Al Pacino has opened up about the original ending to The Godfather Part III that he “loved”.
The third part in the classic trilogy was released in 1990, and concludes with Michael Corleone’s (Pacino) daughter Mary (Sofia Coppola) getting killed in an assassination attempt on his life. The film then ends years later with Michael dying of old age.
In his recent book Sonny Boy, Pacino revealed the original ending panned out slightly differently, with his character meeting his end in the assassination attempt.
“At the film’s conclusion, Michael would get assassinated on the stairs of the church,” he explained. “He rolls down the steps and comes to rest on the ground at the bottom.
“Kay, his ex-wife, rushes to his side. She looks into his face and asks him, ‘Michael, are you dying? Are you going to die?’ And Michael looks up at her and he says, ‘No.’ And then he dies. Phenomenal ending. A brilliant callback to the first Godfather, as Michael ends his life with one last lie to Kay.”
Pacino went on to admit problems surfaced after actors Richard S. Castellano and Robert Duvall refused to return as Peter Clemenza and Tom Hagen, calling it a “big miss”.
“With so much of the film depending on [Duvall’s] character, none of us knew what to do without him,” he recalled. “Francis and Mario had to reconstruct the story, but they were brilliant writers and changed the whole script around. Even the ending that I loved so much had to go – instead, Michael would die of old age, in solitude, after his daughter, Mary, is killed in the attempt to assassinate him.”
Pacino also addressed criticisms of the third film, which is widely regarded as inferior to the first two movies, explaining that a common sticking point is “Michael’s pursuit of redemption”.
“I don’t think the audience wanted to have Michael spend the film seeking forgiveness for his sins,” he reflected. “They wanted Michael to continue to be Michael. They wanted the Godfather. That’s what we love about him, right? The guy we saw at the end of Part II was encased in stone. I saw Part III as his effort to break free of that encasement, searching for a way out of his almost traumatised state of numbness.
“That one line of his which has sort of become lore and that people still remember from Part III, when he says, ‘Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,’ sums up Michael’s need to get out of that state, those chains that bound him.”
The Godfather Part III was given a recut in 2020 called The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, which NME said at the time turns a “disappointing climax into a more fitting final flourish”.
Elsewhere in his new book, Pacino claimed that studio bosses eyed up the likes of Jack Nicholson and Robert Redford to take the role of Michael before him.
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