On Oct. 12, the Guardian published an excerpt from Al Pacino’s new memoir, Sonny Boy, in which he relates his struggles to find his footing on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic 1972 mafia film. Literally: While filming a stunt where he was supposed to jump onto a moving car, he slipped and injured his ankle.
“Everyone on the crew had crowded around me,” he writes. “They were trying to lift me up, asking me: Was my ankle broken? Could I walk? I didn’t know.”
Pacino adds that at the moment, the injury felt almost like a blessing: Coppola had told the young actor that his performance as Michael Corleone, the scion of an East Coast crime family, wasn’t up to snuff.
After a week and a half on set, Pacino recalls, Coppola took him aside to ask him to step up his performance: “You know how much you mean to me, how much faith I had in you,” Pacino recalls the director saying. “Well, you’re not cutting it.”
Though the ankle injury constrained him physically, Pacino recalls that he was determined to prove himself while filming a pivotal scene where Michael assassinates a rival mobster in a restaurant. His steely demeanor in the scene got over, ultimately earning him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.
“Francis showed the restaurant scene to the studio, and when they looked at it, something was there,” he writes. “Because of that scene I just performed, they kept me in the film.”
Sonny Boy will be published on Oct. 15.
Mark Athitakis is a freelance writer.
