Brando used covert CIA tapes of Mafia bosses to perfect Godfather voice
DIRECTOR Francis Ford Coppola coached Marlon Brando as The Godfather’s Vito Corleone by showing him bugged conversations of real Mafioso.
The CIA tapes helped Brando hone the accent and delivery of gangster lingo in the 1972 blockbuster – earning him an Oscar.
The tight-knit way the legends worked together also emerged in a letter Coppola sent to Brando about playing Colonel Walter E Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.
It shows the director had a lastminute rethink on the character, settling on the one fans saw in the 1979 classic.
A memo to Brando covering the mobster tapes – on Godfatherheaded stationery – does not reveal how Coppola got hold of them.
But his assistant writes: “[enclosing] some tapes of Mafioso meetings from a Central Intelligence division bug”.
Meanwhile, the typed letter Coppola sent Brando about the Vietnam movie Apocalypse Now details his thoughts on Colonel Kurtz’s portrayal. In the final cut Kurtz goes insane then missing before launching a guerrilla war from an outpost in Cambodia. In the correspondence, Coppola, who is now 82 and won an Oscar for The Godfather II in 1975, apologises to Brando for the delay getting the Apocalypse script to him.
He explains he wanted to rethink the Colonel’s character from that of a “doped-up madman” to a “rational great officer who finds himself totally at odds with the generals in command”. Coppola relates his wider ambitions for the film, which was controversial at the time: “We will never get past Vietnam if we sweep it under the carpet – we must face it, head on, as ugly and horrible as it will seem out in the open.”
The papers were kept by Brando until his death from heart and lung failure aged 80 in 2004.
The Apocalypse Now letter, together with Brando’s scripts and notes, have just been sold to a mystery buyer for £70,000 at Bonhams LA. The Godfather lot, which did not include the CIA tapes but contained scripts, call sheets and press clippings, also went for £70,000, again to a mystery buyer.
Bonhams’ entertainment expert Helen Hall said: “Brando’s research into Don Corleone and Kurtz went very deep.
“For a man who claimed that he cared little for his acting career – that it was just a means to finance the causes that were dear to him – the research he undertook for these roles belies that claim.”