25 Facts About the Making of “The Godfather” You Never Knew
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You come to me, on the day of my daughter’s wedding, and ask for trivia about The Godfather movies? We can oblige. In fact, here’s a bit of trivia to start: Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone doesn’t actually say those exact words in that oft-quoted moment. The line in the 1972 masterpiece is really: “You come into my house on the day my daughter is to be married.”
The Godfather and its sequel, The Godfather Part II , from director Francis Ford Coppola , are widely regarded as two of the best movies ever made—if not the best movies ever made. Epic crime dramas that track the rise and fall of an organized crime dynasty in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the first two Godfathers are full of iconic moments and major movie stars, including Brando, Al Pacino , Robert De Niro , James Caan , and Diane Keaton . The third film in the trilogy, made a decade and a half after, isn’t as highly regarded as the first two, but it’s still the conclusion of one of the most important stories in cinema history.
As you might expect, there are a lot of interesting bits of trivia about these three seminal films. Read on to learn 25 facts about The Godfather trilogy, including numerous production woes, debunked urban legends, and fascinating “what ifs?”
RELATED: The 15 Movies That Won the Most Oscars .
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Peter Bart , the vice president of production at Paramount, bought the rights to the 1969 novel The Godfather two years before it came out—or was even finished. The executive had heard that author Mario Puzo was working on a book about the mafia, and he thought it had potential, snatching it up when it was still just an outline. The deal—which is dramatized in the recent Paramount+ series about the making of The Godfather , The Offer —was $12,500 to option the book and another $80,000 should the movie end up getting made. Puzo reportedly accepted in part because he had gambling debts he needed to pay off.
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Puzo’s The Godfather was a huge success when it came out in 1969. It was on the bestseller list for more than a year, selling nine million copies in its first two years of release. It’s now one of the bestselling fiction books of all time, having sold north of 21 million copies . It also led to a full book series.
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Coppola was not Paramount’s first choice to direct the movie, and he was almost fired amid filming when studio execs were not thrilled with how some of the early scenes were turning out. In a move that the mafia might approve of, the director took preemptive action , firing his assistant director and other potential threats or traitors. Then he reshot the scenes that the bosses didn’t like, ensuring that he’d be the one to stick it out to the end of production.
Pacino also wasn’t the studio’s first choice (they wanted Robert Redford ), and he also nearly got the ax. He told The Washington Post that he was nearly fired three times .
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Paramount was concerned that making The Godfather a period piece would cost more than setting it in the then-present day of the ’70s. Coppola convinced them to spend the extra cash, and the final film spans the decade from 1945 to 1955.
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Johnny Fontaine, the singer character who owes his career success to the mafia, was modeled after Frank Sinatra , as there were allegations that Ol’ Blue Eyes had connections to organized crime. Sinatra confronted Puzo , who also co-wrote the screenplay, and singer Al Martino , who played Fontaine in the movie, said he received threats warning him not to play the part.
RELATED: 7 Best Under-the-Radar ’70s Movies You Need to Watch .
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Brando wasn’t Paramount’s first choice for the role of Don Corleone, as they worried he would be a problem on the set. But Coppola wanted him and helped him get the part by filming an audition tape. Brando wanted Corleone to look “like a bulldog,” and he stuffed his cheeks with cotton balls to get that effect in the audition. Despite popular belief, he did not do the same while filming. A dentist made him a special prosthetic mouthpiece to wear.
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The famous cat sitting and purring in Don Corleone’s lap in The Godfather ’s opening scene was not in the script. In fact, the cat was a stray that happened to be hanging out on set, and Coppola decided it might be a nice detail. He plopped it into Brando’s lap, evidently to the cat’s satisfaction—it was purring so loudly that they worried they wouldn’t be able to hear the dialogue in the final footage.
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Brando won an Oscar for his role in The Godfather , even though he infamously used cue cards rather than fully memorizing all his lines. He said the reason for this wasn’t that he was too lazy to learn them, but rather that he liked the spontaneity that came from seeing his lines as he needed to say them, because in real life people tend not to rehearse and know everything they’re going to say before they say it.
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Lenny Montana was cast to play Corleone’s enforcer Luca Brasi, despite being a professional wrestler and not an actor. Because of his inexperience, he got tripped up and flubbed his lines in front of Brando when his character had to pay his respects. Rather than reshoot the scene, Coppola added a new scene in which Brasi nervously practices what he’s going to say—a detail that shows even the big guy is intimidated by the boss.
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RELATED: Marlon Brando and Jackie Kennedy Had a Two-Night Affair, Book Claims .
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The hotheaded eldest son played by James Caan, Sonny, meets a grisly end when he’s gunned down in his car by a rival family on the Jones Beach Causeway. The scene cost $100,000 to shoot —a decent chunk of the $6 million total budget. Caan wore 127 blood-filled explosive squibs and there were 200 squibs drilled into the Lincoln Continental. All of them went off to simulate the hail of deadly gunfire.
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One of the most famous lines from this very quotable movie was an ad-lib, as in both the book and script Clemenza, one of the Corleones’ enforcers, simply says “leave the gun.” Actor Richard Castellano added the “take the cannoli” on the suggestion of his wife and co-star , Ardell Sheridan , who came up with the idea to reference an earlier scene where Clemenza is asked to pick up desert.
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Castellano—not Brando, Pacino, or Caan—had the highest salary of anybody in the cast of the original Godfather . His salary demands—along with a request that Sheridan write Clemenza’s dialogue—led to his character being written out of the sequel.
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There are a lot of oranges in The Godfather , and critics and fans have noted that they tend to show up before violence occurs, possibly making them omens of death. That wasn’t the original intention, however. Production designer Dean Tavoularis simply chose to include oranges because the citrus fruit added a bright, contrasting splash of color to a film that was otherwise very dark.
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Nino Rota’s iconic score for The Godfather received an Academy Award nomination. It was disqualified , however, after it came to light that some of the music had originally been composed for the 1958 Italian comedy, Fortunella .
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Despite its subject matter, the word “mafia” is never uttered in The Godfather . In 1971, before filming began, the Italian-American Civil Rights League launched a campaign asking the producers not to include the word in the film. (The campaign was led by a man whose father was involved in organized crime.)
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At first, Coppola wasn’t interested in directing the 1974 sequel. He suggested Martin Scorsese , who at that point was an up-and-coming filmmaker Coppola thought was “such a natural.” He relented, though, and ultimately directed Part II himself.
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Initially, Coppola wanted Brando, who was 49 at the time, to play 25-year-old Vito Corleone in Part II ’s flashback scenes. He even sent letters to Brando offering him the chance to reprise the role. He declined, however, and 30-year-old De Niro got the part.
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In the early ’70s, De Niro was just starting out as an actor, and he auditioned to play Sonny Corleone in the first Godfather . The part ended up going to Caan, but obviously, Coppola remembered De Niro’s work.
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Two actors won Academy Awards for their portrayals of Vito Corleone, with Brando winning a Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather and De Niro picking up a Supporting Actor Oscar for Part II . Fewer than a dozen pairs of actors have received nominations for playing the same character, and only Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix , who played different versions of the Joker, have also won.
RELATED: Godfather Star Was the First Person to Be Banned From the Oscars—Here’s Why .
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The boat that Vito takes to America has a story that’s wilder than anything in The Godfather . Originally built in Scotland in 1904, the state-of-the-art tall ship was seized by the U.S. during World War I and renamed “Moshulu,” after a Native American tribe, by first lady Edith Wilson . Finland bought it in the ‘30s, then Nazi pirates captured it during World War II. The Finns got it back in the late ‘40s, and the U.S. bought it in 1974, after which it appeared in The Godfather Part II . It’s currently a floating restaurant in Philadelphia.
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The Godfather Part II holds the distinction of being one of the last major films to be made with the Technicolor film process , as the vibrant dye-printing method gave way to others in the ‘70s,
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The filmmaker has admitted that he didn’t want to make Part II —let alone Part III . But he agreed to helm the sequels, because he needed help “ getting out of [his] financial hole .”
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One major character who survived to the end of Part II but didn’t show up in Part III was Duvall’s Tom Hagen, an adoptive member of the Corleone family and their loyal consigliere. The actor opted not to return for the third movie over salary disputes.
“I said I would work easily if they paid Pacino twice what they paid me, that’s fine. But not three or four times , which is what they did,” Duvall told CBS in 2004.
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Coppola’s caught a lot of flak for his decision to cast his daughter, Sofia Coppola , as Mary Corleone in Part III . However, that wasn’t the original plan. Up and coming actor Winona Ryder was initially cast in the role , even traveling to the filming location. However, she pulled out because of exhaustion and other issues related to her skyrocketing career. (A 1990 Vanity Fair article described her situation as a “ nervous collapse .”) Future award-winning filmmaker Sofia, who had read the part in rehearsals while Ryder was busy finishing another film, stepped in.
30 Travel Movies to Help Inspire Your Next Trip
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One of the great things about movies is that they can take you places without you having to squeeze into an uncomfortable airplane seat or with all the other hassles that real-life travel entails. There are lots of great movies about people setting out to see the world , so let the big screen scratch your wanderlust by checking out these 31 films.
Some of the movies on this list are romantic, following two people as they come together in that special way that happens when you’re away from home. Others are about journeys of self-discovery, showing what can happen when you hit the road solo. Some movies are uproarious comedies that will transport you away from your troubles as you laugh along to the antics on screen. There are also movies that are less of a vacation than they are an adventure, sure to get your blood pumping. And there are some scary movies about travel—the sort that might make you think, “You know, actually, maybe let’s make this one a staycation.”
Don’t bother packing your bags. All you need to do is hit “play” to embark on any one of these 30 great travel movies.
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Romantic Travel Movies
Diane Lane stars in this charming 1996 movie as a recently divorced woman who travels to Italy in an attempt to break out of her post-divorce funk. (In her defense, her husband was cheating on her and he got to keep the house, so she’s right to be miffed.) Once in Tuscany, though, she somehow becomes the owner of a villa, and as she begins to make a new life for herself, the potential for new love emerges amidst some of the most beautiful scenery and delicious-looking wine ever put to film. It’s the type of movie that will have you looking up flights to Florence.
A destination wedding counts as travel, and the breakout comedy of 2023 was shot on location in Australia. Glenn Powell and Sydney Sweeney play two people who left on bad terms after a one-night stand only to have to make nice when their mutual friends get married. Anyone But You is enough to make you want to take a trip Down Under, although perhaps without all the rom-com shenanigans.
Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz play lovelorn women who swap homes so that they can get away from their respective heartbreaks over Christmastime. When Winslet’s Iris and Diaz’s Amanda get to Los Angeles and London, respectively, they find new love in Jack Black and Jude Law’s characters. The 2006 movie, from the great Nancy Meyers , works extra well as a travel movie because, thanks to the house-swapping premise, it’s a reminder that everyone’s home is somebody else’s trip.
The first of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy introduces audiences to Ethan Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Céline as they meet on a train from Budapest and decide to spend the night together wandering Vienna. Widely regarded as one of the more romantic movies ever made, Before Sunrise will also make you want to explore Vienna with someone you’ve just met—someone who maybe you could see yourself spending the rest of your life with.
Technically, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris is a travel movie (because Owen Wilson’s character is visiting Paris with his fiancee, played by Rachel McAdams ) and a time travel movie (because he goes back in time to 1920s). It’s a romantic movie both because of the relationship Wilson’s Gil strikes up with Marion Cotillard’s Adriana and because of how it romanticizes Paris and nostalgia—and deftly interrogates that romanticism.
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Movies About Traveling Solo
Dev Patel stars in this 2016 film, which is based on the true story of Saroo Brierley , who was separated from his parents in India at a very young age and adopted by an Australian couple. Once he grew up, he went back to his birth country in an attempt to find his biological parents. Saroo’s trek through India and into his own forgotten past is a tear-jerking, emotional travel story, and Lion was rewarded with six Oscar nominations.
This 2014 adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail stars Reese Witherspoon as Strayed sets out to hike from Southern California to Washington State in an attempt to find herself. The tour of the West Coast’s trails is a tour-de-force for the actor as her character remakes her life one hiking boot-clad step at a time.
In 1977, Robyn Davidson set out on a nine-month journey across the unforgiving Australian Outback with her dog and four camels. She later wrote about her adventure in National Geographic and in her memoir Tracks . In 2013, her story was adapted into a film with the same name. Mia Wasikowska plays Davidson in the movie, which features stunning cinematography of the Australian desert in all its harsh beauty.
A lot of solo travel stories are tales of self-discovery where the voyager has learned something by the time they reach their destination. Into the Wild offers no such catharsis, instead telling the true story of Christopher McCandless , a man who hiked across America and eventually ended up in the Alaskan wilderness—an environment he was not prepared for. It’s a poignant, tragic counterpart to the more common celebrations of wanderlust you tend to see in pop culture.
Julia Roberts stars as Elizabeth Gilbert in this 2010 adaptation of her memoir of post-divorce travel and self-discovery. Feeling her life is aimless and without purpose, Liz elects to travel around the world, stopping in Italy, India, and Bali where she eats, prays, and well, you can probably guess.
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Travel Horror Movies
Ari Aster’s supremely disturbing folk horror movie stars Florence Pugh as a young woman who is begrudgingly invited by her not-great boyfriend and his friends to go to Sweden to observe a commune’s midsummer festival. Upon getting there, Pugh’s Dani soon learns that the Hårga are not all sunshine and flowers, and that there are dark rituals and sinister plots. It’s the type of movie that will make you think twice about a Nordic vacation, and you’ll never look at a taxidermied bear the same way.
This 2005 horror movie, from director Eli Roth , is one of the biggest examples of the so-called “torture porn” subgenre, but there’s more to Hostel than just blood and guts. (There are a lot of blood and guts, though.) The film follows some American backpackers who, while traveling in Eastern Europe, become the victims of a shadowy organization that lets the ultra-rich live out their most depraved fantasies by torturing and killing unsuspecting tourists. Let’s just say that Hostel is not exactly a great promotional tourism campaign for Slovakia—something that the country was actually pretty upset about .
This 2022 film, released by the horror-centric streaming service Shudder, follows a social media influencer who, when traveling in Thailand, meets and befriends a young woman. It’s the type of movie that lives or dies on its twists, but let’s just say that Influencer is what you would get if The Talented Mr. Ripley were set in the social media age and a full-on horror film instead of a thriller.
The Creator director Gareth Edward’s 2010 debut follows a photojournalist as he tries to escort a young woman through Mexico, which has been taken over by kaiju-sized alien monsters. There are moments of beauty and discovery along their journey, as well as high-stress moments of terror when they encounter these creatures, which Edwards brings to life on a shoestring budget—though you can’t tell that by watching.
It’s right there in the title: John Landis’ 1980 comedy horror is about an American in London, although he’s not a werewolf when he first arrives in the UK. No, that happens after he’s mauled by a strange beast in the moors of Yorkshire—and that same beast kills the friend he was backpacking with. When he recovers in London, things get gnarly in the light of a full moon.
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Comedy Movies About Traveling
If you like the misadventures of the Griswold family’s first vacation attempt, great news: There are five sequels to this 1983 Chevy Chase comedy. Before the European , Vegas , or Christmas Vacation , though, Clark Griswold tries to drive his family from Chicago to southern California. Their journey makes for some classic comedy, though it might hit a bit too close to home if you’ve had to endure a family vacation that went awry.
A lot of Wes Anderson’s movies are about travel, including his most recent film, Asteroid City , and The Grand Budapest Hotel . His ultimate travel movie, though, is 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited , which stars Owen Wilson , Adrien Brody , and Jason Schwartzman as three estranged brothers who agree to make a trip through India together in the hopes of reconnecting after their father’s death.
Lots of movies are about travel, but are they about a big adventure, the way Tim Burton’s directorial debut is? Paul Reubens stars as his Pee-wee Herman character, who hits the road in an attempt to recover his beloved bicycle, which has gone missing. Following a psychic’s totally legit vision of his bike in the basement of the Alamo, Pee-wee encounters a ghost trucker, biker gangs, and all the madness of a Hollywood backlot.
Netflix’s Oscar-nominated animated movie has a setup that’s not too dissimilar from that of National Lampoon’s Vacation . Aspiring filmmaker Katie Mitchell can’t wait to get away from her family and start film school. Her dad, voiced by Danny McBride , feels his daughter slipping away and opts to have the whole fam drive her across the country rather than take a plane to school. At the same time, an A.I. gone rogue has started a robot uprising. Oops!
In addition to featuring a hall-of-fame cameo from Matt Damon as the singer of “Scotty Doesn’t Know,” Eurotrip is a classic, if not especially intelligent, teen sex romp. It’s not the movie to watch if you want to get a feel for Europe, but it is what you put on when you want to enjoy some good, dumb laughs.
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Adventure Travel Movies
Ben Stiller directed and stars in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty , an imaginative adaptation of a 1939 short story about a mild-mannered man who gets lost in his daydreams. When circumstances force Walter to embark on a trip around the world, he starts living his daydreams for real, going to Greenland and the Himalayas. Featuring a fantastic soundtrack and gorgeous cinematography of some truly beautiful, off-the-beaten-path places, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is the type of movie that might make you stop just thinking about taking a trip and actually buy a ticket.
William Friedkin , best known for directing The Exorcist , also helmed this 1977 thriller about possibly the worst road trip of all time. When four people, all on the run from their various sordid pasts, find themselves trapped in a remote oil village in Colombia, they are desperate to get out by any means necessary. The opportunity presents itself when the bosses need people to drive boxes of dynamite that are extremely unstable and could blow at any minute across miles of rainforest. There is one sequence in Sorcerer that’s some of the most unbelievably tense filmmaking you’ll likely ever see. (Note that it’s a remake of another classic film, Wages of Fear , should you want another movie that’ll keep you on edge.)
Johnny Depp stars as an average man who finds himself smack in the middle of an international criminal incident when on vacation in Europe after a woman, played by Angelina Jolie , tries to trick the authorities into thinking Depp’s the fugitive they’re looking for. Thrills, laughs, and a little romance ensue.
Charlie Hunnam plays real explorer Percy Fawcett in this adaptation of the book by the same name from author David Grann , who also wrote Killers of the Flower Moon . The film follows the British explorer in the early 1900s as he tries, time and time again, to prove the existence of a mythical city deep in the jungles of Brazil. Think of it as a somber, reflective take on a real-life Indiana Jones, one whose obsession with traveling to hostile environments in search of knowledge may prove to be his undoing.
This gripping survival drama about the infamous 1996 Mount Everest Disaster, as documented by Jon Krakauer in the book Into Thin Air, is the type of film that will probably make you consider an all-inclusive beach resort for your next vacation rather than mountain-climbing.
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Movies About Roadtrips
This biopic follows the man who would become the Che Guevara when he, as a young man in the early ‘50s, travels across South America with his friend Alberto Granado . The film, which is based on Guevara’s trip diary, is both a road movie and a coming-of-age film about an important historical figure, as we see him become radicalized by the poverty and inequality he sees on this journey.
Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan star in Ethan Coen’s romp from earlier this year, and it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call Drive-Away Dolls “ The Big Lebowski , but just the silly parts.” Set in the late ’90s, it follows two lesbian friends who learn that the car they’ve rented has a human head and a briefcase in the trunk—and that some shadowy types really, really want whatever’s in that case back.
Burt Reynolds stars in this 1977 classic, which was the second-highest-grossing movie of its release year after the original Star Wars . He plays a legendary bootlegger who accepts a job to smuggle 400 cases of Coors from Texarkana to Atlanta in under 28 hours. Along the way, he encounters a runaway bride played by Sally Field , and Sheriff Buford T. Justice, who wants to stop the Bandit. Smokey and the Bandit also features an incredible theme song, “ East Bound and Down ,” and while the lyrics describe the plot of the movie almost beat-for-beat, you’ll find that it’s a fitting song to blast on your own car stereo when you’re on the road.
Il Sorpasso , which is sometimes given the English title The Easy Life , is a masterpiece of 1960s Italian cinema. It follows a boisterous middle-aged man who decides to take a timid, bookish college student he meets under his wing for a good time out on the road—whether or not the younger man actually wants to tag along or not. Hilarious and poignant when you might not expect it, Il Sorpasso ’s well worth the watch.
This seminal adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s novel of the same name stars Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro as they drive to Sin City under the influence of an absurd amount of drugs. In that way, it’s the ultimate travel movie. It’s about a trip, but it’s also about a trip .
