Suicide Squad director David Ayer reflects on his unmade Scarface reboot script, and admits it was one of his best.

"One of the best scripts I’ve ever written was my Scarface draft," he says in the new 2024 preview issue of Total Film, which hits shelves this week. "It gets passed around in Hollywood, underground. It’s funny when people talk about the project. 'Is it the Ayer script?' 'No, it’s somebody else.' 'Oh, OK.'"

Ayer was attached to the reboot of the classic Brian De Palma film which starred Al Pacino as Tony Montana before he parted ways with Universal on the project in 2017. Speaking to TF in our new issue, the director also addresses the misconception that the script was turned down because it was too violent.

"It wasn’t too violent. Violence – I can cover it. If someone gets shot, I can photograph it where a head explodes and have a hard R, and it’s not going to alienate people. That’s easy. That’s filmmaker 101. I created this rich, soulful journey through the drug trade, and kind of what it is. The studio just wanted something more… fun."

He continues: "Scarface is its biggest IP behind Jurassic Park. They want to capture as big of an audience as possible. I fucking love Universal. Amazing people. I had this really honest conversation about the movie they wish they had, and the movie that I wished to make. There’s a lot of daylight between us. It’s just easier to be like, 'Let’s park this.'"

Even De Palma’s usual ally, Pauline Kael, had a host of issues with it. Singling out the “rash brilliance” of the chainsaw sequence as a highlight, she faulted the film’s dramatic arc – “the middle is missing” – and called it “manic yet exhausted”, with Pacino’s efforts expended on a character so consistently pig-like that the audience got no kick out of him. She compared him – rightly – to De Niro’s Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (1980), another film Kael disliked for reasons that seem a little facile now. It’s as if she’s asking these loathsome men, with their “macho primitivism”, to satiate an audience’s craving to be won over, somehow. Charmed.

In retrospect, all the unpleasantness Kael describes in Scarface is right there – but it adds up to a go-for-broke vision, not a litany of flaws. Fast-tracking Tony to obscene wealth, bypassing the steps he takes, is the most swaggery way to comment on his ugly rapaciousness. It differentiates De Palma’s film from The Godfather – or the likes of Casino after it – and makes it pop as a prescient, coke-taker’s satire on Reaganite consumption. “Nothing exceeds like excess,” as Pfeiffer drawls, acidly.

With its glacial Giorgio Moroder score and mirror-filled nightclub scenes, Scarface flaunts an archetypal early-1980s aesthetic, but also manages to feel like the last word on the selfish glamour of a decade that had barely begun. When Tony berates all the rich, appalled habitués of a swanky restaurant as hypocrites, worse than he is, the scene would hardly benefit from more social realism – it’s a one-sided slapdown, a screed. Tony is no one’s listener, of course: he just shouts, expecting the world’s attention.

It took a while to get it. Scarface barely broke even in 1983 – hurt by the reviews and backstage squabbles, netting a so-so $65m worldwide. But it soon became a runaway hit on VHS, selling more than 100,000 copies (priced at an eye-watering $79.95 per cassette, in the medium’s early days). In 2003, the 20th anniversary DVD re-issue was the fastest-selling disc on record, even beating ET. Saddam Hussein was such a fan, he named his family trust fund Montana Management in Tony’s honour.

Along the way, it became an enormous touchstone in hip-hop culture, referenced and sampled by everyone from Public Enemy to Jay-Z. Rapper Sean Combs claims to have seen it 63 times; it’s been an incalculable influence on rap videos ever since it was made.

The electronic artist and composer E.M.M.A., whose main instruments are synths, has had the film on her “creative mood board” from the moment she first heard “Tony’s Theme”. “The mood is unsettlingly complex,” she explains. “Every sound has a purpose and space is used wisely. It helps cement in my mind the gold standard of the emotion you’d want to draw out of a story with your music, and what can be achieved with a meeting of minds.”

The blimp that floats past Tony’s mansion saying “The World is Yours” – nodding back to the billboard under which Muni dies in Hawks’s original – gives the film a reckless allure that transcends bling and firepower. E.M.M.A sees this as the reason so many artists have drawn inspiration from Scarface: “Wanting something just out of grasp is an ideal creative canvas.”

In Raising Cain, Sternhagen was at the center of what is possibly Brian De Palma's most wonderfully outrageous Steadicam shot. Entertainment Weekly's Tom Scanlon was there while they were filming:

”Cut!” director Brian De Palma calls out. ”Cut, cut, cut,” he mutters, hustling up the steps toward actress Frances Sternhagen. The stocky, salt-and-pepper-bearded De Palma is known for his on-the-set gruffness, but here he shows a softer side, gently coaxing from Sternhagen (Misery) the inflection he imagines an elderly Swiss psychologist would have while explaining how a harmless family man could harbor multiple, murderous personalities. Shooting at City Hall in Mountain View, Calif., De Palma wants Sternhagen to deliver the complex speech while following a pair of detectives through a hallway, down a flight of stairs, onto an escalator, and into an elevator, finally ending up in a basement morgue — all in one continuous shot.

The scene is almost as long as the 4-minute, 50-second Steadicam shot that opened De Palma’s last picture, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990). But if the controversial director of Dressed to Kill, Scarface, and The Untouchables has his way, that will be the only similarity between the two films. With a lean budget ($12 million), relatively low-profile leads (John Lithgow, Lolita Davidovich, Steven Bauer), and a low-key production in the suburbs of San Francisco, Cain is not only a return to the Hitchcockian terrain where De Palma has always felt most at home but it’s also his chance to prove that he can still craft an efficient thriller.

The Cain script, which De Palma also wrote, gives him an opportunity to indulge his taste for showy plot twists and frequent nods — part homage, part send-up-to the master. And it gives Lithgow (Ricochet) the chance to let loose an entire improv troupe’s worth of kinky character studies. ”I must say, I’m great in this movie,” Lithgow chuckles. ”This is going to be mind-blowing.”

For De Palma, who had recently married Terminator producer (and James Cameron’s ex) Gale Anne Hurd, keeping the project manageable was a top priority. ”Gale was pregnant (she has since given birth to a baby girl, now 10 months old), and I wanted to do a movie that I could do very simply and that was close to home,” he says, adding that he deliberately chose locations that were near the couple’s Woodside, Calif., home. Hurd, who’s also Cain‘s producer, says, ”It’s really nice to be able to go to sleep in your own bed.”

Particularly on days like this. The long Steadicam shot requires 27 tedious takes. In the final seconds, with actors gathered around a covered body in the morgue, De Palma bellows stage directions.

”Hand!” he shouts, directing the coroner to lift the corpse’s bloody hand.

”Drop!” The hand drops back on the slab.

”Face!” The sheet is yanked back to reveal …

Interviewed by Charlie Rose in 1992, just three months after Raising Cain was released, Rose asked Sternhagen to explain what she measn when she says that she works from the outside in:

Well, it really means that I like to… I feel like John Cleese, the man of silly walks [laughs]. I like to find out how it feels to walk and talk like a character before I really start on the emotional moments. … It begins to all happen together, but in the very beginning, it starts – I love things where I have to do accents, for example. It’s a kind of limit. It’s a kind of pattern that I then can fit myself into. And I know I have a friend, for example, who has no idea that I used her in a movie. And what I loved about it was I just – it began to happen. As I read it, I started seeing how [voice trails off], and pretty soon, I found myself being tough and hard, just the way she was. And what was wonderful was that, I got a little apprehensive that she might recognize herself, she came up to me after seeing the movie and she said, “I like that character you played!” And I thought, she likes herself. She likes herself, that’s nice!

Wanting more than you need is, of course, the cornerstone of a consumption-based economy, as well as a reasonable definition of addiction. The specter of this illness arises when Elvira interrupts to tell Tony lesson number two: “Don’t get high on your own supply.” Frank, clearly annoyed, seconds this and adds, with a hard look at Elvira, “Of course, not everybody follows that rule.”

In the logic of Scarface, no one follows this rule because no one can. If Tony can be called a tragic figure, this is his hamartia, as inevitable as Oedipus marrying his mother. This is because Tony’s addiction to cocaine, modeled by Elvira, does not simply undermine his rational business acumen. Rather, it represents the very essence of business, the point of doing it in the first place: Tony sells to consumers so that he, in turn, may himself consume.

In his study of Latin American narcoliterature Drugs, Violence and Latin America, professor Joseph Patteson describes Western addiction to cocaine as a parody of capitalism—it shores up a solipsistic sense of self closed off to identification with the other and oriented towards consumption and domination, a state of affairs that leaves the addict perpetually unsatisfied. This is not due to any inherent quality of the drug itself. Indigenous peoples of South America who ingest relatively high amounts of cocaine through traditional coca chewing do not suffer from what we in the West call “addiction”. Tony, however, embodies the transformation of coca into cocaine, that is, the process of commodification under capitalism. The more he consumes, the more dissatisfied he becomes, as he systematically alienates everyone around him through his selfishness.

Frank’s final lesson, though not part of his list, is imparted when the waiter brings them a bottle of 1964 Dom Pérignon: “five hundred and fifty dollars…for a bunch a fucking grapes!” When asked how he likes it Tony responds, “Woah, that’s good, Frank!” Thus is commodity fetishism demonstrated, though not critiqued. The wine’s exchange value is based on its function as a status symbol, which also makes it taste very, very good. This lesson is put into practice when Tony makes his first major purchase, a Porsche he hopes will impress Elvira (it does), and later, as Tony steals her from Frank, kills him, and takes over his business.

The ensuing montage, cited by Márez as an allegory of the movement of narcocapital through the modern financial system, with bills riffling through counting machines and sacks of money being taken to a bank, also includes a portrayal of consumption. We see Tony marry Elvira at his new mansion, unveil a portrait of them, show guests his pet tiger, and buy his sister a designer dress. It ends with a shot of Elvira sitting in front of a mirror with a far-away look in her eyes, taking cocaine with a small spoon, sipping from an old-fashioned glass, and anxiously taking a drag from a cigarette. In the very next scene, we see Tony in his office, garishly decorated in black and gold and with a bank of CCTV screens, negotiating with the financier who launders his money as he mirrors Elvira’s consumption in a less elegant fashion, slamming down his glass, chomping a cigar and noisily snorting lines off of a mirror.

The dissatisfaction inherent to the search for the “good life” under capitalism is put front and center in Scarface‘s very next scene, which features Tony sitting in a huge jacuzzi filled with bubbles, smoking a cigar, and watching TV as Elvira does her toilette behind him and Manny, his right-hand man, attempts to convince him to talk to a new money launderer. While ranting at the news, Tony ironically criticizes the very thing that enabled his acquisition of wealth, arguing that bankers and politicians maintain drug prohibition to enrich themselves at the expense of people like him. His complaints even have a tinge of nostalgia for socialism: “You know what capitalism is? Gettin’ fucked!” Elvira responds sarcastically: “true capitalist if ever I met one.”

Though he does not have the reputation of Brad Pitt or the acclaim of Sean Penn, in the 1990s, Tim Robbins rapidly established himself as the most reliable leading man in Hollywood, equally adept as both a vulnerable audience insert and a smirking anti-hero. With his slicked-back hairdo and sizeable stature (standing at 2 meters tall), Robbins had a naturalistic watchability that made him the perfect anchor for some of the most acclaimed films of the decade and a muse for vaunted auteurs from Robert Altman to Brian De Palma.

In the 21st century, the aging Robbins has shrewdly shifted his attention to supporting roles, including one in Mystic River (2003), which earned him a much-deserved Academy Award. Recently, it has been the role of independent filmmakers to utilize most of his talents and producers at HBO, who cast Robbins as the Secretary of State in the cruelly overlooked miniseries The Brink. And then, of course, there’s his respectable output behind the camera: 1992’s Bob Roberts adapted a cult comedy caricature from Saturday Night Live into one of the finest political satires of the post-Cold War era, whereas Dead Man Walking’s musings about life on death row earned leading lady Susan Sarandon an Oscar.

This top 10 list will act as both an overview of Robbins’ decades-long contributions to American cinema and an evaluation of his finest performances to date, including stone-cold classics and underrated gems.

10. Mission to Mars (2000)

 

Mission to Mars is certainly the gutsiest film ever to take its name from a Disneyland ride. Brian De Palma‘s direction is typically virtuosic, Ennio Morricone’s score imbues the entire film with sweeping spectacle, and the cast is stacked with some of the era’s most reliable performers. The result is a film both admirable in its ambition and visual clarity but restrained in its execution due to studio interference and shoddy visual effects. Whilst Gary Sinise leads the cast, it’s Robbins who, as Commander Blake, gives the most rewarding performance with a distinctive character arc ending with the ultimate sacrifice and the movie’s most memorable scene.

As Saving Private Ryan realizes, in a story centering on the recovery of a person, the audience’s desire to see the character found is as much motivated by the search party’s likability as it is sympathy for the missing person. For all of its myriad flaws, Mission to Mars understands this, and the dynamics between the traveling space crew are fully realized, and the chemistry between the performers is palpable. Don’t be dissuaded by the poor reviews from some critics. Mission to Mars is a worthwhile revisit whose influence on subsequent sci-fi epics (The Martian in particular) is undeniable.

I just love Carlito’s Way, because it’s, for me – coming from the disco point of view – it’s actually one of the few films made after the era that could have well been made within it, if you see what I mean. There’s very few movies – and Saturday Night Fever is obviously, you know, the one that’s going to do it – and all the others that came along didn’t quite get it right, whereas Carlito’s Way got it exactly right. I do have a couple of issues with a few of the songs that are in there that are actually out of the time loop. But other than that, for me, if you’re a De Palma fan, if you’re a gangster fan, if you’re a disco fan, it is the perfect movie. And I also – I’m going to bore you to death with disco by the end of this, I’m sure – but I mean, I’ve just written my autobiography, which is called DISCOMANIA! And basically what it is, is my favorite disco movies of all time, of which Carlito’s Way is one. Why they’re important to me, what memories they spark, and the tracks in it that actually take me back to my era of the punk-disco seventies. So that’s where it’s all coming from.