It began with a phone call from Francis Ford Coppola to a young New York actor called Al Pacino. Coppola announced that he was going to be directing The Godfather - and he wanted Pacino to star as Michael Corleone. This took a little while to sink in. Firstly, that Paramount had given The Godfather to Coppola. The book, by Mario Puzo, had been a massive hit so the cinema rights were highly prized and the mercurial Coppola, with just a few credits to his name, was hardly a safe pair of hands. And secondly, that the largely unknown Pacino was in the frame for Michael. As he recalls in his memoir, “When you’re a young actor … just getting a part in a film is a miracle. Opportunities like this don’t exist for you.”

But there was a hitch. A big hitch. Paramount didn’t want Pacino. They wanted an established star who was guaranteed box office: Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty; anyone other than this unknown Italian kid. To his credit, Coppola persisted, nurturing Pacino through an elaborate audition process, taking him to a barbers to have a 1940’s cut and orchestrating a meet with a real mob family.

Pacino at the home of a real life crime boss

The young Pacino was excited but unnerved. He knew about the studio’s antipathy. He knew that they were trying all the young actors of the day, desperate to find an alternative. So he took a breath, cleared his head, and prepared for his first screen test by ‘going to the character’, something he’d learned to do at the Actors’ Studio. Who was Michael deep down? And how could he be changed by the story?

Against the odds Pacino secured the part. He was given an extra boost when he rang his grandmother to tell her the news and discovered that his late grandfather had been born in Corleone in Sicily - the town that gave his character’s family their name.

Before shooting began Pacino immersed himself in his character. He would take long walks up and down Manhattan, sometimes for hours, musing on how he was going to play Michael. And he decided to create an arc: “Michael starts out from a young man we’ve seen before, getting by, a little loopy, a little lumpy. He’s there and not there at the same time. It’s all building up to when he volunteers to take out the drug dealer and crooked cop who conspired to kill Vito Corleone, Michael’s father. All of a sudden, there’s a big explosion in him.” This unexpected and dramatic transition from callow, ineffectual underling to head of the family felt like the right way to go.

Shooting began with the scene that would open the film, the wedding of Vito’s daughter Connie. At this point in the narrative, Michael, as Pacino had chosen to play him, is yet to come into his own. He’s still that ‘lumpy young man’ who is ‘there and not there at the same time’.

Connie’s wedding. With Pacino as Michael and Diane Keaton as Kay.

So when the studio saw the first rushes their fears were confirmed: Michael had none of the charisma or presence they wanted him to have. This was, of course, exactly Pacino’s intention, but they didn’t know it. Word began to spread that Pacino was going to get fired from the film. He writes, “You could feel that loss of momentum when we shot. There was a discomfort among people, even the crew, when I was working. The word was that I was going to be fired, and likely so was the director. Not that Francis wasn’t cutting it - I wasn’t. But he was the one responsible for me being in the film.”

And worse was yet to come. One night in a scene not dissimilar to those in the film itself, Pacino was invited to join Francis and his family for dinner. The director took the young actor to one side and told him that he too was starting to feel like the performance wasn’t working. This hit Pacino hard. So long as Coppola was on his side he felt like he could keep going. But now his chief supporter had lost faith and Pacino knew that his breakthrough role in what would become one of the biggest films of all time was hanging by a thread. They agreed that Pacino would watch a rough cut of the rushes so he could see what was amiss.

But when he did there was no surprise. The effect was exactly as he’d intended: “I didn’t want to be seen. My whole plan for Michael was to show that this kid was unaware of things and wasn’t coming on with a personality that was particularly full of charisma. My idea was that this guy comes out of nowhere. That was the power of this characterisation … the emergence of this person, the discovery of this person, the discovery of his capacity and his potential. By the end of the film, I hoped that I would have created an enigma.”

In a very fortunate twist of fate, which some say was orchestrated by Coppola, the restaurant scene in which Michael finally comes into his own, performing the hit on the drug dealer and the corrupt cop, was moved earlier in the shooting schedule. Pacino writes, “That scene was meant to be filmed a few days later, but if something hadn’t happened to let me show what I was capable of, there might not have been a later for me.”

The moment in the film that Michael Corleone reveals his true colours

And so he finally got to play the scene in which the young Michael reveals he does indeed have what it takes to become the Godfather. Except even this didn’t go quite as smoothly as Pacino had hoped. While making his getaway Michael has to leap into a moving car. Pacino fell and twisted his ankle so badly he couldn’t move. As he lay there in the gutter - physically and emotionally spent - a huge wave of relief passed over him and he gave a prayer of thanks: now he had an excuse to leave the film that seemingly no one wanted him to be on.

But as soon as the rushes from that punishing night in Brooklyn made it back to the studio, everything changed. The shift that Pacino had so brilliantly envisaged in the arc of Michael’s story, the evolution in character in which a new Godfather is born, was there for everyone to see. Pacino reflects, “So I didn’t get fired from the Godfather. I just kept doing what I did, what I had thought about on those long, lonely walks up and down the length of Manhattan. I did have plan, a direction that I really believed was the way to go with this character.”

It's a tale of creative fortitude (and maybe a little luck too). No one had thought as hard as Pacino about Michael Corleone; who he was as a character; how he would change and develop over time; the role he played in the story. The studio were worried about recouping their investment. Coppola was worried about everything. But all Pacino had to worry about was Michael. And he kept faith in this vision even when everyone around him failed to understand it.

Taking an idea all the way to execution is often a long and torturous process. There are always any number of occasions when it would be very easy to compromise, to drift away from your original intention. But so long as you’ve done the hard work and walked those metaphorical miles up and down Manhattan, stay strong and stick to your vision. Unless of course a member of the family makes you an offer you can’t refuse …

Al Pacino’s memoir ‘Sonny Boy’ is available now.

Al Pacino, The Godfather and Creative Fortitude