Al Pacino Was Relieved To Have Twisted His Ankle On The Set Of ‘The Godfather’: “At Least Now They Could Fire Me”

Al Pacino could never have predicted that his performance in The Godfather would be his breakout role.

Pacino, who recalls receiving the role of Michael Corleone directly from director Francis Ford Coppola over the phone as “a hundered-million-to-one-shot” in his memoir Sonny Boy , reveals that Paramount was “questioning whether [he] was the right actor for the part.”

“The rumor had got out around the set that I was going to be let go from the picture,” he writes, per an excerpt published by The Guardian . “You could feel that loss of momentum when we shot. There was a discomfort among people, even the crew, when I was working. I was very conscious of that.”

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He continues, “The word was that I was going to be fired, and, likely, so was the director. Not that Francis wasn’t cutting it – I wasn’t. But he was the one responsible for me being in the film.”

Pacino explains that Coppola asked him to meet him at a restaurant, where he was issued a harsh truth.

“Finally, Francis said, ‘You know how much you mean to me, how much faith I had in you,'” he remembers. “At this point we had been shooting The Godfather for about a week and a half. And Francis said, ‘Well, you’re not cutting it.'”

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Coppola suggested that Pacino take a look at the “rushed of what [they had] shot already.” Once he did, Pacino writes that he didn’t “think there’s anything spectacular here.” However, Coppola “move[d] up the filming of the Italian restaurant scene,” where as Pacino describes, “the untested Michael comes to take his revenge on Sollozzo [Al Lettieri] and McCluskey [Sterling Hayden].”

“That scene was not meant to be filmed until a few days later, but if something hadn’t happened to let me show what I was capable of, there might not have been a later for me,” Pacino shares.

While filming the scene in which Michael “jump[s] onto a moving car,” which he notes he “had no stand-in” and “no stuntman,” Pacino “missed the car.”

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“Now I was lying in a gutter on White Plains Road in the Bronx, flat on my back and looking up at the sky. I had twisted my ankle so badly that I couldn’t move,” he writes.

As the film’s crew gathered around to help him and assess his injury, Pacino “la[id] there thinking, This is a miracle.”

“Oh God, you’re saving me,” he remembers thinking at the time. “I don’t have to do this picture any more. I was shocked by the feeling of relief that passed over me. Showing up for work every day, feeling unwanted, feeling like an underling, was an oppressive experience, and this injury could be my release from that prison. At least now they could fire me, recast another actor as Michael, and not lose every dime they’d already put into the picture.”

As fans of the mob classic know — and as Pacino pens — “that’s not what happened.”

“They filmed the rest of the car-jumping scene with a stunt guy who appeared out of nowhere, and they shot my ankle up with cortisone until I could stand on my feet again,” he adds. “Then Francis showed the restaurant scene to the studio, and when they looked at it, something was there. Because of that scene I just performed, they kept me in the film.”

Sonny Boy is out now. The Godfather is streaming on Paramount+ .

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