'OK, SO WE NEED A CHAINSAW & A PROSTHETIC ARM'
NICK NEWMAN TWEETS ANTHONY F. DE PALMA TEXTBOOKS
- FLASHBACK -
Posted October 11 2003
BAUER: STONE WROTE IT, DE PALMA SAID:
'OK, so we need a chainsaw and we need a prosthetic arm'
While talking to The Age about the original premiere of Scarface in 1983, Steven Bauer began to tear up, telling the interviewer, "Forgive me, I get emotional about it." After regaining his composure, Bauer relayed a story about the premiere screening of the film: "At the premiere Martin Scorsese turned around in the middle of the film, and he said, 'You guys are great - but be prepared, because they're going to hate it in Hollywood.' He said that to me and he didn't know me from Adam. And I said, 'Why?' He said, 'Because it's about them.'" Bauer talked about the expectations and anxieties he had about making his feature debut with Al Pacino: "I would go back into the trailer with Al and I'd say to Al - in an accent, because we always talked that way - I'd say to him, 'What are people going to think when they see this? We're the protagonists of this film and we're these wild guys. Are people going to be repulsed?' And he'd say, 'Don't worry about it. It's something new. They've never seen anything like it and probably never will again.'" Bauer feels vindicated by the success of the film over time, after it was villified upon its initial release. He said that fans stop him daily on the street to talk about their love of Scarface. Even fans such as Matt Damon and Ben Affleck stopped him at an Oscars after party last year: "They came up to me and they launch into a scene, knew all the words, between Tony and Manny." Bauer talked about Brian De Palma's matter-of-fact approach to the violence in the film. Talking about the chainsaw scene, Bauer said, "[Oliver Stone] wrote it and Brian said, 'OK, so we need a chainsaw and we need a prosthetic arm. Build me an arm, we gotta have the blood. We'll shoot his face, but we've got to see the saw going into his arm.'" Recalling a sense of dark humor on the set while filming these violent scenes, Bauer said, "Oh, yeah, absolutely, but Brian De Palma is very matter-of-fact about it. His art is very, very important to him, but he doesn't belabour it. It's like, 'OK, we're shooting an arm getting cut off. Guys, can we get it right so we can go to lunch?'" Canada's National Post has an additional interview with Bauer in which he talks a little more about Scarface, as well as his marriage to Melanie Griffith, including a matter-of-fact discussion of the couples' drug usage.
