"I DON'T SEE THAT AS THE METAPHOR... I THOUGHT IT WAS A SOCIO-POLITICAL STATEMENT"
In an interview with The Independent's Kaleem Aftab, Al Pacino discusses what Scarface is about, as he sees it. Here's the excerpt:The greatness of his performances mean that sometimes the roles that he has played have taken on lives of their own. This has never been as true as with Scarface, in which he played the Cuban immigrant turned drug baron Tony Montana. The character and the life he lived have become a go-to for criminals, and lauded by a plethora of gangsta-rappers. The rags-to-riches story has been used to glorify violence. Does Pacino feel that his film has impacted culture in a negative way?“Well I don’t know what to say about that, I don’t know.” But his moment without an opinion is short-lived.
“I look at Scarface and I don’t see that as the metaphor. I see what Brian De Palma was talking about when we made it. It was the crazy Eighties, the decade of avarice, greed and introducing that into the world; greed is good and the whole thing from Gecko in Wall Street. I thought it was a very socio-political statement, which is why rappers took to it. Hip-hop people were so buoyed up on Scarface. I know a lot of people who don’t deal drugs who are inspired by it. It’s about a kind of ingenuity, suddenly coming from the bottom and rising, which is why the original was so inspiring for me. There is something else too that seems to trigger off a certain thing, and that is this sense of his ideals as an outsider.”