Production History (Scarface) Scarface

Al Pacino saw the 1932 original and called his producer

The project began when Al Pacino saw Howard Hawks's 1932 Scarface at the Tiffany Theater in Los Angeles and immediately phoned producer Martin Bregman to discuss remaking it. Bregman attached Sidney Lumet to direct and Lumet proposed the key conceptual leap: update the Prohibition-era bootlegger to a Cuban immigrant arriving during the 1980 Mariel boatlift. Lumet eventually left the project, feeling it was too violent and wanting a more political film. (wikipedia, tcm)

"I had heard about Scarface for a long time... It was the model for all gangster pictures." — Al Pacino, Cinema Scholars (2023)

Oliver Stone wrote the screenplay in Paris to escape cocaine

Bregman hired Oliver Stone, who was then deep in a cocaine addiction that had lasted roughly two and a half years. Stone traveled to Miami, Ecuador, and Bolivia to research the cocaine trade, meeting actual drug lords who anonymously described their operations. The research was dangerous — most interviews took place after midnight, and in one incident Stone was suspected of being an informant at four in the morning in a room with armed traffickers. He modeled the character of Alejandro Sosa on Roberto Suarez Gomez, a Bolivian drug lord nicknamed the "King of Cocaine." (cinemascholars, wikipedia)

To actually write the script, Stone relocated to Paris, where he could separate himself from the drug world he was documenting.

"Sidney had a great idea to take the 1930s American prohibition gangster movie and make it into a modern immigrant gangster movie." — Oliver Stone, Cinema Scholars (2023)

"Cocaine had screwed me so much. It had taken so much of my money that now I needed to take my revenge and so I wrote Scarface." — Oliver Stone, JoBlo (2020)

Stone named the protagonist Tony Montana after San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana. He also drew the chainsaw motel scene from an actual police report describing a nearly identical incident in the Miami drug trade. (mentalfloss)

De Palma wanted an operatic vision of the American Dream gone wild

Brian De Palma replaced Lumet as director. Coming off the critical success of Blow Out (which had underperformed commercially), De Palma saw Scarface as an opportunity to work at a larger scale. He told Bregman and Pacino that he wanted to make the film an "operatic" vision of the American Dream gone wild, with a "heightened sense of reality." (cinemascholars)

De Palma's instructions to cinematographer John A. Alonzo inverted the genre's visual conventions: instead of dark, noir-inflected lighting for criminal activity, De Palma wanted brightness and color surrounding the violence.

"Give me the most beautiful pictures you can. I'm going to place violence inside of them." — Brian De Palma, Cinema Scholars (2003)

Miami's Cuban community forced the production to relocate

The film was originally planned to shoot entirely in Miami. When production was announced in 1982, Miami city commissioner Demetrio Perez Jr. sought to block filming permits, arguing that the script would reinforce anti-Cuban prejudice by emphasizing the criminal minority among Mariel refugees while ignoring the majority who were ordinary people fleeing Castro's regime. The Cuban exile community's opposition was fierce enough that the production received death threats from local underworld figures. (wikipedia, thevintagenews)

Bregman abandoned Miami and relocated the production to Los Angeles. Filming ran from November 1982 to May 1983, with only a brief two-week return to Miami for select exterior shots — the chainsaw scene's Ocean Drive hotel and a sequence at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach. (caplinnews)

"The movie was a nightmare to make, went three months over... It was so slow the way they made it." — Oliver Stone, Cinema Scholars (2023)

Pacino built Tony Montana from Roberto Duran and Hollywood gangsters

Pacino worked with a speech coach and spent time with Cuban emigres to develop Tony's accent, though the result was deliberately stylized rather than naturalistic — Tony claims in the film that he learned English watching Bogart and Cagney, and the performance carries that artificiality by design. Pacino also based elements of Tony's physicality on Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran, borrowing Duran's compact aggression and swagger. (tcm, imdb)

"I can tell you that I was terrified... I would go to sleep some nights crying." — Michelle Pfeiffer, Cinema Scholars (2023)

The Babylon Club was built on a Hollywood soundstage

Production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti created the Babylon Club as a circular set ringed by eight-inch by six-foot mirrors, with purple carpeting, Greek statues, and an onyx dance floor. The design was based on Miami's Mutiny Hotel — a real nightclub that was a notorious meeting point for cocaine traffickers in the early 1980s. For the Babylon Club shootout, Alonzo covered the mirrors with transparent Plexiglas and used high-velocity pellet rifles fired by experienced marksmen to simulate bullet impacts, shooting the action with multiple cameras to capture it in continuous takes. (fast-rewind)

Spielberg visited the set and helped with the finale

During filming of the climactic last stand, Pacino grabbed his M16 prop by the barrel, which was red-hot from blank firing, and severely burned his hand. Production halted for two weeks while Pacino recovered. De Palma used the downtime to film all scenes not featuring Pacino. Steven Spielberg, who visited the set during this period, collaborated informally on additional camera angles for the elaborate shootout. (syfy)

"Stephen wandered over, we did a few shots: 'What do you think about this Steve, should we put another camera up here?' 'Why not?!'" — Brian De Palma, De Palma (2015)

The budget landed between $25 million and $37 million

Estimates of the final budget vary. Universal Pictures has cited figures from $23.5 million to $37 million, with the variance likely reflecting different accounting methods for the extended shoot, the Miami relocation, and the Pacino injury delay. The film grossed approximately $45 million domestically in its initial theatrical run and $66 million worldwide — a modest return that did not suggest the cultural afterlife to come. (wikipedia, emanuellevy)