"Originally, we were gonna shoot the entire film in Miami... because that's where the story takes place." "We scouted locations in Florida and we were gonna shoot in Florida." "But then the Cuban community became so outraged... at how we were representing them... they ran us out of town." "There was an element of the Cuban community that were convinced... that this was a Castro-financed film... which was obviously not true." "Castro had nothing to do with this film." "We were doing a gangster film." "We were doing a theatrical film." "An operatic theatrical film." "But there were some people that... within the Cuban community, a small part of them... that were convinced that we were out to... in fact, hurt their reputation collectively." "There were a number of threats made... and we thought that it would be best if we moved the production... from Miami to California." "We shot in LA, we shot in Santa Barbara." "We shot in New York and then we went to Florida for about..." "I'd say we shot two weeks there." "When we went back we had bodyguards... but we were originally going to shoot the whole movie there." "What do you call yourself?" "Antonio Montana." "And you, what you call yourself?" "Antonio Montana, who was named after my star at that time..." "Joe Montana, 'cause I was a big 49er fan... and I was looking around for a good name and I thought Montana, the mountain." "I think the most stunning thing about Al is his face." "He's the kind of guy that can hold the screen with his face." "When you start a movie, you want to give the lead character... a very impressive entrance." "And that face, that character... the crazy shirt he's wearing... the scar, the way he moves, the way he talks... you just wanna hit them 'cause you're hitting them... with something they've never seen before." "All this had been reported on the news... but nobody had ever seen it in a movie before." "You see these Cuban gangsters, the way they talk, the way they move... he just embodied that in that close-up." "It's a very well-written scene by Oliver." "I think Brian's ideas on the opening of Scarface... were very interesting to me and it was very against the grain... so to speak." "Instead of using this big, wide crane shot or something... to introduce the character... he introduces him in a close-up, sitting in a chair... and he had the camera roll around him 360 degrees, all the way around him." "He did the performance, the take, maybe five, six takes like that." "And they were all close, and I thought, what a fascinating thing." "In other words, he was introducing that face to the audience... and the script is so good, you also felt the personality coming out of it." "That arrogant behaviour... that Latin machismo coming out of this man... with a scar on his face." "Where'd you get the beauty scar, tough guy?" "Eating pussy?" "How am I gonna get a scar like that eating pussy?" "I was very worried that it looked phoney, it was too big, it was too small... so we did many makeup tests until we came up with something we all liked." "I felt this character was good with a knife... and fought with a knife." "And the scar came from... one of those fights and I thought it would be interesting... if it got through the eyebrow." "And in the action, pulled my head away and it went down even further... into this part of the face." "So there's one up here and here." "I like the different places because I think it was evocative... of a chaotic wildness in this guy." "That he was all over the place." "He had one here and one there." "I think Brian has an affinity for doing... the high crane shot, the straight-down shot... the bird's-eye view of things." "And some of the things in Scarface were born out of necessity." "For instance, the opening of an internment camp... that was under the freeways." "If we had been levelled off, you would have seen that it was LA and not Miami." "Also, he was giving you that introduction as if you're coming from heaven... just to come down to take a look at these people that are interned." "He likes to move the camera a lot... and he doesn't do it arbitrarily." "I don't think he does it just..." "What I call cinematic gymnastics." "He does camera moves that are an integral part of the story." "Other than the personal events, the wars... the actual drug wars... the actual massacres, the chainsaw massacre... were all based on real incidents." "Very much so." "We got a big assist from the U.S. Attorney's office down there." "They showed us their files and their tapes... their video tapes of crime scenes." "All of the violence in this film had happened." "They didn't just kill each other, they literally chopped people up... and found them sawed up in a trash can outside a 7-Eleven." "I wanted to establish a level of violence that nobody had ever seen before... 'cause this is a whole different level of Mob interaction." "Not the pleasant shoot-outs of The Godfather... stranglings or people being stabbed in the hand." "Now we're into really... terrible ways... of killing each other." "And I wanted to get it over early in the movie, to set up... to say, this is what it is, we're in a whole different world here." "The chainsaw scene was based on an event I heard about." "'Cause I hung out with County of Miami and Dade County... and I also hung out with Fort Lauderdale, which had another history." "So I hung out with three departments... and the case histories were pretty thick on murders." "Definitely, the saw had been used." "The scene was written by Oliver and I had to figure out a way of doing it... which wouldn't turn into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." "That is a vintage De Palma technique." "And you can feel it when you're doing it that he set things up in such a way... with such a strong visual understanding... of what he wanted to do..." "How he wanted to build it." "I just marvel at it." "I was in the scene and I felt as though... it was so laid out, so completely mapped out... that it wasn't difficult to do." " Yeah, it's very important." " I understand it's important." " Thank you." " You're welcome." "He had a giant crane move that Brian designed, from the motel... to see Steven Bauer playing with a girl in a bathing suit... and then back again, building that tension... and that sweeping move, I call those "director's points of view."" "As if, voyeuristically, I could do that, I'd fly up and look through the window." "I couldn't see, I'd fly down." "To me, that's the feeling that he was giving me." "Inside the motel room..." "Everyone that I meet usually says:" ""That scene where they cut off his arm was terrible."" "I said, "You never see it."" "You see it off Pacino's face, you see it off the reaction... but you never see it." "That, to me, is good directing." "To leave you with a taste of seeing something... that actually hadn't happened." "When Scarface first came out, the shower scene... was picked on by almost every major reviewer in this country... as something that was extremely violent... that was disgusting... but if you take a look at that scene very closely, we show nothing." "All it is, is sound." "The sound, and the man's face and blood." "But there's nothing that goes on in that scene." "You saw nothing." "It was something that permeated the audience's imagination... which was brilliant filmmaking." "That's probably one of the most interesting that Brian ever did." "When you do a scene like that, there are props around that you use... or don't use, and though we may have had body parts hanging... if we shot them we never used them or we didn't shoot them." "But the intention was always to suggest what was happening." "You could hear it, you didn't have to see it." "We wanted to set up the world these guys are in... and once you set up a terrifically violent scene early in a movie... you don't have to do much after that." "I expected Brian to give us these elaborate details... of how he wanted the picture to look, and what he wanted to work with." "All he said is, "John, I want you to give me the most beautiful pictures." ""And I'm gonna put violence inside."" "The movie was supposed to be shocking." "It's a shocking world... and these were like gangsters you've never seen before." "We shot a couple of parts where we hung F. Murray from a crane, basically." "But the stuntman Dick Ziker had to leap out of a helicopter... with a noose around his neck and it had never been done before." "That was a kind of tense day, as I recall." "We had a couple of cameras on it and they flew around... and then they literally tossed him out of the plane." "And then we intercut it with Murray hanging from a crane." "I wanted to do it kind of hi-tech, neon... acrylic, vibrant pastels... instead of your usual dark film noir." "Because you looked at South Florida, and this is what it was all about... these guys dressed in white, not black." "Scarfiotti came up with a whole great look for the movie... and he was just a genius." "The Babylon Club in Scarface:" "An extraordinary set that Nando Scarfiotti designed." "And he warned me, before I saw the set." "He didn't warn me... but as much as asked me, "Do you mind mirrors?"" "And I said, "No, I don't mind mirrors."" "I figure one or two mirrors here." "I walk on there... and there's 15 panels of mirrors all the way around." "And to add to the dilemma, Brian says:" ""I like to shoot two and three cameras." So that made it funnier... because I had to check each camera... to make sure the mirrors were not reflecting itself or the other camera... and when they were to be destroyed with gunshot... that we weren't going to get an accidental reflection." "Stan Parks and Ken Pepiot were the mechanical effects men." "These guys were in charge of the explosions, pyrotechnics and all that." "Extremely talented men." "And the fear that I had, everybody had... that these mirrors exploding so close to Pacino... flying glass and so on, 'cause they couldn't really be plastic, you see." "Because if they were plastic they wouldn't break." "They had to be plate glass so they would have the implosion." "What they did was very, very clever." "They were able to more or less implode them... so that they could take the pellets away from Pacino's face." "And then we go on the set." "These sets were like..." "We'd read it, we'd been reading it for months... and suddenly there it is." "They built these things at the soundstages at Universal." "We walk on, and it's like, "Now I know where I am," and like, boom, we're there." "Look at these pelicans fly." "Come on, pelicans!" "The humour was a part of what I thought, right from the start, would be necessary... in order to get this guy... so that you could laugh at him also." "Because if not, it was just a one-way street." "Playtime is over, okay?" "That's a Cadillac." "It looks like somebody's nightmare." "You needed to find those odd things, those twists, those ironies... to give the character some intelligence, too... so that there was something else going on, also." "Otherwise it would be too blunt and too hard to take, I think." " What was that?" "What you just did?" " That's what you do." " That's disgusting." " Watch." "Look at that fucking thing." "You look like a lizard." "Like a bug coming out of your mouth." "Oliver said in this scene, "Have you ever done that?"" "I said, "Do that?" And he goes:" ""It's this thing." "I saw this guy in Miami do this thing with the tongue."" "I said, "You saw somebody do that?"" "He goes, "Yeah," and I go, "Why, then he probably got slapped."" "He goes, "That's what happens!" "You get slapped."" "And he goes, "But do it." "Really do it." "Can you do it?"" "And I said, "I'll practise, you know."" "And I started doing it and he goes, "Manny, it's perfect." ""Show Brian."" " Lf I wasn't a nice guy..." " She's too big for you." "Causing trouble like that, come on." " Bitch!" "Lesbian!" " What I try to tell you?" "I think it's important to establish that robbers... they enjoy the money they rob." "I mean, they have a good time." "The cocaine world is a crazy world." "It's not all grim, death and murder..." "I mean, it's fun!" "The clubs should be fun." "The girls should be fun." "There's a price to pay for all this, but you got to show why they're there." "They may be killers but they're kind of colourful." "I thought we should have that very electric disco sound." "That's what they were playing in the clubs." "That's what all these people lived by." "It's a very cocaine sound, you know." "Get into one of these places, put down a couple of lines... turn the music up so you can hardly breathe, and party!" "Tony gets the American Dream... but it's hollow because there's nothing going on spiritually." "He can't love." "He can't love Michelle Pfeiffer." "He can't reach her heart." "He can't connect." "I have Nick "The Pig" as a friend." "What kind of life is that?" "Can't you see... what we're becoming, Tony?" "All he can love is his sister." "His blood." "But his ability to imagine... a form of love outside himself is gone... by the materialism that surrounds him." "It's destroyed by it." "I though that Al reminded me always of Humphrey Bogart... with that kind of narrow face and those kind of nervous eyes of his... and I thought it would be a great finale... for him to be buried in a mound of gold dust or cocaine... you know, like, just crash into it." "The cocaine that Al snorted was real!" "No, I don't know what Al was snorting, to tell you the truth." "I do remember that we tried out baby milk, which is dried milk." "But there was nothing easy to snort, because it would get in your nose... and he'd be blowing his nose all the time." "But I never snorted it, so I can't really attest to what it was." "I don't like to give away that secret because... it takes away from somebody's belief." "You have to have a secret." "I mean, that's part of what we do." "The ending of the Paul Muni Scarface... has probably a lot to do with the codes of the time that the bad guy... had to repent or to have to crawl on his knees... and to beg, and be a coward, so that he could be killed or punished." "So I think that's what's probably dictated the ending of Ben Hecht's Scarface." "I think it was more interesting to let Al Pacino..." "Tony Montana destroy himself." "To bring himself down, which seemed to be the case if you study... the history, the profiles of the drug lords." "You will see a pattern:" "Money and excess and wealth... luxury corrupts far more ruthlessly than war." "Is this it?" "That's what it's all about?" "The only memory I have of that... is putting myself in a kind of trance... trance-like state because I was in a coked-up state as the character." "So I found myself every day going into this room... with all these guns and all the smoke... and all this hell, actually." "And I would put myself in some kind of a..." "Give myself a kind of mantra, and just go in, bite the bullet... and, you know, spend the 12, 14 hours there every day." "Day in, day out, just shooting that sequence." "Say hello to my little friend!" "Once you find that you get into a rhythm... and if you're relaxed when you're doing it, you can take anything." "You get Zen about it." "Because if you for once take a look around you... it's just unendurable." "A lot of times, the guns are shooting and you don't see the flash." "When you see a gun shoot, you like to see the flash." "So we rigged up something that synchronised the flash... to the shutter of the camera so you could see the flashing all the time." "Ken Pepiot and Stan designed this synchronization system... for the weapons, so that the camera shutter is open to see the flame... which can't fire unless the shutter is open." "It drove Pacino a little crazy, 'cause he'd press the trigger... and it wouldn't fire until the camera was perfectly in sync with his flash." "And it got a little testy there because he wanted the freedom of it." "But it worked out very good." "These men were very talented men." "We had time to shoot that 'cause Al burned himself badly... handling one of the guns." "So I basically had to shoot two weeks without Al." "So I had a lot of time to shoot the Columbians doing things." "I wonder how many cameras we used in the climax..." "I'm not sure, I think we had..." "We had one on a crane... and we had two down below and the third one..." "It may have been four." "Maybe four, five cameras that we had." "We had a slow-motion camera... that was prepared to shoot the stuntman as he got hit... or Pacino as the squibs were going off." "We had one camera in slow motion." "May have had five cameras on that sequence." "Steven's a very old friend of mine, came over to the set... and thought this was great and said, "I got an idea." ""Let's put a camera here." And I said, "Fantastic."" "So we stuck a camera, I think it was a low-angle camera over on the side... and it was used for when the Columbians... first come into the house." "Come on!" "I take your fucking bullet!" "It probably took... more than half a day just to line up exactly where the cameras were going to go." "And it took two days to get the stunt of the man falling." "I say it took two days because it wasn't working right the first time." "He had to hold his breath, too, when he landed... 'cause Brian wanted to keep shooting for a long time." "I thought it was very important that we dedicate the movie... to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht 'cause that was always the inspiration for it." "The theme for Tony had to reflect... the character and the person of Al Pacino... and, of course, of the character of the movie." "And it has to be a little dangerous, a little suspenseful... but a little deep, too." "And I think it reflects quite well... that atmosphere which was... at that time in my head, with all the crime and all that stuff." "Giorgio Moroder had done a very good score for Paul Schrader... in the American Gigolo." "And I liked the sound and, of course, as I went into these clubs... where all these guys were hanging out, all they played was this endless... disco, coked-up music." "So that seemed perfect for the score." "The theme for the two girls... was a little tricky because..." "I wanted to have the same feel for both... because Tony's in love with the sister and in love with Elvira... and so the sounds are very similar... the melodies are slightly different, but that was done in purpose... so to create a little bit of an ambiguity... and to show the people... that Tony is in love with both." "The gentleman that was head of MPAA at that point... had a very strong negative feeling about this film... in terms of its violence and in terms of the language." "They fuck anything and anyone." "Can't you stop saying "fuck" all the time?" "But the language was a big problem to him... and he threatened us, not only threatened us... but he stamped an X-rating on this film." "We discussed what they thought was bothering them... then I made an adjustment and sent it back to them a second time." "They gave us an "X" again." "Then I cut it back a third time... and they were sort of fixated on how many gun hits were in the clown." "They're not looking at the clown." "They're worried about the gun hits in the clown." "So this is the third time I sent it back and they still gave us an "X."" "And the studio, of course, was saying to me, "Solve this." ""You know we can't release an 'X' movie."" "But I wasn't going to cut it anymore." "I felt it was against what the material was." "I didn't think it was overly violent." "I thought it was just showing the world of these people." "And I thought it was affecting the dramatic thrust of the movie." "So I said, "I'm not doing this anymore." ""I think we're going to hurt the movie." Then I basically got on the phone... and I called some of my reporter friends nobody knew about... and I said, "This is an outrage."" "So there was a tremendous amount of articles." "And I went to arbitration on this." "Except, I went prepared for, literally, a court case." "I brought in three psychiatrists... three experts in this field." "I brought in Time magazine." "I brought in the police officer... the head of the Organised Crime Bureau from Miami." "In terms of how this would affect children... the fact that it was an anti-drug film and how important it was for it to be made." "And we conducted this thing, we conducted this like a trial... and we beat him, we beat him hands down." "The vote was 18 to 2 in favour of our getting an R rating." "Somebody said, "We've got to let the world know what's happening."" "And that's what I think swayed them, and we won." "There's something that gets completely confused all the time... because I cut the picture back three times... everybody assumes they saw the third cut." "But I called the head of the studio and I said:" ""I have an 'X' on the third version, I have an 'X' on the first version..." ""the initial version." "They're all 'X's.' Why don't I just go with the first version?"" "They said, "No, you can't do that." And I said, "Why not?" ""An 'X' is an 'X', isn't it?"" "So the version you see in Scarface... is the original version that I cut." "It's not changed, it has not been cut back... and that's what we fought over, and that's what we won with." "When I first saw the movie, I thought that..." "Brian had achieved that operatic style..." "I thought it would be controversial, though." "I thought there would be a reaction to it... that it would affect a certain kind of criticism." "But it was the movie Brian set out to make." "And I thought he achieved it." "And I was pleased." "At the first screening in New York, Martin Scorsese was sitting in front of me." "I was a nervous wreck." "And he turned around in the middle of it and he said:" ""They're going to hate this film but they're going to love it, too."" "He said, "People are going to love this." "You guys are right there, you're on."" "Then he says, "You're on to something, you know."" "When I saw the film, I was very proud of it." "It was, you know, one of my children." "I go in the New York subways and I hear dialogue from the picture." "I knew that it had hit a nerve." "When Scarface was reviewed and released... we did very well business-wise, but review-wise we did terribly." "There wasn't a major reviewer, with the exception of Vincent Canby... of the New York Times, who thought this wasn't garbage." "Now these same reviewers have pointed to Scarface... as the consummate gangster film... as the landmark gangster film." "Tony Montana was a product of his time." "He came here not to blow up banks, and not to go into the cocaine business... but this was what was available to him." "As many poor people have come to the States... there's nothing opened for them." "Especially somebody like Tony Montana, with a criminal background... and he didn't know where to go." "So, like many others, he fell within this criminal group." "But he was a heroic figure." "He was a man that had integrity." "He was a man that climbed very quickly... based upon his intelligence and his toughness... to become a king of industry, if you will." "His industry just happened to be cocaine, and was illegal." "But he was a dynamic character... he was certainly an exciting character, he was a romantic character." "He was all the things that a good gangster film should be in terms of their leading men." "It is one of my favourite films." "I felt that what I started out trying to do with that character... make that character, in a way, and this sounds strange, I know... but I picked two dimensions, not three dimensions for this character." "This side and that side." "And I sort of tried to go the globe... and say this is it, this is what you see... and I didn't try to go into another area with it." "So I felt in terms of that, I might have succeeded there." "And I'm very proud of my collaborators, they're all great artists." "Oliver and Al..." "Michelle." "I mean, I could go down the whole list." "And Bregman." "I mean Bregman was a really fine producer... and held this sort of group together." "So in a sort of traditional Hollywood way... we have a great producer, a great actor, a great director, and a great screenwriter." "I think we made a really great movie." "And everybody... did the best they could... in a kind of very controversial material... and we got our heads handed to us at the time... because the movie, you know, sort of scandalised everybody." "But in retrospect, when you're looking back, you say, "This is really good."" " Me, I want what's coming to me." " What's coming to you?" "The world, chico... and everything in it."