

The Godfather Part III featured many familiar faces both in front of and behind the camera.


When they couldn’t reach an accord, Coppola wrote Duvall’s character Tom Hagen out of the script and created a new family attorney character played by George Hamilton. Robert Duvall was written out of The Godfather Part III due to a salary dispute.ĭespite Coppola’s intentions to reassemble as many members of the original The Godfather cast as possible, Robert Duvall balked after learning that Al Pacino was being paid “three or four times” what he had been offered. Still, scenes like the murder of Joey Zasa gave Coppola an opportunity to stage a murder by a policeman on horseback, a sequence he always wanted to shoot. In the commentary track on the original cut, Coppola said that he wasn't interested in revisiting the violence of the first two films, and instead wanted to focus on Michael’s purgatory as a lonely old man fortified and insulated from the people he cares about by his ill-gotten success. Francis Ford Coppola wanted The Godfather Part III to be more of a character study. He and co-writer Mario Puzo threw them out and started over from scratch, even though the deadline to have a completed screenplay was looming.
#GODFATHER CODA SERIES#
Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo were given a bunch of completed scripts, but chose to start from scratch.Ĭoppola inherited a series of scripts commissioned by Paramount that went back as early as 1979, including one where Michael’s son Anthony was a Naval officer working for the CIA who facilitates the Corleone family’s involvement in an assassination attempt on a Central American dictator. Paramount forbid it and forced him to name it The Godfather Part III. Inspired by films like The Bride of Frankenstein and an era in which sequels were given provocative titles, Coppola and Mario Puzo wanted to call this new film The Death of Michael Corleone, intending it to be an epilogue to the events of the first two films. Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo wanted to give The Godfather Part III a dramatic title. But after the making of One From The Heart in 1982, Coppola found himself in such a dire financial situation that he agreed to Paramount’s request for another sequel. Francis Ford Coppola had no plans to make a third Godfather film.Īfter The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Francis Ford Coppola thought that the saga of the Corleone family was complete and had no intention of making Part III. Check out just a few of the behind-the-scenes stories that led to a complicated finale for one of film history’s most acclaimed series. But even if a new, mercifully shorter version doesn't repair all the problems that audiences had with the film in its original form, there are a lot of details that explain what happened, including why it was made, what Coppola’s original ambitions for it were, and why some of them didn’t pan out. Much of the negative attention was directed at the fact that Coppola cast his daughter Sofia (who was not then or now an actor) in a pivotal role, and generally repeated too many elements of its predecessors to comparatively hollow effect.Īs the film celebrated its 30th anniversary in December 2020, Coppola finally delivered The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, a version of the film that most closely approximates the director's original vision for a conclusion to The Godfather saga. Perhaps that’s why a lot of people, especially the ones loudly declaring The Godfather's greatness, seem to ignore the very existence of The Godfather Part III.įrancis Ford Coppola returned to the well of his greatest commercial and critical success in 1990 for The Godfather Part III, and it promptly became an unwelcome addition to an accomplishment that by all accounts was already perfect. These are the rare movies that carry the kind of reputation that few people would ever dare challenge. The original The Godfather (1972) and its 1974 sequel, The Godfather Part II, exist on the same “unassailable” level of cinema history that's typically reserved for only a handful of other films, including Citizen Kane.
