“In all of my films I try to have a couple of weeks to have the all the cast together and very often if the first time the actors work together they do so in improvisation especially sensual improvisation: eating together or preparing food together. Or doing some activity that you touch and making something together. And for the Godfather what I did in Patty’s restaurant uptown: they had a backroom. And before the cast really knew each other, I arranged to have a family style table put in that backroom. And I had all this Italian food. (…) And I just told them to have an improvisation as a familiy, you know, talk while eating (…). And I very much believe that it was in that first improvisation that they established what it was like for them to be a family. And I always have felt that that improv and other things we did afterwards really gave them something fundamental that helped them throughout every scene that was to come and made it believable that they were brothers or father and son. (…)”
(Coppolla on Godfather)
Der Pate