Scarface
“DO YOU THINK you can take me? You’re gonna need a fuckin’ army if you’re gonna take me!” Tony Montana screams at his Colombian foes from the crassly ornate balcony of his palatial Miami estate, smeared with cocaine and his own blood, and toting a grenade-launching assault rifle like a one-man Wild Bunch. So high is the Cuban drug lord on his own supply, he thinks he’s invincible. And also, fatally, fails to appreciate that the Colombians have indeed brought a fuckin’ army.
As written by Oliver Stone, the finale to 1983’s Scarface only involved “four or five gunmen sneaking up on him”. However, when he arrived on set, Stone was surprised to find that director Brian De Palma had taken it a bit further. Well, a lot. “It was like 30 or 40 gunmen! It became a Hong Kong [action] movie at that point. But, well, people loved it!”
For Stone, it was crucial the climax work as an extravagant act of self-destruction by a villain at his teetering peak, in contrast to the original 1932
Scarface movie’s insistence that he “repent or crawl on his knees”. In De Palma’s hands, it really couldn’t have been more extravagant. The sequence required five cameras, one crane and dozens of stunt performers. Not to mention a specially designed weaponsynchronisation system, which enabled DP John A. Alonzo to keep his camera shutters open while the guns fired, and therefore capture every muzzleflash in all its fiery glory.
It was a gruelling experience for the man at the raging heart of the bullet storm. Pacino’s death-dealing ‘little friend’ was literally too hot to handle. The gun’s searing barrel burned his hand so severely he was hospitalised and had to take two weeks off. “I had a lot of time to shoot the Colombians doing things,” deadpanned De Palma.
Pacino got through it, he said, by going into an almost trance-like state. “I found myself every day going into this room with all these guns, and all this smoke, and all this hell, actually. I would give myself some kind of a mantra, and just bite the bullet and spend the 12, 14 hours there, day in, day out, just shooting that sequence. If you’re relaxed when you’re doing it, you can take anything. Because if you for once take a look around you, it’s just unendurable.”
But the sequence itself has endured like few others. The embracing of Scarface by hip-hop artists has elevated it to pop-culture nirvana. Rap outfit G-unit sampled Montana’s “Say hello to my little friend” speech in their song ‘My Buddy’, and Sean Combs claimed to have seen the movie 63 times, noting that, “You watch it for the lessons.”
Well, here endeth the lessons (whatever they are): with the image of Montana brazenly raining death upon his enemies, moments before winding up face-down in his own fountain. He might not survive the movie, but thanks to De Palma’s stylishly excessive send-off, he has become immortalised in celebrated infamy. SCARFACE IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DIGITAL