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

The provide couldn’t even be refused as a result of it was by no means made. However although Paramount handed him over for the function of Sonny Corleone within the “The Godfather” in favor of James Caan, Robert De Niro‘s audition for the doomed eldest Corleone son is one thing that also impresses Francis Ford Coppola to today.

“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 mentioned at a Q&A earlier than the New York premiere of “Megalopolis” September 23. Seated beside him had been De Niro and Spike Lee with moderating duties carried out by New York Movie Pageant creative director Dennis Lim.

Earlier this summer time, Coppola truly shared clips of that audition footage and remarked that he had supplied De Niro, then an unknown, the a part of Paulie Gatto within the movie after Paramount determined to forged Caan. A superb factor he didn’t take that half, although — De Niro accepted an even bigger half in “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” as a substitute — as a result of he was then in a position, after all, to take the function of younger Vito Corleone in “The Godfather Part II.”

Caan is clearly unimaginable as Sonny, however it’s attention-grabbing to see how De Niro makes a barely completely different meal of these iconic strains about “getting his brains all over your nice Ivy League suit, Michael.”

“I never forgot that,” Coppola mentioned of that audition on 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.”