Scarface Behind The Scenes

Powdered soya milk was used as a prop instead of real coke (in most scenes!).

Al Pacino adopted the Cuban accent six months before shooting began.

In the final shootout sequence, Al grabs the gun by the barrel and even though they were only using blanks, Pacino's hand was quite badly burnt, thus production had to be put on hold for a few weeks.

In the special edition DVD Brain De Palma doesn't deny that they used cocaine for some of the scenes.

"On the radio, they were talking about the threat to the orange crop, meanwhile, we were shooting at night dressed for the tropics!" (Steven Bauer on the surprisingly cold evenings in L.A.)

Tony and Manny worked at El Paraiso Cuban sandwich shop, El Paraiso later became the nightclub in 'Carlito's Way'.

In creating the Freedom Town sequence, director Brian De Palma and visual consultant Ferdinando Scarfiotti researched actual events and found that in 1980, newly arrived Marielitos were housed in a hastily constructed camp beneath a Miami freeway. For the movie, the camp was erected in Los Angeles, beneath the intersection of the Santa Monica and Harbour freeways. The final riot in Freedom town called for some linguistic agility, as many of the six hundred extras spoke Spanish; thus safety required careful translation prior to each set-up.

In the opening sequence with Tony Montana (Pacino) and the immigration officers, Charles Durning's voice has clearly been used to overdub an actor playing one of the officers. Another of the officers is dubbed by De Palma regular Dennis Franz.

The car that Tony bought and drove in the movie was a 1983 Porsche 928. It was the last year that this car was available in it's original form as shown in the movie with the totally clean body styling and the "telephone dial" alloy rims.

In the motel scene where some coke buyers are being tortured with a chainsaw, some girzzly shots of dismembered hands dangling from handcuffs had to be cut from the film to help obtain an R rating..

Wayne-o kindly wrote in to add: The film went through three reviews by the censorship board in order to avoid an X certificate. Director Brian DePalma felt that he couldn't cut any more from the film without it losing its impact and thus put in an appeal. The appeal was successful, and "Scarface" was given an R certificate, so DePalma felt that because all three "cuts" of his film were worthy of an X-rating, than it might as well be released in its original form. Therefore, no footage was left on the cutting room floor based on its graphic or confronting nature. (Source: "Making of Scarface" DVD featurette.)

Everyone seems to think that the rifle he uses at the end of the film (the shoot out where he says "Say hello to my little friend") is an M4 with an M203 grenade launcher but in actual fact it's an M16.

Michelle Pfeiffer accidently cut Al Pacino's face during production.

There's one shot near the end of the movie of a henchman tossing one of those spikes for scaling buildings onto the top of Tony's mansion. That shot wasn't directed by Brian DePalma. Believe it or not, that one shot was actually directed by STEVEN SPIELBERG, who was visiting the set at the time.

Apparently (I read this in a magizine article about this person) in the scene right after Manny gets slapped by the woman and Tony gives his 'First you need the money' speech, you can see a young 9 year old boy playing in the pool. That little kid is Brett Ratner, the Director of the Rush Hour movies.

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