While his friendship with Francis Ford Coppola is legendary and his involvement in Apocalypse Now well known, what’s not so well known is the work George Lucas did on The Godfather, the 1972 Oscar-scooping epic that in its day was the highest grossing film of all time. Working as an assistant on the movie Lucas filmed insert shots, but that wasn’t his most insightful contribution as Time explains.
The friendship between Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas goes back decades, to when they were both relatively unknown filmmakers in Northern California. Coppola served as executive producer on THX 1138, Lucas’ first film, and the year after it was finished, Lucas worked as an assistant on The Godfather. Lucas shot the footage of newspaper inserts that show major events during the scenes where the families go to the mattresses as well as the one above, which reveals to Michael the shooting of his father.
But perhaps his biggest contribution to the film was a small suggestion he made to Coppola. After filming the scene in which Michael fends off would-be assassins while the don is in the hospital, Coppola realized he didn’t have extra shots to feature the sound of footsteps in the hallways. So Lucas suggested that he use the leftover shots of empty hallways just after the actors had left the frame. Lucas helped Coppola scour his original footage for those precious few seconds, which Coppola used in the film, greatly adding to the tension of an already white-knuckle scene.
