Scarface has been so much more than a movie for so long. In the 1980s the sampled dialogue of Tony Montana became — as it remains — a staple among rappers of every style and sensibility. Meanwhile, memes and posters proliferate. As for the merchandise: one hardly knows where to start. Over on Amazon, I punch in “scarface merchandise” and this is what shows up on just the first page of results: T-shirts, fleece blankets, refrigerator magnets, framed collages, flip-top lighters, table lamps, wall clocks, pillow cases, keychains, drinking flasks, and computer-tablet skins.

Oh, and a resin “The World Is Yours” statue.

And a garden gnome.

Scarface has been so much more than a movie for so long, it’s easy to forget there was a time when people considered it so much less.

Some people got it at first; a lot of people didn’t. There were problems that surpassed those normally attending the filming of such brutal material. The Cuban community of Miami was so aggressive in its protestations, the filming had to be completed in Los Angeles. To avoid an X rating, the producers had to assemble a panel of experts — drug-enforcement officers, psychologists, film critics — attesting (respectively) to the veracity, safety, and artistic value of the material.

Cooperation came in unlikely forms. The U.S. attorney’s office in Miami knew what the film-ratings board didn’t — namely, that this was not a movie that celebrated cocaine trafficking. They opened up their files and shared their expertise, doing all they could to make sure the filmmakers were able to get everything right.

Oliver Stone, right, with Al Pacino on the set of ‘Scarface.’

This started with Oliver Stone, who’d been hired to write the screenplay. He engaged in a repertorial kind of research, hanging out with cops and crooks alike, to better understand a world he’d known primarily as a mere consumer. “I was doing cocaine a lot at the time…,” he remembered. “I started to hit the trail in ’79, and continued till ’82. I don’t think my writing benefited from cocaine, but I did write Scarface completely sober. The research was done stoned, but it allowed me an insight into cocaine.”

“The picture,” he added, “is about appetite, and I had that appetite, that madness.”

One thing Stone wanted to do when he came aboard is to make the so-called Drug War of the 1980s mirror Prohibition of the 1930s. That had been the subject of the original Scarface, the one directed in 1932 by Howard Hawks and written by Ben Hecht. The decision to remake that movie had been reached by producer Marty Bregman. Sidney Lumet, who’d worked on two films with Al Pacino, was originally chosen to direct, and it was he who came up with the idea of setting the piece in Miami amidst the Cuban culture of the Mariel boatlift. This means, of course, that his handprints are all over the thing, even though he became dissatisfied with the direction of the production and was replaced by Brian De Palma.

De Palma had just made a movie, Blow Out, that was not recognized for the masterpiece that it is, and he was confused as to what to do next. He couldn’t get funding for anything he wanted to do and even committed, briefly, to directing Flashdance. A couple weeks of that told him he should be doing something else. When Bregman approached him to take over Scarface, it was a natural fit; De Palma’s reasons for being attracted to the project went at least as deep as Stone’s. “I always look for the corrosive side of everything,” he told Esquire at the time.