunately died
before any opportunity was made to have him work on the script with me.