Jason Schwartzman NEVER Saw 'The Godfather' Until He Was 17?!

Jason Schwartzman grew up inside one of Hollywood's most storied family trees, and somehow that meant The Godfather was not part of the furniture. Asked on the show whether it was true he did not watch the film until he was 17, Schwartzman confirmed it without hesitation. "Yeah, that's definitely true," he said. "It wasn't like we were, I mean, she wasn't watching it at the house then."

The "she" is his mother, Talia Shire, who also played Adrian in Rocky. Schwartzman's uncle is Francis Ford Coppola. And yet, by his telling, the family's cinematic legacy "wasn't a big part of my life."

The most charming piece of the story involves how slowly Schwartzman pieced together what his mother actually did. He did not really know until he was around 11. Walking around Los Angeles in the 1980s, strangers would call out to her. "People would say, Yo, Adrian, to her," he recalled, "and she'd say, I don't know what you're talking about." Schwartzman would press her on it, telling her people kept calling her this person, and she would deflect, too shy to come clean.

His own introduction to the Rocky films came out of order. He figures the first one he saw was Rocky IV, or maybe the third, anchored by a vivid memory of the beach scene. "Why are they yelling at each other on the beach?" he remembered thinking. Whatever the entry point, he was hooked, and he confessed an early allegiance: "I was a big Apollo Creed fan."

Then came the story he said he had never told before. Schwartzman did not grow up on film sets, but the one time he got to visit one was for Rocky IV, during one of the big fight scenes shot in a hotel. There, he met Dolph Lundgren. His mother introduced him, and Lundgren responded by placing a hand on the young boy's head. "He had my whole head in his hand," Schwartzman said, marveling at how small he felt. "Wow, I'm this little?"

Asked, with a grin, whether Lundgren warned that he might break him, Schwartzman played along. "He couldn't have," he said. "At that age, you're too loose. You can't break me."