With The Godfather running at 172 minutes and Part II running at 201 minutes, this amounted to a staggering 381 minutes which told the story of two generations of the same family over the course of nearly 60 years (the first scene of Part II takes place in 1901 and ends in 1959). He was Sergio Leone and those films were The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West. READ MORE: The Godfather: Revenge as an Unseen Dish Served ColdĪ few years later, another Italian would make two films that didn’t quite reach three hours – but at 165 minutes each, they came close. Oddly enough, the very first director to release a three hour epic during the 60’s was like Coppola, a fellow Italian – Federico Fellini, who released the 175 minute La Dolce Vita in February of that year. During the 1960’s, the three hour film was mostly relegated to large, grand, visionary movies featuring large vistas and environments which crossed the globe – namely the movies of David Lean such as Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. The Godfather Part II was made at a time when a director was allowed to tell the story they wanted to tell it, in the time they wished to take to tell it. Imagine any director pulling *that* off today.
Both stories would intersect in the final film which yes, remarkably, did open on December 20th, 1974 despite having been filmed in three different countries, featuring a cast of 100 speaking parts, with stunning plot surprises that required attentiveness from the audience and which ran at 201 minutes in length. While Coppola worked on outlining the young Vito storylines, Puzo was fashioning his story on the fading power of Vito’s son, Michael. These scenes of young Vito would be interwoven into the other main story, which according to Puzo, were to be about the fall and ultimate death of Michael Corleone (once again played by Al Pacino).
This second movie would indeed feature a significant amount of screen/story-time to the rise of young Vito Corleone, played by an up-and-coming Italian actor named Robert De Niro. The first thing Coppola did was immediately return to the ideas he formed in Sicily the previous year. This gave Coppola and his co-writer, Mario Puzo two and a half years to write, shoot and edit the picture. The Godfather Part II would open on December 20, 1974. He kept notes of his ideas and then returned to America to oversee the completion of the first film.Ī year later, in July of 1972, four months after The Godfather had earned nearly $100 million, Paramount officially announced a sequel. Inspired by the history of the warring factions within the small town of Sicily, Italy while he was on-location filming the Michael Corleone in exile scenes for the first Godfather, the director started imagining what telling the story of a younger Vito Corleone would entail. Fortunately for everybody, ideas for a script had already been percolating in the mind of writer/director Francis Ford Coppola.
When that first movie *did* open and started breaking all-time box-office records, a sequel was an immediate go. The first Godfather movie wasn’t even released when Paramount had already beginning thinking of a possible sequel.