“What, say hello to my little friend? Yes, I say hello to my little friend!”
That’s Al Pacino, happily reciting one of his most famous lines at a 35th anniversary screening of Scarface at the Tribeca Film Festival. The Beacon Theatre was packed with excited acolytes on Thursday night, who spent nearly three hours watching the classic film, before tucking into a rowdy—and sometimes unbearably awkward—panel with its stars: Pacino, Michelle Pfeiffer (Elvira), and Steven Bauer (Manolo), and director Brian De Palma. Moderator Jesse Kornbluth spent much of the event directing questions only at the seminal 1983 gangster flick’s male cast members—and it took a turn when he finally aimed a direct query at the largely quiet Pfeiffer.
In the film, Pfeiffer plays Elvira, the miserable wife of Pacino’s trigger-happy Tony Montana. The role was a major dramatic turn for the actress, a part she had to fight for over more established stars like Glenn Close. Though Elvira could have been a two-dimensional bored housewife, she’s endlessly watchable in Pfeiffer’s hands—sultry, crackling with emotion, and increasingly erratic as she descends into drug addiction.
But Pfeiffer wasn‘t asked about any of that. Instead, Kornbluth asked her this: “What did you weigh [in the film]?” He prefaced that by saying he was “a father of a daughter,” and was concerned about Pfeiffer’s preparation for the role. Pacino, Bauer, and De Palma immediately turned to look at her, shocked by the question. The audience booed almost immediately, with one audience member loudly asking, “Seriously?”
“Well, O.K.,” Pfeiffer began, clearly taken aback. “I don’t know, but I was playing a cocaine addict, so that was part of the physicality of the part which you have to consider.”
She added that she purposely lost weight over the course of the film for the role. “I became thinner and thinner and more emaciated,” she said, noting that she “was starving by the end of it,” because the shoot for her final scene kept getting delayed. “I literally had members of the crew bringing me bagels because they were all worried about me and how thin I was getting. I think I was living on tomato soup and Marlboros.”
Kornbluth followed that up by asking Pfeiffer if she remembered the first thing she ate when was done with the film. She didn’t, though flatly she offered that it was “probably Mexican food. Probably chips and guacamole.”
She later noted that many people over the years have asked her about Elvira’s lack of agency. Pfeiffer, who was 25 at the time of the film’s release, said she “hadn’t thought about that a lot of the time.” However, she now feels it was part of her artistic duty to show the truth of women like Elvira without sugarcoating their existence. “That said more than getting up on any soapbox and preaching to people,” she added.
Were the film to get remade today, Kornbluth later posited to Pfeiffer, could she see it starring a female version of Tony Montana? Before she could answer, Pacino, and Bauer both replied, “No.”
“No,” Pfeiffer added, blunt and resigned at this point.
“I think it’s quite remarkable that the movie we made is a remake of a really great movie,” Pacino added—specifically, the classic 1932 Howard Hawks film of the same name. “That’s really hard to do.”
The remake struggled to make it to theaters because of its consistent and graphic violence. After wrapping production, De Palma recalled, he had to submit three different versions to the ratings board, which kept finding issues with the levels of violence in each cut. In the third cut, De Palma recalled them being upset about the death of Octavio the clown.
After that, the director couldn’t take it anymore, telling producer Martin Bregman (who was in the Tribeca audience that night), “I’ve had it with these people.” Bregman was ready. “We’ll go to war,” De Palma recalled the producer saying. They ultimately decided to scrap all the changes and go back to the original cut of the film, winning the ratings board over with a presentation that got them a more accessible R-rating. The rest is history. If the universe grants us another celebratory screening and panel with the team behind Scarface, perhaps Pfeiffer will be given a chance to talk about that stuff—rather than her body.
Photo: Photograph by Mark Seliger.
Photo: Photograph by Mark Seliger.
Photo: Photograph by Mark Seliger.
Photo: Photograph by Mark Seliger.
Photo: Photograph by Mark Seliger.
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