30 Surprising Facts About ‘Scarface’

Say hello to our little list. Here are a few facts to break out at your next screening of Scarface, Brian De Palma’s gangsters-and-cocaine classic, which arrived in theaters in 1983.

1. It wasn't the first Scarface.
2. It could have been a Sidney Lumet film.
3. Oliver Stone wasn't interested in writing the script until Lumet got involved.
4. Unfortunately, according to Stone, Lumet hated his script.
5. Stone had firsthand experience with the subject matter.
6. Brian De Palma didn't want to audition Michelle Pfeiffer.
7. Yes, there is a lot of swearing.
8. Tony Montana was named for a football star.
9. Tony is only referred to as “Scarface“ once, and it's in Spanish.
10. Very little of the film was actually shot in Miami.
11. All that “cocaine” led to problems with Pacino's nasal passages.
12. Pacino's nose wasn't his only body part to suffer damage.
13. Steven Spielberg directed a single shot.
14. Some cool technology went into the gun muzzle flashes.
15. Saddam Hussein was a fan of the film.
16. Pfeiffer subsisted on a diet of tomato soup and cigarettes.
17. Tony doesn't know what to do with lemons.
18. “The World Is Yours” is a nod to the original film and bookends Tony's assassinations.
19. His “little friend” is what Schwarzenegger used in Predator.
20. Bauer had to respond to the Cuban community’s backlash.
21. De Palma sneaked his X-rated version into theaters.
22. John Travolta was almost Tony Montana's sidekick.
23. It was a flop until VHS came to the rescue.
24. Pfeiffer cut Pacino with a plate during her final audition.
25. De Palma sees it as a gangster version of the American Dream.
26. Scorsese warned Bauer that Hollywood would hate it.
27. Producers have been trying to make a sequel to, or remake of, Scarface for 20 years—unsuccessfully.
28. Pfeiffer cried herself to sleep during production.
29. Tony and Elvira never really kiss.
30. Tony's left tail light is always broken.

It wasn't the first Scarface.

Brian De Palma's Scarface is a loose remake of the 1932 movie of the same name, which is also about the rise and fall of an American immigrant gangster. The producer of the 1983 version, Martin Bregman, saw the original on late night TV and thought the idea could be modernized—though it still pays respect to the original film. De Palma's flick is dedicated to the original film’s director, Howard Hawks, and screenwriter, Ben Hecht.

It could have been a Sidney Lumet film.

At one point in the film's production, Sidney Lumet—the socially conscious director of such classics as Dog Day Afternoon and 12 Angry Men—was brought on as its director. “Sidney Lumet came up with the idea of what's happening today in Miami, and it inspired Bregman,” Al Pacino told Empire magazine. “He and Oliver Stone got together and produced a script that had a lot of energy and was very well written. Oliver Stone was writing about stuff that was touching on things that were going on in the world, he was in touch with that energy and that rage and that underbelly.“

Oliver Stone wasn't interested in writing the script until Lumet got involved.

Producer Bregman—who passed away on June 16, 2018—offered relative newcomer Oliver Stone a chance to overhaul the screenplay. But Stone, who was still reeling from the box office disappointment of his film The Hand, wasn't interested. “I didn’t like the original movie that much,” Stone told Creative Screenwriting. “It didn’t really hit me at all and I had no desire to make another Italian gangster picture because so many had been done so well, there would be no point to it. The origin of it, according to Marty Bregman, Al had seen the ’30s version on television, he loved it and expressed to Marty as his long time mentor/partner that he’d like to do a role like that. So Marty presented it to me and I had no interest in doing a period piece.”

But when Bregman contacted Stone again about the project later, his opinion changed. “Sidney Lumet had stepped into the deal,” Stone said. “Sidney had a great idea to take the 1930s American prohibition gangster movie and make it into a modern immigrant gangster movie dealing with the same problems that we had then, that we’re prohibiting drugs instead of alcohol. There’s a prohibition against drugs that’s created the same criminal class as (prohibition of alcohol) created the Mafia. It was a remarkable idea.”

Unfortunately, according to Stone, Lumet hated his script.

While the chance to work with Lumet was part of what lured Stone to the project, it was his script that ultimately led to the director's departure from the film. According to Stone: “Sidney Lumet hated my script. I don’t know if he’d say that in public himself, I sound like a petulant screenwriter saying that, I’d rather not say that word. Let me say that Sidney did not understand my script, whereas Bregman wanted to continue in that direction with Al.”

Stone had firsthand experience with the subject matter.

In order to create the most accurate picture possible, Stone spent time in Florida and the Caribbean interviewing people on both sides of the law for research. “It got hairy,” Stone admitted of the research process. “It gave me all this color. I wanted to do a sun-drenched, tropical Third World gangster, cigar, sexy Miami movie.”

Unfortunately, while penning the screenplay, Stone was also dealing with his own cocaine habit, which gave him an insight into what the drug can do to users. Stone actually tried to kick his habit by leaving the country to complete the script so he could be far away from his access to the drug.

“I moved to Paris and got out of the cocaine world too because that was another problem for me,” he said. ”I was doing coke at the time, and I really regretted it. I got into a habit of it and I was an addictive personality. I did it, not to an extreme or to a place where I was as destructive as some people, but certainly to where I was going stale mentally. I moved out of L.A. with my wife at the time and moved back to France to try and get into another world and see the world differently. And I wrote the script totally f***ing cold sober.”

Brian De Palma didn't want to audition Michelle Pfeiffer.

De Palma was hesitant to audition the relatively untested Pfeiffer because at the time she was best known for the box office bomb Grease 2. Glenn Close, Geena Davis, Carrie Fisher, Kelly McGillis, Sharon Stone and Sigourney Weaver were all considered for the role of Elvira, but Bregman pushed for Pfeiffer to audition and she got the part.

Yes, there is a lot of swearing.

According to the Family Media Guide, which monitors profanity, sexual content, and violence in movies, Scarface features 207 uses of the “F” word, which works out to about 1.21 F-bombs per minute. In 2014, Martin Scorsese more than doubled that with a record-setting 506 F-bombs thrown in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Tony Montana was named for a football star.

Stone, who was a San Francisco 49ers fan, named the character of Tony Montana after Joe Montana, his favorite football player.

Tony is only referred to as “Scarface“ once, and it's in Spanish.

Hector, the Colombian gangster who threatens Tony with the chainsaw, refers to Tony as “cara cicatriz,” meaning “scar face” in Spanish.

That chainsaw scene, by the way, was based on a real incident. To research the movie, Stone embedded himself with Miami law enforcement and based the infamous chainsaw sequence on a gangland story he heard from the Miami-Dade County police.

Very little of the film was actually shot in Miami.

The film was originally going to be shot entirely on location in Miami, but protests by the local Cuban-American community forced the movie to leave Miami two weeks into production. Besides footage from those two weeks, the rest of the movie was shot in Los Angeles, New York, and Santa Barbara.

All that “cocaine” led to problems with Pacino's nasal passages.

Though there has long been a myth that Pacino snorted real cocaine on camera for Scarface, the “cocaine” used in the movie was supposedly powdered milk (even if De Palma has never officially stated what the crew used as a drug stand-in). But just because it wasn't real doesn't mean that it didn't create problems for Pacino's nasal passages. “For years after, I have had things up in there,” Pacino said in 2015. “I don't know what happened to my nose, but it's changed.”

Pacino's nose wasn't his only body part to suffer damage.

In the film's very bloody conclusion, Montana famously asks the assailants who've invaded his home to “say hello to my little friend,” which happens to be a very large gun. That gun took a beating from all the blanks it had to fire, so much so that Pacino ended up burning his hand on its barrel. ”My hand stuck to that sucker,” he said. Ultimately, the actor—and his bandaged hands—had to sit out some of the action in the last few weeks of production.

Steven Spielberg directed a single shot.

De Palma and Spielberg had been friends since the two began making studio movies in the mid-1970s, and they made a habit of visiting each other’s sets. Spielberg was on hand for one of the days of shooting the Colombians’ initial attack on Tony Montana’s house at the end of the movie, so De Palma let Spielberg direct the low-angle shot where the attackers first enter the house.

Some cool technology went into the gun muzzle flashes.

In order to heighten the severity of the gunfire, De Palma and the special effects coordinators created a mechanism to synchronize the gunfire with the open shutter on the movie camera to show the huge muzzle flash coming from the guns in the final shootout.

Saddam Hussein was a fan of the film.

The trust fund the former Iraqi dictator set up to launder money was called “Montana Management,” a nod to the company Tony uses to launder money in the movie.

Pfeiffer subsisted on a diet of tomato soup and cigarettes.

Fresh off Grease 2, Pfeiffer effectively starved herself to embody rail-thin cocaine addict Elvira. Her diet of choice consisted of “tomato soup and Marlboros” which should come with a warning not to try it at home—although Pfeiffer hasn't complained about the process of thinning down so much as the duration. The shoot was only supposed to go for three months, but De Palma and company went over budget and far beyond their deadline, dragging the tomato soup torture out to six months. 

Tony doesn't know what to do with lemons.

As a subtle signal to Tony's impoverished upbringing and general lack of wealthy sophistication, he picks up a lemon from the table during the meeting with Sosa and bites it instead of using the water to wash his hands. It's a quiet moment for an otherwise extremely loud character.

“The World Is Yours” is a nod to the original film and bookends Tony's assassinations.

After hitmen fail to assassinate Tony at the nightclub, he emerges to see a blimp whose lights blare “The World Is Yours.” It makes an impact because Tony gets the words inscribed on his fountain statue. In addition to potentially being the last thing he sees after the successful assassination, it's also an homage to the 1932 film, which uses a neon sign outside the main gangster's window to sell its ironic message.

His “little friend” is what Schwarzenegger used in Predator.

Perhaps the only gun in cinema history that we're asked to formally greet, Tony's “little friend” is a Colt AR-15 with a fake M203 grenade launcher attached. Prop master John Zemansky and the team made the grenade launcher because they couldn't find the real thing, and their work went on to find new life in Arnold Schwarzenegger's hands fighting the alien hunter in Predator.

Bauer had to respond to the Cuban community’s backlash.

Bauer was the only Cuban in the cast, and he found it necessary to respond to critics in the Florida Cuban community who feared that the film would cement an idea of Cubans as criminals in the minds of their neighbors. At a reunion for the Tribeca Film Festival, he said, “A lot of the old-school Cubans were concerned with me to the point where they weren’t really sure that my participation in a Hollywood movie was worth me degrading or tainting the image of their accomplishments in society. What I tried to convey to them was: Relax, man, it’s a movie. Take it easy, and be happy for me.”

De Palma sneaked his X-rated version into theaters.

The original version of Scarface was given an X rating—the kiss of death in 1983, because it would dissuade most theaters from showing the movie. De Palma tried editing the film to have it bumped to an R rating. The full saga is worth checking out, but the quick and dirty version of his efforts involved multiple attempts to edit the film's objectionable violence, an appeal to the MPAA in which regulators finally agreed De Palma's latest cut had earned an R, and a defiant De Palma guessing (correctly) that his edits had been so minor anyway that no one would notice if he sent the X-rated version to theaters. So he did. It's possible that the only thing left out was a severed arm during the chainsaw/bathroom sequence, but otherwise, the X-rated version is the version we all know and love.

John Travolta was almost Tony Montana's sidekick.

This makes a lot of sense when you consider that Travolta had just worked with De Palma on Blow Out and that he would have made a solid Manny. He apparently met with Pacino to discuss playing the role, but (obviously) it never came to pass. Instead, the production hired Bauer without an audition and got a stellar performance. If Travolta had been in the film, it would have had two actors from the Grease-iverse, and left the door open for future cultural critics to consider Scarface as a sequel in the musical series.

It was a flop until VHS came to the rescue.

We wouldn't be talking about Scarface without home video. Critics dismissed it as a messy slog that belonged in the B-movie bin, and audiences never rallied to it in theaters, so it didn't make enough to cover production costs. The next summer, it exploded onto VHS, selling 100,000 copies back when VHS tapes cost $79.95 a piece. A cult following and the growing popularity of home video pushed this F-bomb-laden murderfest into the mainstream.

Pfeiffer cut Pacino with a plate during her final audition.

Since she wasn't their first or second or third choice, Pfeiffer had to fight hard for the role, and the audition process wore her down. The production called to tell her she wasn't getting the gig, but then called back to request a screen test a month later. Convinced she still had no shot, she let loose in the audition, angrily throwing plates all around the restaurant, cutting Pacino's face, and winning the part in the process. 

De Palma sees it as a gangster version of the American Dream.

The world is yours, right? De Palma explained in an interview with The Talks that Scarface's endurance has been a product of luck and the stars aligning for it to have a life beyond its initial box office disappointments. “There’s something that connects with it from generation to generation,” he said. “I mean, Scarface is basically the American Dream told through a gangster saga.” Say hello to Tony's little bootstraps. 

Scorsese warned Bauer that Hollywood would hate it.

Scorsese was right. At high-profile screenings, a lot of the Hollywood elite of the time either walked out or dismissed the film as trash. After one showing at the Broadway Theater, Scorsese congratulated Bauer and gave the young actor the warning. “’They are going to hate this movie in Hollywood,’” Bauer recalled Scorsese saying to him. “And I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Because it’s about them.’“ Cocaine, greed, and excess may have hit too close to home. 

Producers have been trying to make a sequel to, or remake of, Scarface for 20 years—unsuccessfully.

At its heart, the story's concept is simple: A newly arrived immigrant to the United States rises through the criminal underworld to amass an amount of money so large that it leads to his downfall. Despite the desire to extend or remake that tale, pushing a movie through production has proved impossible so far. There was rapper Cuban Link trying to make the sequel “Son of Tony” in the early 2000s. David Yates was in talks to direct the reboot at one point, as was David Ayer and Pablo Larraín. Director Antoine Fuqua was attached to a version featuring a Mexican immigrant, and they got as close as announcing filming for the fall of 2018 before it fell through. The latest version involves Luca Guadagnino and the Coen Brothers. 

Pfeiffer cried herself to sleep during production.

One of the main lessons of Scarface is that Michelle Pfeiffer did not have a happy time making the film. Through starvation, isolation, and a lengthy production schedule, Pfeiffer endured a lot to make the magic. “It was also the nature of the relationship for Tony Montana to be very dismissive of my character,” she said. “So I would go to sleep some nights crying.“

Tony and Elvira never really kiss.

Just as we never see chainsaw hit flesh, Tony and Elvira's adoration is largely implied. There are romantic moments (like him stealing her hat) that signal how he wins her over, but even their kiss at the wedding is obscured. 

Tony's left tail light is always broken.

There are a lot of fantastic cars in the movie: Bentleys, Porsches, a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow II, and many more. When we get to see the back of the cars Tony's driving, the left tail light is usually burned out. It's not clear why. Early on in the film it might be a signal of where his money's going, and later on it might be to show that he doesn't really take care of his nice things. It also may be a signal that he's being followed—missing a tail light would make a car easier to see, and the driver wouldn't know it.

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