[on why he was not in
El padrino parte II (1974)] I saw Clemenza as a teacher. He teaches how to make spaghetti, how to use the gun. [Coppola] can't tell me that Clemenza, after years of loyalty to the old man, would go in and testify against organized crime. Not unless you proved to me... that he had become a fearful man, that he had become a betrayer. The demands on me were impossible. I had settled on a price and everybody else's was settled upon mine. [Coppola] had me losing weight to play Clemenza as a young man. I was down to 194 pounds. When I received the script five minutes later, it had me rolling in at 300 pounds... The next thing, I saw Coppola quoted as saying that I asked for more money than anyone else, that I asked to rewrite the script. Once the lie gets out, the lie is told, and it takes.
