There’s just no disputing it; The Godfather is an absolutely brilliant movie. You could even go as far as to say it is cinematic perfection. The Francis Ford Coppola drama movie is widely regarded as one of the best movies of all time, and you would be hard pressed to find anything you could change about the 1972 movie. That is, unless you’re James Caan, one of the actors in the Italian crime film.
As The Godfather approaches its 50th anniversary, many of the cast and even Coppola himself have been reminiscing about the production and the immense success of the movies. James Caan however, has a particularly sour memory of the first time he saw the movie in its final form, and realised one of his scenes had been cut.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Caan revealed how Coppola cut a massive scene involving his character Sonny, which amounted to ten pages of script. Caan was so angry at the time, that he actually walked out of a screening of The Godfather.
“When Michael tells me he is going to take care of the cop and Sollozzo, I say, ‘You’ll get brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.’ There was a scene before in the same room that I had with Bobby [Duvall] that was like ten pages long — and Francis cut all of it out,” Caan explains.
“I was so pissed off, I couldn’t watch the rest of the film,” Caan claims. “But otherwise, he gave me a great honour,” he added with a smile. At least he’s not holding a grudge, right?
The interview also threw up another fun anecdote from James Caan, when the actor explained how he bought his own shoes for the role of Sonny Corleone. According to Caan, every Italian-American owns a pair of black and white shoes, and when there were none in the costume department, he took matters into his own hands.