Interview: SCARFACE's Steven Bauer On the Fall And Rise Of a Cult Classic

When I spoke to actor Steven Bauer, he was in Miami at the time, in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene. Bauer actually grew up in Miami after his parents emigrated from Cuba in the 1960s during Castro's revolution. As our interview started and I offered my well-wishes to him and others in the region, he seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. "Oh man, well we certainly dodged a bullet and actually Manhattan dodged a bullet. I was really wary of what was happening there because my youngest son, Dylan, just finished drama school in the city." When the warnings about Irene hit, Bauer made Dylan head into New Jersey, only for Jersey and other more inland states to get hit with flooding and power outages. Bauer was philosophical about it, saying his son dodged a bullet, while others weren't so lucky. "I really feel for the people of Vermont, right now because they really got it hard."

But when it came to talking about Scarface, and the role that vaulted him to stardom--Cuban immigrant and narco lieutenant Manny Ribera, Bauer's mood changes immediately. I asked him when the last time was he saw the movie and he said it was actually pretty recently--a screening on AMC to be precise. He comes across the movie with surprising, but not unwelcome frequency. "Every month or so, somebody will have it playing it at their place--I'll go over to someone's house and they're watching Scarface for some reason or other."

He's able to enjoy the continued reputation that the movie has, but says that at the time of its original release 28 years ago, the overwhelmingly negative critical response seemed to doom the movie. It's actually the primary refrain from the many "making of" features on the recently-released Blu-ray: Scarface was a movie that no one wanted in its own time, an underdog like its hero, Tony Montana.

Even during the production of the movie, Bauer noted that although they didn't expect such a vitriolic critical reaction, he and the rest of the actors and crew knew they were onto something different with Scarface. "Back then, I felt fortunate to be part of something that was so out there... What came before that was Godfather and Taxi Driver... and so when we did [Scarface], we went way out on a limb." Bauer says that at the time, he knew he'd either be in a classic with a reputation for the ages or simply a classic failure. He explains that on set the production seemed simultaneously "awkward and clunky and weird" but that they "knew that it was beautiful because... we didn't walk away from one scene without feeling that it was done. It was perfect the way we finished it."

A combination of the violence (the movie had to contend with several cuts to get the movie bumped from an X to an R rating), the language, as well as negative reactions to Pacino's over-the-top performance seemed to relegate the film to the latter category. Bauer says that at the time, the audience response was "tremendous," but that American critics simply didn't "get" the movie. Even Pauline Kael--then a fan of the prior works of director Brian De Palma--called it a "sloppy piece of filmmaking" in her own review. Bauer said this split response to the film led to a sort of "schizophrenic reaction" on the part of the cast and crew. After getting the movie to a cut that everyone was satisfied with, "Bang, it comes out, the audience responds amazingly, our peers respond amazingly, and the next day in the press, in the national press, basically they said that the movie was a piece of shit."

Bauer laments that the movie took a beating from, in his estimation, about 95% of the critics. Even now, the actor takes many of the bombs lobbed at the movie personally, particularly those aimed at De Palma and Pacino. "So what did we do wrong," Bauer wonders. He offers that perhaps critics were simply unprepared for the movie in front of them, for the change in the cinematic zeitgeist, for the "weird monster" that was Tony Montana, and that ultimately it "lost all credibility with the press."

For Bauer, what he describes as the "warped world" of the movie wasn't too far off from what was going on in the streets of Miami, which at the time was suffering a plague of narcotrafficking-related violence. Nonetheless, there was still some outcry against the movie among Cuban American groups, reaching its peak with death threats being sent to the film's producers (ultimately, filming was moved from Miami to L.A.).

Perhaps most distressing for Bauer was that in spite of the overall critical drubbing the movie received, his performance as Manny was singled out as one of the more successful elements, earning him a Golden Globe nomination. "It was embarrassing, almost. Because I'm getting off scot free in reviews that are basically calling everybody in the film full of shit--saying this movie's full of shit and the filmmakers are full of shit and the actors are all over the top except for Steven Bauer." For Bauer, there was a certain solidarity in being reviled together instead of praised separately--"If you're going to kill us," he explains, "kill us all. If you're going to trash us, trash us all."

Listening to him, it seems like what really bothers Bauer the most is that his performance as Manny--more reserved and relaxed when contrasted against Pacino's live wire act--earned esteem at the time simply because it was in sharp contrast to the other roles in the movie. Bauer talks about walking into meetings for roles after Scarface and meeting executives who would praise his performance and then proceed to tear apart the rest of the film. "I really wanted to spit in their face[s], you know?" He says that what essentially amounted to backhanded compliments continued for years and it fed into this feeling that there was a gulf between audience and film industry responses to the movie.

It seems to strike Bauer as more good fortune than inevitability that the movie was finally gain a following when it was embraced by rap artists. In the last 20 years, the film has been sampled, referenced, elements from the story borrowed and stolen by performers who gravitated towards Oliver Stone's quotable script and Tony's arc from street level hustler to millionaire kingpin. Bauer's quite aware of--and thankful for--the rep that the movie has earned in the rap community, crediting the mutability of the story about "this little man who wants the world and everything in it," into ghetto dreams about "coming from the streets and wanting more."

Now, the movie makes the AFI list of classic films, and its reputation has more or less been redeemed. If one can trust such things as a barometer of a 28-year-old film's critical success, it currently has a score of 88% on Rotten Tomatoes among critics and 93% among readers. Of the resuscitation of the movie's reputation, Bauer says that's been both gratifying and humbling. Bauer credits this to either the critical community turning around or the previous generation that saw the film during its initial run simply dying off.

He also notes that in terms of its original reputation for being an extreme film, today Scarface could be considered tame when compared some of the subsequent films that have arrived in its wake, what Bauer describes as "graphic stuff that's imitation Scarface." But for Bauer, these films have actually paradoxically enhanced the reputation for Scarface, which was released in the same year that Terms of Endearment was the number one movie at the box office.

Arguably, one of the film's descendants is the multiple Emmy Award-winning AMC series Breaking Bad. In this past week's chilling meditation on controlling one's fate titled, "Hermanos" Bauer plays the role of drug kingpin Don Eladio. "Without Scarface, how could Breaking Bad exist," Bauer muses. He actually finds the show disturbing, but nonetheless enjoyed turning his father on to the misadventures in meth chemistry of teacher turned drug manufacturer, Walter White (Bryan Cranston). For Bauer, the appeal of the series is the many shades of gray in the morality which are cast over the characters--it's about good men doing bad things, bad men with morals, and the collateral damage in between.

Bauer's reaction to being in the show kind of sums up his reaction to the past three decades of his career: "I'm just fortunate to be involved, to be in it."

Scarface was released on Blu-ray this week. You can also catch Bauer in this week's episode of Breaking Bad, "Hermanos" and the September 18th episode, "Salud."