The other miracle of the film really is that Al Pacino emerged from this film as a star, and he was relatively, almost completely unknown before the film began. And what you saw in the film was the character of Michael who was not... who didn't want to be part of the family and over the course of the film, he emerges as the strongest person who eventually becomes the new Godfather. And this wouldn't have worked as well if it had been somebody like Robert Redford who was already a star. As soon as he appeared on the screen and said, you know, 'I'm not part of this family', you would not... Where is the trajectory there? And the other thing about that if somebody doesn't look Italian and says I'm not part of the family, the audience says, 'Well yes, that's true.' And there's no tension on that because I can see it. Whereas somebody like Al Pacino who looks extremely Italian and Sicilian who says, 'I'm not part of this family, I don't want to be part of this', there's a tension there because in every frame that you look at Al Pacino it says, 'Yes, you are.' And yet you see him struggling against this and eventually failing and being subsumed by the whole story of the film. So his trajectory as a character, what he looks like, how he emerges out of anonymity to take over, all of these things mirror the actual story of the film. But they mirror what actually happened to Al Pacino as an actor and competing with his brother actors for the approval of the Godfather, which is Marlon Brando, who they all were in awe of and adored.

Occasionally films get this fantastic resonance like The Godfather does, and it's down to the vision of the director because this is what Francis [Ford Coppola] wanted and his persistence and luck that it all worked out. It could not have worked out at some point, and somebody might not have been available, and the studio could have been more insistent and, and, and, lots of other problems with it. But in this particular case, that constellation of horizontal and vertical actually fit and made the film the strong film that it is.