Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [153]
At one point Charles Bluhdorn threatened to fire Francis Coppola—I don’t remember why—but I said, “If you fire Francis, I’ll walk off the picture.” I strongly believe that directors are entitled to independence and freedom to realize their vision, though Francis left the characterizations in our hands and we had to figure out what to do. I threw out a lot of what was in the script and created the role as I thought it should be. When you do this, you never know whether it’s going to work; sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. But after I had read the book, I decided that the part of Don Corleone lent itself perfectly to underplaying. Rather than portraying him as a big shot, I thought it would be more effective to play him as a modest, quiet man, the way he was in the book. Don Corleone was part of the wave of immigrants who came to this country around the turn of the century and had to swim upstream to survive as best they could. He had the same hopes and ambitions for his sons that Joseph P. Kennedy had for his. As a young man, he probably hadn’t intended to become a criminal, and when he did, he hoped it would be transitional. As he said to his son Michael, played by Pacino, “I never wanted this for you. I wanted something else. I always thought that you’d be governor or senator or president—something—but there just wasn’t enough time.… There just wasn’t enough time.”
I thought it would be interesting to play a gangster, maybe for the first time in the movies, who wasn’t like those bad guys Edward G. Robinson played, but who was a kind of hero, a man to be respected. Also, because he had so much power and unquestioned authority, I thought it would be an interesting contrast to play him as a gentle man, unlike Al Capone, who beat up people with baseball bats. I had a great deal of respect for Don Corleone; I saw him as a man of substance, tradition, dignity, refinement, a man of unerring instinct who just happened to live in a violent world and who had to protect himself and his family in this environment. I saw him as a decent person regardless of what he had to do, as a man who believed in family values and was shaped by events just like the rest of us. The people who joined the Mafia in those days did so because they were set upon by people who wanted to take advantage of them. There was a war in Little Italy; members of a group called the Black Hand were extorting money from immigrants, who had to pay to safeguard their families and to make a living. Some knuckled under, but others like Don Corleone fought back, and this was the story of The Godfather. He would not surrender to the men who demanded a piece of everyone’s action. He was forced to protect his family, and in the process he gravitated into crime.
At the time we made the film in the early seventies, there were not many things you could say about the Mafia that you couldn’t say about other elements in the United States. Was there much difference between mob murders and Operation Phoenix, the CIA’s assassination program in Vietnam? Like the Mafia, it was just business, nothing personal. Certainly there was immorality in the Mafia and a lot of violence, but at heart it was a business; in many ways it didn’t operate much differently from certain multinational corporations that went around knowingly spilling chemical poisons in their wake. The Mafia may kill a lot of people in mob wars, but while we were making the movie, CIA representatives were dealing in drugs in the Golden Triangle, torturing people for information and assassinating them with far more efficiency than the Mob. I can’t see much difference between the assassinations