10 Movies Actors Thought Would Suck (But Were Awesome)

The Godfather is such a towering, confident piece of work, and one held in such high esteem by basically everybody, that it's genuinely shocking to learn that even an actor with instincts as strong as Al Pacino had little faith in it.

Though Pacino knew the film had a lot of potential, the uneasy atmosphere on set combined with director Francis Ford Coppola's relative inexperience gave him major doubts. In a recent cast reunion, he said:

"It was a great script... [But] at the time we were so young and inexperienced. We didn't know what filmmaking was, really."

Pacino also added that he was further perturbed by hearing people "snickering on the other end" while filming scenes, which made him assume that shooting wasn't going well.

It all came to a head when he and Diane Keaton shot the film's opening wedding scene, and the pair then decided to get drunk for real once shooting was done and unpack their real feelings about the movie:

"We got so loaded after that wedding sequence. We were theater actors, and we were not used to film... The whole thing had sort of a surreal feel to it. So we got back and started drinking: 'Where do we go from here? We're done, it's over! This is the worst film ever made!'

As it turned out, The Godfather was quite the opposite of the worst film ever made, becoming a phenomenal box office hit, receiving 11 Oscar nominations and winning three, including Best Picture, as well as spawning two sequels.

Better yet, it's a perennial contender in debates about the greatest movie ever made - again, the literal polar opposite of what Pacino feared while making it.