Al Pacino on How 'Scarface' Legacy Is Indebted to Hip-Hop’s Embrace: 'It Kept Going and Going'
It may be hard for lifelong fans of Brian De Palma’s Scarface to fathom, but the film was decidedly not a critical darling upon its initial release in 1983. Subsequent decades, of course, have been very kind to the film, which has achieved the sort of zeitgeist-infiltrating omnipresence most filmmakers can only dream of, thanks in no small part to the Al Pacino -starring, Oliver Stone-written cult classic’s embrace within hip-hop.
During a recent chat with Marc Maron for the WTF podcast, Pacino looked back on his feeling of surprise upon the first reactions to the film, itself a remake of a 1932 Howard Hawks drama co-produced by Howard Hughes. Following the film’s release, Pacino noted, there was a disconnect between how audiences and critics felt about De Palma’s film.
“I was surprised that it had that reaction,” Pacino said. “The audiences liked it. Took a while.”
Maron highlighted the fact that other filmmakers had urged Pacino to be patient with regards to the film’s standing in the eyes of the public, including Warren Beatty. But it was Scarface’s pop culture immortalization through hip-hop that ultimately stuck, building a key facet of the film’s legacy that sustains to this day.
“Hip-hop just got it,” Pacino said. “They understood it. They embraced it, the rappers. And then the next thing you know, VHS is going out and more people are seeing it. Plus, we’re on the records, these rappers. And then it just carried and it kept going and going.”
Pacino also expressed shock at his own performance as Miami drug lord Tony Montana in the film, laughing as he expressed to Maron, “I don’t know what the hell was the matter with me.” According to Pacino, he’s “never been that committed to a role” in his career.
As for the copious amounts of cocaine integral to the larger Scarface cinematic experience, Pacino, despite getting to a point where he told himself “I am this guy” during production, says he’s never actually partaken in pastimes of the nostril variety.
“Nobody believes me,” he said. “I’ll say it anyway. It is the truth. I’ve never had coke in my life. I was all about something that was gonna depress this energy of mine. I needed the calm.”
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Listen to Al and Marc’s full conversation here . Pacino is currently fresh off the release of his new book Sonny Boy , billed as “the memoir of a man who has nothing left to fear and nothing left to hide.”
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