I guess someone made them an offer they couldn’t refuse…

At this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, director Francis Ford Coppola and stars Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, James Caan, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall and Talia Shire reunited to talk about the 1972 movie and 1974 sequel.

Rolling Stone have summed up what happened, picking out a few things that caught their attention:

Pacino and Diane Keaton got really drunk together after filming the wedding sequence

Pacino [worried] that he was completely in over his head, and he recalled how early on in the shoot, he and Diane Keaton went back to their hotel and hit the sauce. “We got so loaded after that wedding sequence,” the actor says, “We were theater actors, and we were not used to film. The whole thing had sort of a surreal feel to it. So we got back and started drinking: ‘Where do we go from here, we’re done, it’s over! This is the worst film ever made!'”

He eventually got over it, he admits. As for Keaton, she is still unsure why she was cast. “I heard it was because Francis thought I was eccentric,” she says.

The gentleman who played hitman Luca Brasi may have, shall we say, done real-life research for the part

There have been rumors [sic] over the years that Lenny Montana, the hulking former wrestler from Brooklyn who played Don Corleone’s muscle, may have been more than a little familiar with the world that was being portrayed in The Godfather. Coppola recalls asking Montana if he would be able to convincingly do the scene where Brasi sits on his bed, loads his gun with bullets and spins the chamber. The actor’s response, according to the director, was “Are you kiddin’ me?”

Hackford asked the filmmaker if Lenny was, in fact, “the real deal.” The silent, exaggerated shrug that was Coppola’s reply got the biggest laugh of the night.

Marlon Brando had more impressive testicles than Robert Duvall

The Method-acting legend’s penchant for pranks on the set of The Godfather has become the stuff of legend, and James Caan recalls how, during the funeral scene, he nearly got a hernia lifting the Don’s coffin; he later found out that Brando had filled it with weights to make three times as heavy. (Caan’s imitation of Brando’s laugh, by the way, is priceless.)

It was Duvall, however, who won the anecdote competition regarding His Marlon-ness. The cast kept trying to crack each other by engaging in an on-set mooning contest, and during the wedding scene, the older actor and Duvall decided to drop trou, despite the fact that Coppola reminded them “there are women and children present, Bobby!” After the two men had bared all, a woman approached the man playing consigliere Tom Hagen. “Mr. Duvall, you are fine,” he remembers her saying, “but my god, did you see the balls on that Brando?!?”

There’s something that you wouldn’t have known from the DVD extras.

Also if you haven’t yet watched The Sopranos grow up, seriously.

[source:rollingstone]