Francis Ford Coppola Recalls Robert De Niro’s Audition for Sonny Corleone

The offer couldn’t even be refused because it was never made. But though Paramount passed him over for the role of Sonny Corleone in the “The Godfather” in favor of James Caan, Robert De Niro’s audition for the doomed eldest Corleone son is something that still impresses Francis Ford Coppola to this day.

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“He had an unforgettable audition for Sonny Corleone, that, uh, was so in advance of what I even could imagine because he really nailed that kind of a guy,” Coppola said at a Q&A before the New York premiere of “Megalopolis” September 23. Seated beside him were De Niro and Spike Lee with moderating duties performed by New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim.

Earlier this summer, Coppola actually shared clips of that audition footage and remarked that he had offered De Niro, then an unknown, the part of Paulie Gatto in the film after Paramount decided to cast Caan. A good thing he didn’t take that part, though — De Niro accepted a bigger part in “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” instead — because he was then able, of course, to take the role of young Vito Corleone in “The Godfather Part II.”

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Caan is obviously incredible as Sonny, but it is interesting to see how De Niro makes a slightly different meal of those iconic lines about “getting his brains all over your nice Ivy League suit, Michael.”

“I never forgot that,” Coppola said of that audition at the “Megalopolis” Q&A. “And that’s one of the reasons why I went at this daunting opportunity to have him play the Vito Corleone part that had been made so famous by Marlon. I thought I would do the outrageous and have someone other than Marlon play the role. Normally in a movie [at that time] they would have Marlon play it himself, but he wouldn’t look young. It’s like James Dean, in ‘Rebel Without a Cause.’ I saw it when I was in high school, and there were no guys who looked like him in my high school. But they were very casual about age in movies in those days. I wouldn’t do that. So I said I thought that Bobby could play Vito Corleone as the young man. And he did beyond my wildest expectations.”