Al Pacino met “The Godfather” co-star Marlon Brando covered in chicken dish

Leave the gun, take the cacciatore.

Al Pacino reflects on the first time he spoke to Marlon Brando on set The Godfather in his upcoming memoirs, Sonny Boy, they say On the water The actor behaved so bizarrely that he could barely remember what they were talking about.

After being briefly introduced at a cast dinner, Pacino said he was forced to have lunch with the star, who plays his father, after director Francis Ford Coppola insisted.

“I actually didn’t want to talk to him. I thought it wasn’t necessary,” Pacino writes about the encounter in a new excerpt from the book The Guardian. “The discomfort I felt just at the thought – 'You mean I have to have lunch with him?'” Seriously, it scared me. He was the greatest living actor of our time. I grew up with actors like him – larger-than-life people like Clark Gable and Cary Grant. They were famous when fame meant something. Before the rose bloom faded, Francis said, “This is what you must do,” and so I did.”

Pacino said his first real conversation with the Tram named Desire The actor appeared on the set of the scene in which his character Michael Corleone visits his father Vito in a shadowy, abandoned hospital. “He was sitting on one hospital bed, I was sitting on the other,” he recalled. “He asked me questions: Where do I come from? How long have I been an actor?”

Unfortunately, it was difficult for Pacino to concentrate as Brando was eating his food. “He ate chicken cacciatore with his hands,” he said Dog Day afternoon Star remembered. “His hands were covered in red sauce. Likewise his face. And that's all I could think about the whole time. Whatever his words were, my consciousness was fixated on the splotchy sight before me. He was talking – devouring, devouring, devouring, devouring – and I was just fascinated.”

Pacino was also disturbed by the chaos. “What should he do with the chicken?” he asked himself. “I hoped he wouldn't tell me to throw it in the trash for him. He somehow disposed of it without getting up. He looked at me quizzically, as if to ask, 'What are you thinking about?' ' I asked myself, 'What is he going to do with his hands?' Before I could, he spread both hands across the white hospital bed and smeared red sauce on the sheets without even thinking about it and kept talking.”

The heat Star was taken aback by Brando's careless (or careless?) behavior. “I thought, ‘Is this how movie stars behave? You can do anything,'” he recalled. “When our lunch was over, Marlon looked at me with his gentle eyes and said, 'Yes, boy, you'll be all right.' I was taught to be polite and grateful, so I was probably too scared to even say anything: “Can you define 'okay'?”

Pacino continues to be impressed with Brando's performance The Godfatherwhich he believes is the main reason for the film's continued response. “Marlon also showed me generosity, but I don't think he saved everything for me because he shared it with the audience,” he writes Sonny Boy. “That’s what made his performance so memorable and endearing. We all dream of having someone like Don Vito to turn to. So many people are mistreated in this life, but when you have a sponsor, you have someone to help you. You can go there and they will take care of it.

He continued: “That’s why people responded to him in the film. It was more than just the courage and boldness; it was the humanity behind it. That's why he had to play Vito larger than life – his height, the shoe polish in his hair, the cotton in his cheeks had to be iconic, and Brando made him as iconic as Citizen Kane or Superman, Julius Caesar or George Washington.

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Pacino's new memoir,Sonny Boy, hits shelves October 15th.