Michael Corleone by Al Pacino He returned to the movie screen 30 years ago on December 25 in “The Godfather: Part Three” with a new haircut and a plan to exit organized crime.
In the third “Godfather” movie, Corleone struggled to get out of the sordid crime trade (“They pulled me back on,” he famously said). Offscreen This nifty buzzer cut was surprisingly big of drama during the production of the movie.
“It was really a big deal,” filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola now says of the Corleone haircut.
“I had a hard time with her,” Al Pacino told USA TODAY about the hairstyle while discussing the movie, as it was edited and re-named “The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone.” Beam).
The drama did not come from Pacino, who came to accept the new look, “and yet he succeeded,” he said.
But others enthusiastically spoke out against the hairstyle of the time. Coppola admits that makeup legend Dick Smith and actress Diane Keaton, Pacino’s girlfriend at the time who played Corleone’s estranged ex-wife, has died in the face of the extreme deviation from the style shown by young Michael in 1972’s The Godfather and 1974 The Godfather: Part Two “
Even the Oscar-winning Smith, who was a central crew member in the first two films of “The Godfather,” left the third because of the haircut, according to Coppola.
“Dick Smith and Diane were against the idea of ​​cutting Al’s hair,” Coppola wrote, responding to questions via email. Dick Smith quit because of it.
Pacino, who was 52 at the time of the film’s release, must have been of age to play Corleone. Smith, who died in 2014, had introduced Coppola With the conceptual images that show Pacino With the same long hair Michael Corleone had worn in the last two movies, but his age was just right.
But the director wanted to go in a different direction.
“I wanted to do something that would be a real debut between long-haired Michael in the first two films and this new mature movie,” Coppola explained. “My thinking was to create a unique look for Al at that age, the kind of semi-gray ‘crew cut’ I’ve sometimes seen in business or military strongmen.”
In an interview with LimitCoppola said his final decision to cut Michael Corleone’s hair led to a group of “rebellion … I did it and I didn’t know why I was so sure I was right doing it that I would even encounter someone I was so grateful to Dick Smith, who was …” End of our relationship. He never spoke to me again. “
Pacino was not passionate about cutting and his vision of Corleone was more than that of Smith. The actor initially visualized “long, flowing hair,” but more guilt Michael carried within himself.
“I imagined the cheekbones sprinkled, the Howard Hughes character, the sunken cheeks,” said Pacino. “Francis directed me in another direction. I’m very grateful for that. Because I didn’t know where to go with that other one.”
“That’s why it’s always a good idea to listen to your manager,” said Pacino. “He dumped me in the movie.”
Instead of hair, Pacino insisted the biggest public reaction came from seeing how far the actor seemed to get (due to makeup). Film fans were surprised by the big difference between Frank Keeler in 1989 drama “The Sea of ​​Love” and his gray haired movie Corleone in 1990.
People were saying, ‘What happened to? He got old!’ Pacino said. “They were surprised how much I had grown up to one year since” The Sea of ​​Love. “
