“Oh God, you’re saving me.”

Al Pacino suffered an ankle injury on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and admits in his new memoir that he was relieved it might have gotten him fired. At the time, the studio was still wondering whether Pacino was the right man to play gangster Michael Corleone, and the actor felt enormous pressure to get it right.

In a new excerpt from the book – titled “Sonny Boy” – via The Guardian, Pacino writes that a rumor spread on set that he was being “let go.” “When I was working, there was unease among people, even among the crew. “I was very aware of that,” writes Pacino. “It was said that I would be fired, and probably the director too. Not that Francis couldn’t do it – I didn’t. But he was the one responsible for me being in the film.”

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One evening, Pacino said Coppola invited him to a restaurant and told him, “You can’t do it.” And after showing footage of the film at Coppola’s suggestion, Pacino agreed. “I don’t think there’s anything spectacular here,” he recalls. Luckily, a key scene – in which Michael takes revenge on Sollozzo and McCluskey at an Italian restaurant – was moved up in the filming schedule. It was time for Pacino to prove himself.

But everything went wrong when it came time for Pacino to film the stunt where Michael jumps onto a moving car. He didn’t have a stuntman, so it was up to him – and he missed.

“I had twisted my ankle so badly that I couldn’t move,” Pacino writes in the excerpt. “Everyone in the crew was crowded around me. They tried to pick me up and asked me: Was my ankle broken? Could I go? I didn’t know.”

Secretly, Pacino was relieved that his time on The Godfather might be over. “I lay there and thought: This is a miracle. Oh God, you’re saving me. I don’t have to take this picture anymore. I was shocked at the feeling of relief that came over me,” he writes. “Showing up to work every day, feeling unwanted, feeling like an inferior was a distressing experience and this injury could be my release from this prison. At least now they could fire me, recast another actor as Michael, and not lose every penny they had already put into the film.”

But of course that didn’t happen. Despite his injury, Pacino’s performance in the restaurant scene convinced the studio that he was their leading man.

“They kept me in the film because of the scene I just played. “So I wasn’t fired from The Godfather,” Pacino writes. “I had a plan, a direction that I really believed was the right path for this character. And I was sure Francis felt the same way.”

Pacino received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance and returned for the sequels The Godfather Part II and The Godfather Part III.

Pacino’s memoir “Sonny Boy” is out now.

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