Al Pacino, in full Alfredo James Pacino (born April 25, 1940, New York, New York, U.S.), American actor best known for his intense, explosive acting style.
After growing up in East Harlem and the Bronx, Pacino moved at age 19 to Greenwich Village, where he studied acting at the Herbert Berghof Studio and appeared in many Off-Broadway and out-of-town productions, including Hello, Out There (1963) and Why Is a Crooked Letter (1966). He took further acting lessons from Lee Strasberg and played a small part in the film Me, Natalie in 1969. The same year, he made his Broadway debut and won a Tony Award for his performance in the play Does the Tiger Wear a Necktie? Pacino’s first leading role in a film came with The Panic in Needle Park (1971), a grim tale of heroin addiction that became something of a cult classic.
Director Francis Ford Coppola cast Pacino in the film that would make him a star, The Godfather(1972). The saga of a family of gangsters and their fight to maintain power in changing times, The Godfather was a wildly popular film that won the Academy Award for best picture and earned Pacino numerous accolades for his intense performance as Michael Corleone, a gangster’s son who reluctantly takes over the “family business.” Pacino solidified his standing as one of Hollywood’s most dynamic stars in his next few films. In Scarecrow (1973), he teamed with Gene Hackman in a bittersweet story about two transients, and his roles in Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975) displayed Pacino’s characteristic screen qualities of brooding seriousness and explosive rage. He also repeated the role of Michael Corleone for Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II (1974), a film that, like its predecessor, won the best picture Oscar.
Pacino’s next few films did not fare as well. Bobby Deerfield (1977) was notable as his first box-office failure since he had become a star. The dark comedy …And Justice for All (1979) featured some of Pacino’s most memorable scenes, but Cruising (1980) and the light comedy Author! Author! (1982) were critical and popular disasters.
In Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983), Pacino returned to the kind of combustible, high-intensity role that had made him famous. As gangster Tony Montana, Pacino gave a highly charged, unrestrained performance that, although loved by some and deplored by others, ranks among his most unforgettable. His next film, Revolution (1985), was an expensive flop, and Pacino did not appear in another film for four years.
Sea of Love (1989), his biggest hit in years, reestablished Pacino as a major film star. He reprised the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part III (1990), but it was his hilarious portrayal of grotesque gangster Big Boy Caprice in Dick Tracy (1990) that won him a supporting actor Oscar nomination. Frankie and Johnny (1991) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), both adaptations of plays, continued his string of well-received films, and he won a best actor Oscar for his portrayal of a bitter blind man in Scent of a Woman (1992). Pacino’s other notable films of the 1990s include Carlito’s Way (1993); Heat (1995), a crime drama in which he played a detective hunting a thief (Robert De Niro); Donnie Brasco (1997), in which he starred as a low-level mobster who unknowingly befriends an FBI agent (Johnny Depp); and Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday (1999). Also in 1999 Pacino appeared opposite Russell Crowe in The Insider; based on real-life events, it examines tobacco companies and their efforts to conceal the dangerous side effects of cigarettes.
Pacino’s prolific acting career continued into the 21st century. In 2002 he starred with Robin Williams in the thriller Insomnia, and he later appeared in Ocean’s Thirteen (2007), the final installment of a popular comedy trilogy that featured George Clooney and Brad Pitt. After skewering his public persona with a role as himself in the Adam Sandler comedy Jack and Jill (2011), Pacino played an aging gangster in Stand Up Guys (2012). He evinced the isolation of a small-town locksmith in Manglehorn(2014) and the late-life epiphany of a rock star in Danny Collins (2015).
In between his big-screen work, Pacino appeared in several television productions for HBO. For his role as homophobic lawyer Roy Cohn in Angels in America (2003), an adaptation of Tony Kushner’s two-part play about AIDS in the 1980s, he won an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award. His performance as Jack Kevorkian, a doctor who assisted in the suicide of terminally ill patients, in the movie You Don’t Know Jack (2010) earned him the same awards. He later starred as another controversial figure in David Mamet’s Phil Spector (2013), which was set during the embattled record producer’s first trial for murder.
Pacino frequently returned to the stage throughout his career, notably winning a Tony Award for his leading role in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1977). He also starred in such plays as Shakespeare’s Richard III (1973, 1979), Julius Caesar (1988), and The Merchant of Venice (2010); Mamet’s American Buffalo (1980, 1981, 1983) and Glengarry Glen Ross (2012); and Oscar Wilde’sSalomé (1992, 2003, 2006). In 1992 Pacino originated the role of Harry Levine, a washed-up writer who is depressed about his lack of success, in the Broadway drama Chinese Coffee; he later directed and starred in a 2000 film adaptation. He also directed the documentary films Looking for Richard (1996) and Wilde Salomé (2011), which offered behind-the-scenes looks at two of his stage productions.
He has become something of a critical punching bag of late, a thought that seemed impossible for most of his career. Not that that bothers the legendary actor—he’s still talking.
Al Pacino comes dressed in black and gray, wearing multiple bracelets and an unkempt tuft of hair poking up from his scalp. He speaks in soft whispers, even softer than the ones he uttered as Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’sGodfather Trilogy. This is not the boisterous version of Pacino, the one we saw as Tony Montana in Scarface or as Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman.
Pacino has arrived at the Toronto International Film Festival to promote his filmThe Humbling, which sees him reuniting with Barry Levinson, who he worked with on the critically acclaimed HBO movie, You Don’t Know Jack, about infamous euthanasia activist Jack Kevorkian. After they wrapped up production, Pacino approached the director with a novel by Philip Roth called The Humblingwith the intention of making it his next project. He wanted Levinson on board. “We were very much on the same page in a sense,” the seasoned filmmaker tells The Daily Beast. “I think the way we worked together it would be exciting to do something else. Al really wanted to do a thing about an actor and he’s one of the few movie stars who continue to work in theater over the years, and he can bring a lot to the table.”
The Humbling focuses on Simon Axler (Pacino), a veteran stage actor who loses the desire to act. Unlike Axler, Pacino says he has yet to lose his, though many critics would beg to differ. One glance at his Rotten Tomatoes score over the last decade shows how sharply the press has turned on him. Like his contemporary, Robert De Niro, Pacino has become something of a critical punching bag of late, a thought that seemed almost impossible for the majority of his career. Not that that bothers Pacino. He’s just doing what he wants to do—at least in the 20 minutes I spent with him, where he seemed happy yet driven.
Al Pacino attends the Guess Portrait Studio during 2014 Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, 2014 in Toronto, Canada. (Aaron Harris/WireImage)
Below is an edited version of our conversation, where Pacino discusses The Humbling, whether he’s worried about losing his desire to act, an upcoming project with Martin Scorsese (which, according to Pacino, is still in the works after multiple stop-and-start moments), portraying Joe Paterno in the upcoming filmHappy Valley, and his thoughts on the critical disdain he has faced over the years.
How’s your day going so far?
Well, I am talking.
[Laughs] Talking?
Yeah, that’s a good sign. I am coming from Venice [Film Festival], so I am a little bit out of the time loop.
Well it looked like you’ve been having a good time the past few months. I just saw a photo of you hanging out with Paul Pierce.
Oh yeah! I was doing something in Vegas and he was there. I was there doing a seminar.
A seminar on what?
On a, well, you don’t call it a seminar. I was sort of doing an interview.
Ah, yeah, when you said seminar I thought you attended some sort of corporate speech.
Yeah, like a podium or something. But I wasn’t doing that. I don’t know how it feels if I was standing at a podium doing something.
So you don’t do speeches?
No, I don’t do that. I prefer questions. I get questions, I can turn it into speeches. That’s what happens when you’re older, it takes you three or four paragraphs before you can get to any point.
I have been looking forward to losing the desire! I am trying not to do anything that doesn’t appeal to me. There’s stuff out there that still does. As Shakespeare says, the play’s the thing. And if you find that play, and assuming it’s good, it ignites you, it stimulates your imagination. You thinkI haven’t done that. Or,That’s territory I haven’t been in yet. I am at an age now that I can speak to this in some ways. You can get kind of turned on by it, and you say “Gee, I thought I wasn’t going to work for awhile but this is here.”In this film you play Simon Axler, an aging actor who loses his desire to act. Do you ever worry about losing yours?
The Humbling was different, because I read the book and I thought That’s an interesting idea. I can relate. I am an actor, this is a Philip Roth novel. There was something amusing to us about an actor who wants to move on with a new life. I think he feels like What did I miss out on? And there he is out in the world. It seems as though he goes into areas he wouldn’t go into because he’s certainly not used to it and keeps making these profound mistakes.
When you were at Venice promoting The Humbling, you said the best advice you ever got was from Lee Strasberg telling you to constantly “adjust,” or live for the present and avoid reflecting on past failures or glories.
Yeah, I am one of many who live by that! Live in the moment. Seize the day. Sometimes it’s not a bad idea to look at both of them [failures and glories]. I mean, all bets are off.
The reason I bring that up is, aside from the parallel to this film, when it comes to past glories, so many of your earlier projects—The Godfather, Serpico, Scarface—are completely entrenched in pop culture. I feel like it would be very hard to not reflect on them in some way. Do you agree?
Well the truth is, I still sort of don’t [talk about them]. I must say, I am very grateful that I was around, especially in the ’70s, which were kind of a renaissance. But man, I have no memory of the ’70s! You have to understand, I was in another world! I didn’t know what was going on. But I am glad it worked out. So when you meet somebody who met you once—because I meet a lot of people and they know you because you’re an actor—it’s nice to know that when you meet that someone they say, “You were nice to me.” It’s just interesting. I’ve always appreciated the journey. They say it’s not the destination but the journey. So it still means something to me to be able to have an opportunity to be involved with something that I feel I have something to say with. It’s a form of communication. I still love the stage. I like doing that, but I wish I could define how it’s changed, because it has changed.
Acting in general?
Acting in general. I just want to do things that I feel would be in some way part of what I am going through or have some sense of. What you really do as an actor is you try to find in the role something that you can relate to that you feel can ignite you and give you the appropriate energy to commit to it in that way. Some of the movies I did early on I had that in general. Now I would find that it would be hard to do something that I couldn’t say something with.
And the roles you’ve chosen in the last few years definitely reflect that. You played Phil Spector and Jack Kevorkian. You also have Joe Paterno coming up for Happy Valley…
Yeah, we’re working on that.
How’s that going?
It’s developing. I see [the story] as a major fall—it’s a fall of a person.
It’s Shakespearean, Paterno’s story.
It is! Did you see the documentary Happy Valley?
I did. It was very good.
Stunning movie. And I kept thinking, it’s not the story of Paterno—that’s part of it, but it’s about Happy Valley. And it’s about all of us. It’s the way it’s sort of depicted and the intensity and the thought and how it makes you think. You go feeling one way and you leave and you sort of don’t know what to do.
How’s it being back with Brian de Palma [who’s directing Happy Valley]?
I love Brian. You know that. I love that guy. There’s a few things I am working on now. I am doing a new play with David Mamet.
Are you still doing The Irishman?
The Irishman. Wow. Oh yeah, Steve Zaillian script.
Yeah, and Martin Scorsese directing.
Yeah, [Joe] Pesci, [Robert] De Niro, Bobby Cannavale.
You’ve never done anything with Scorsese, which is interesting because you would assume you would have at this point.
Isn’t that something?
Have you guys gotten close to doing anything together?
I don’t think I’ve gotten close to doing something with Marty. I know him. He’s such a great director. But I am sure there are other actors who Marty hasn’t worked with.
Of course. But you’re very much associated with that community of actors and filmmakers.
Yeah, I know. But at that period [in the 1970s] we were sort of split. Scorsese made movies with De Niro and I was making movies with [Sidney] Lumet. But I can’t think of a Scorsese movie that I would have been right for.
I assume it will be nice working with Robert De Niro again.
Oh, I love Bobby. I love him. Getting the opportunity to work with him, especially on something that is with one of the greatest directors ever.
Critics weren’t too kind to you and De Niro’s last project, Righteous Kill.
Well, that one was not [pauses]… You want to do something again that you feel good about.
Do you pay attention to critics at all? In the last decade, they have been pretty brutal about the films you’ve done.
Well, something happened, because it’s all about the Internet. How do you not pay attention and then how do you pay attention, is the question. Because you get a sense of things and you get a sense of where it’s going. That’s why you try to just keep going. I have always been aware [of the bad reviews]. It’s not wise to stick [with them]. Unless you can find good criticism, which is hard to do, because you get too subjective.
So, like, constructive criticism?
Yeah, I mean, I love that. I especially like it in live theater. If you know what you’re doing, it’s fulfilling something in yourself, then it doesn’t matter as much. It still matters. We’re all sensitive to it. It’s when you feel a little bit on the fence about what you’ve done and you’re concerned about it. It’s like Tennessee Williams said, “You can always depend on the kindness of strangers.” You can’t do that here [laughs]. You know what I mean?
I mentioned Scarface earlier. Have you heard about this remake Universal is doing?
I’ve heard of it!
What are your thoughts on that? They are kind of changing the story apparently. It’s going to be set in LA.
Well, if it’s inspired by the movie, I think that’s good.
I think it’s inspired by both. The original and yours.
That’s what we were doing. I saw the Scarface with Paul Muni on Sunset Boulevard at the… whatever the name of that theater is, the Tiffany. I said, “Oh I love this Paul Muni so much, I just want to make a movie and imitate him. That’s all I want to do.” And I called [my agent] and said “There is a movie here for us to do now.” It was 50 years old but it says so much. So we got De Palma, we got Oliver Stone to do the screenplay…
I think it’s fascinating the second life the film has taken on, especially in hip-hop.
Yeah, it still goes on. And the fact that it was so eviscerated when it first came out was a bit surprising, because we thought Brian deliberately tried to make it operatic. There was a whole thought in the 1980s, that Wall Street greed thing and this sense of avarice was in the air. And this movie sort of covered it, and it was Brian’s vision, which I went along with completely. I thought it was the way to go. And I think critics didn’t quite follow that. But audiences kept coming and stayed around. And they just kept coming and it had this resurgence. We always felt there was something there. But at the time, like all things, it wasn’t in fashion. The fashion was more in naturalism in films. Low-key stuff. There were so many wonderful movies being made during that. But this came out in a different fashion and it didn’t belong in the pantheon of things.
Do you see a lot of recent films now?
No, I don’t get out that much. I have young children. I did see this wonderful movie, Guardians of the Galaxy.
Ah, yes, I heard about this.
My kids were into it. And then I heard [my quote] was all over the Internet and everything about Marvel. But the truth is, I love the movie. I thought the movie was inventive and funny and interesting and dark sometimes. It was very, very impressive. But it somehow got out [that I wanted to be in a Marvel film]. And I am perpetuating it now, which is fine by me. But I don’t get out much. I always see what are considered the best films. And I try to see offbeat films. Sometimes these good films don’t get a life. Maybe they don’t have stars in it, or even if they have stars in it! I don’t think they get their proper viewing.
I believe films…you know, enough with this watching it on an iPhone! That’s what I love about festivals, you get to watch it on the big screen. I saw The Humblinglast night on the big screen. You see things on the big screen. You can’t pause it. Your experience is different. And that’s the way films were. I think we should have more of that kind of encouragement. When I get to a festival I am still like “I get to see my movie on the big screen!”
Al Pacino likes to make trouble for himself. “Everything’s going along just fine and I go and f--- it up,” he’s telling me. We’re sitting on the front porch of his longtime Beverly Hills home in the low-key section known as “the flats.” Nice house, not a mansion, but beautiful colonnades of towering palms lining the street.
You’d think Pacino would be at peace by now, on this perfect cloudless California day. But dressed head to toe in New York black, a stark contrast to the pale palette of the landscape, he speaks darkly of his troubling dilemma: How is he going to present to the public his strange two-film version of the wild Oscar Wilde play called Salome? Is he finally ready to risk releasing the newest versions of his six-year-long “passion project,” as the Hollywood cynics tend to call such risky business?
“I do it all the time,” he says of the way he makes trouble for himself. “There’s something about that discovery, taking that chance. You have to endure the other side of the risk.”
“The other side of the risk?”
“They said Dog Day [Afternoon] was a risk,” he recalls. “When I did it, it was like ‘What are you doing? You just did The Godfather. You’re going to play this gay bank robber who wants to pay for a sex change? This is so weird, Al.’ I said, ‘I know. But it’s good.’”
Most of the time the risk has turned out well, but he still experiences “the other side of the risk.” The recent baffling controversy over his behavior during the Broadway run of Glengarry Glen Ross, for instance, which he describes as “like a Civil War battlefield and things were going off, shrapnel... and I was going forward.” Bullets over Broadway!
It suggests that, despite all he’s achieved in four decades of stardom, Al Pacino (at 73) is still a little crazy after all these years. Charmingly crazy; comically crazy, able to laugh at his own obsessiveness; sometimes, crazy like a fox—at least to those who don’t share whatever mission he’s on.
***
Actually, maybe “troubled” is a better word. He likes to play troubled characters on the edge of crazy, or going over it. Brooding, troubled Michael Corleone; brooding troublemaker cop Frank Serpico; the troubled gay bank robber in Dog Day Afternoon; a crazy, operatic tragicomic gangster hero, Tony Montana, in Scarface, now a much-quoted figure in hip-hop culture. He’s done troubled genius Phil Spector, he’s done Dr. Kevorkian (“I loved Jack Kevorkian,” he says of “Dr. Death,” the pioneer of assisted suicide. “Loved him,” he repeats). And one of his best roles, one with much contemporary relevance, a troublemaking reporter dealing with a whistle-blower in The Insider.
It has earned him eight Academy Award nominations and one Oscar (Best Actor for the troubled blind colonel in Scent of a Woman). He’s got accolades and honors galore.
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The star of The Godfather and Scarface, who now supplements his income selling seats on his private jet and doing meet and greets, talks about marriage, ageing and death – and why, with his new film Manglehorn out in August, he has no intention of giving up acting
Al Pacino, whose new film, Manglehorn, comes out in the UK in August. Photograph: Dave J Hogan/Getty Images
In 2011, Al Pacino roasted himself. In the Adam Sandler comedy Jack & Jill, he falls for the twin sister of a Los Angeles advertising executive (Sandler), the buxom, boorish Bronxite Jill (also Sandler). Pacino plays himself as a sell-out and a creep, mocking the roles that made him famous by rapping for Dunkin’ Donuts coffee (“You want creamy goodness? I’m your friend. Say hello to my chocolate blend”), carelessly allowing his Oscar to be smashed while trying to impress Jill during an impromptu game of stickball. He is befuddled, paranoid, pretentious and hopeless. He’s confused by LA and adrift within his own celebrity.
Jack & Jill bombed, but Pacino’s performance is extraordinary: an icon’s twist on his image that shrugs at fans as it ravages his past. The film’s director, Dennis Dugan, says: “He was as dedicated playing Al Pacino in our movie as he would be if he were at the Globe playing Macbeth.”
Some would offer Jack & Jill as evidence that, at 75, Pacino, is surfing his reputation. But dig deeper and it feels as if this is a man still working out a way to carry on creating in a world that will for ever see him as Michael Corleone (The Godfather movies) or Tony Montana (Scarface). Two recent releases – Danny Collins and The Humbling – pigeonholed him as an ageing burnout: a hollow pop singer loved only for his early hits (Collins) and a knackered thesp whose mojo has abandoned him (The Humbling). His latest film – Manglehorn, directed by David Gordon Green, who’s flipped from lyrical dramas (George Washington) to stoner comedies (Your Highness) and back again (Joe) - is less direct in its analogy, but more interesting for it.
Pacino plays the title character, a locksmith still grieving for a relationship that soured years back. He lives alone in a rickety Austin pile where the lights blow out and trains shake pictures from the wall. His best friend is a cat, and a sick one at that; he’s at loggerheads with his son and he’s primed to sabotage a romance with a sweet-natured bank cashier (played by Holly Hunter). Yet there’s an adolescent innocence to Manglehorn, a self-destructive refusal to give up on past love. The film, which was written for Pacino after he and Green first met (“Soft spoken, gentle, sensitive, vulnerable,” were the director’s first impressions), is strange, ethereal and oddly lovely. A fog of remorse clears to reveal Pacino’s best performance in a decade.
“I’m in the middle of this new world,” says Pacino, sweeping an arm to map the imaginary landscape. “It’s interesting to find a way in it, and adjust. The movie world now is moving surprisingly fast. The stage is more rigorous. I prefer long, arduous, hopeless rehearsals.”
Pacino as Tony Montana in the 1983 film Scarface. Photograph: Allstar/Universal/Sportsphoto
In person, Pacino is by turns playful and mournful, not quite the wide-eyed buffoon of the talkshow circuit, nor the fiery grump of Wilde Salomé, the documentary he made about directing Oscar Wilde’s Salomé on Broadway. He has a shock of thick, dark hair that wafts every which-way when he talks. He wears many layers of black, and chunky silver rings. Two good-luck pendants dangle into an open shirt front. He looks like a goth Rod Stewart.
Pacino leans forward. His intense stare is weakened by his sunglasses. He apologises for wearing them indoors: “I have an allergy and it’s come out.”
What is he allergic to?
“Who knows? Interviews …?” There is a long pause. “Just kidding,” he says.
The sunglasses don’t last long. He takes them off in the midst of a complicated ramble, which, it turns out, is a bit of a speciality (“You have to be with me 50 years before you can get a sense of what I’m talking about,” he once said). He looks tired, but kindly. I was nervous about meeting him. I didn’t know which Pacino I was going to get. There’s a scene in Wilde Salomé where the actor gripes about the promotional material for the show’s run. “PACINO IS BACK!,” screams a poster’s banner headline. “Pacino is back?!,” he yells. “This is the problem with my whole life. What the hell does that mean?! How am I going to live up to that?”
The real guy – for the half hour I am with him, at least – is canny, patient, riled only once.
Let’s tentatively call Manglehorn a return to form. It is, at least, a refreshing break from a run of lumpy crime dramas (The Recruit, 88 Minutes, Righteous Kill) and awkward cameos (Gigli, Ocean’s Thirteen). It’s a low-key movie, shot on-the-fly, requiring Pacino to leave New York and decamp to Austin. Which, he says, is tough: “I like sleeping in my own bed. I like to be near my kids” [14-year old twins Anton and Olivia (he shares custody with Beverly D’Angelou) and another daughter, 25-year-old Julie]. He’s paternal, in a distant way. I mention to him that I’m going to be a dad soon. “Oh my! You got a wife you like? That’s good. That’s a start. It does change you in a way that’s unexpected. If you like that sort of thing … it’s a great thing.”
Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, 1974. Photograph: Cinetext/Allstar Colle
You hire Pacino, you get his reputation. Manglehorn is not immune to the actor’s influence. The furniture of the bank set mimics that in Dog Day Afternoon (in which he played a luckless thief caught stealing to pay for his transsexual lover’s sex-reassignment surgery). “The world is yours,” Manglehorn tells a security guard as he slumps out to face another day. The film is intended as “an insider’s love letter to people who know his career”, says Green, and such homage also emphasises the difficulty in shelving those roles that came to define cinema culture and Pacino himself: Michael Corleone in The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Sonny in Dog Day Afternoon, Frank Serpico, Scarface’s Tony Montana and Frank Keller in Sea of Love.
I ask Pacino if we should read anything into his recent film choices. Does he ever feel, like the actor in The Humbling, that his talent has deserted him? After all, he has been doing this for so long now and …
“OK.”
“I didn’t mean that as an insult.”
“I’m not insulted. I’m sitting here with you. How long is long? Four hundred years? Five hundred years? I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say long. What are you supposed to do? Quit?”
“Would you?”
“I have no desire to quit. Sorry. Why? Why didn’t I quit 20 years ago, 40 years ago? What’s the point of quitting?”
There is a pause as he decides which way to take it, then decides to be magnanimous.
“Listen, I’m trying to tell you something. I had a friend who died of cancer at 35. Thirty-five is young. I was sitting with him a good deal of the time and at one point he said to me: ‘I want to tell you something I’ve learned: three months, 30 years.’ No difference. That was the insight that he got when he was close to death. And I understand that.”
Pacino’s voice is gentler than you would expect, even exasperated. It doesn’t rocket up in volume as the impressionists suggest. We are sitting in a glass dining room in a hotel canteen in Toronto. The familiar Bronx growl bounces gently around the room, just loud enough to attract the attention of a passing waiter, who flits back and forth, peeping at Pacino.
“A painter can be 100 and paint a group of college kids playing football,” Pacino says. “It doesn’t matter, because he’s not playing football. He just grabs a brush and does the strokes. That’s the difference [with age]. That’s really all it is.”
It’s unfair to expect the actor to remain as distinctive as he was 40 years back, says Karina Longworth, author of Al Pacino: Anatomy of an Actor. “People think they have an idea of Al Pacino based on performances in movies like Scarface, but most people forget the moments of grace that make those performances interesting,” she says. “His career encompasses so much more than the six or seven films that are associated with catchphrases, but the sheer repeatability of something like ‘Hoo-ah!’ allows those performances to overshadow everything else.”
Still, it’s an odd time to be a Pacino fan. He has remained a method actor, even if he dispensed a while ago with the actorly intensity. In public, he is garrulous and a little eccentric, rich pickings for the fans who delight in seeing that outrageousness up close. In the past few years, he has topped up his crust by flogging seats on his private jet, passes to backstage meet and greets and tickets to the world tour of an onstage Q&A series called An Evening with Pacino that paved the way for other stars – Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Travolta – to follow suit. He is a veteran artist forced into a modern celebrity – something he distills brilliantly in Wilde Salomé. One minute he’s raging at the producers for putting pressure on his rehearsal time (“Fuck them”), the next he is gamely pretending to machine-gun a fan who is doing a Scarface impression.
“When you’re Al Pacino people want you to be larger than life,” says Green. “But he’s never going to be everybody for everybody. He told me he admires The Rock because The Rock knows how to switch it on for his fans.”
Still, it’s an odd time to be a Pacino fan. He has remained a method actor, even if he dispensed a while ago with the actorly intensity. In public, he is garrulous and a little eccentric, rich pickings for the fans who delight in seeing that outrageousness up close. In the past few years, he has topped up his crust by flogging seats on his private jet, passes to backstage meet and greets and tickets to the world tour of an onstage Q&A series called An Evening with Pacino that paved the way for other stars – Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Travolta – to follow suit. He is a veteran artist forced into a modern celebrity – something he distills brilliantly in Wilde Salomé. One minute he’s raging at the producers for putting pressure on his rehearsal time (“Fuck them”), the next he is gamely pretending to machine-gun a fan who is doing a Scarface impression.
“When you’re Al Pacino people want you to be larger than life,” says Green. “But he’s never going to be everybody for everybody. He told me he admires The Rock because The Rock knows how to switch it on for his fans.”
Pacino says his attitude to working now is inspired by a mantra that method acting guru Lee Strasberg drilled into him when Pacino’s profile exploded in the 70s: “Darling, you simply have to adjust.”
How far might he flex? There has been speculation that he would appear in a Marvel film. It was spurred by news of a meeting with studio head Kevin Feige, after Pacino said he enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy. Mark Millar, who wrote the comic on which the next Marvel blockuster will be based, approves.
“We actually talked about Pacino for the first Kick-Ass film,” Millar says. “I remember sitting in the pub with Matthew [Vaughn], running through who could play the crime boss Hit-Girl takes down. The first three names were: Pacino, De Niro and Jack Nicholson. Then we realised how physical the part was going to be and decided to go a generation younger. But can you imagine how mental that would have been? Scarface getting kicked to death by a 10-year old girl and then blown up with a rocket-launcher?”
Michael Radford, who directed Pacino as Shylock in the 2004 film of The Merchant of Venice, is gathering finance for a Napoleon biopic, starring Pacino (he’s an inch taller than Boney, and 25 years older than the general was when he died). “Al is not somebody who interests the younger generation unless they’re film fanatics,” Radford says. “My kids and their friends? He doesn’t appear on their radar. Michael Fassbender and Tom Hardy do. At the same time, he’s a star for three-quarters of the world. Scarface has … become a kind of totem for all immigrant populations everywhere.”
Radford caught one of Pacino’s Q&A sessions. It wasn’t the onstage banter that stuck with him. “He tells the Al Pacino story,” he says. “It’s very entertaining, but it’s preceded by a montage of all his roles that shows how staggering he is.”
I see the Pacino roadshow in full effect a couple of weeks after we meet. He is being presented with a BFI Fellowship at a black-tie bash. A ragbag of talent – Joan Collins, Richard E Grant, Tom Hooper – clog the reception room. Pacino ambles in and acts delighted. Works the room, plays the part. But it is, despite the glamour, sentimental in a way that Pacino isn’t.
I ask him about death in our interview. He is very matter of fact about it. “You don’t think about it yet, but it will come to you,” he says. “It’s a tunnel, see? And when you’re about 36, for the first time in your life, you look and way down in the distance there’s this tiny, tiny light and you say: ‘Oh! I didn’t know what was there!’ It’s an awareness that comes to us.”
At the reception, the montage of clips from his classic films (mostly pre-1980, no Jack & Jill here) is played before dinner. It’s the same kind of showreel you’d see any given year at any honorary ceremony, but Radford’s right: something clicks.
The young Pacino collects the gun, smooths his hair and walks back to the table tofinish dinner with Sollozzo. He pleads for the captain to air the department’s dirty laundry. He tells that flunky pig to get back. The dining room goes quiet. The genius cuts through the glitz. “He wants to kill me so bad he can taste it!” screams the onscreen Pacino. “Attica! Attica! Attica!” For a brief moment, the art is alive again.
![Dog Day Afternoon [Credit: © 1975 Warner Brothers, Inc. with Artists Entertainment Complex]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sWmLvl2tHJWA0_PewoGk16nY87HepKVH5783YNB79HbC59-37-Mh0IQFWE6-LsVfjJSKO95A272V6RVc4Eddu7ULPcsqv-DklEwUunXuF_cRji4gholLPl6xmbI4nh5iHNycce01W_Pg=s0-d)
Director Francis Ford Coppola cast Pacino in the film that would make him a star, The Godfather(1972). The saga of a family of gangsters and their fight to maintain power in changing times, The Godfather was a wildly popular film that won the Academy Award for best picture and earned Pacino numerous accolades for his intense performance as Michael Corleone, a gangster’s son who reluctantly takes over the “family business.” Pacino solidified his standing as one of Hollywood’s most dynamic stars in his next few films. In Scarecrow (1973), he teamed with Gene Hackman in a bittersweet story about two transients, and his roles in Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975) displayed Pacino’s characteristic screen qualities of brooding seriousness and explosive rage. He also repeated the role of Michael Corleone for Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II (1974), a film that, like its predecessor, won the best picture Oscar.![Scarface [Credit: © 1983 Universal Pictures]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uiCi7zIbyp6PfHMimFn7VpombYpOdxpAwqdfITnDSHyq8adiBuFfr8U0lOcqRKELLoiY133884bQeN9JUjRyBQl-V4cz_lFondWdQ1GtxDxYWER3HHqUMbe8vvTinJVIhf11__A4z05g=s0-d)
In Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983), Pacino returned to the kind of combustible, high-intensity role that had made him famous. As gangster Tony Montana, Pacino gave a highly charged, unrestrained performance that, although loved by some and deplored by others, ranks among his most unforgettable. His next film, Revolution (1985), was an expensive flop, and Pacino did not appear in another film for four years.![Al Pacino and Gabrielle Anwar in Scent of a Woman [Credit: Universal Pictures Inc.]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tSVRL9ZcMXjqwSVxctIrAPaLz-vSN__4pZuFoJix7Kp9P8DNFPDubNDb2AJbhaVFggfFNyatAIv0Rsv8VfDlVlUQYyP2NnJKZ-CXVCriwNgdqR-Ya7C1r5ryQacl1MZNHfO2r0cbU=s0-d)
Sea of Love (1989), his biggest hit in years, reestablished Pacino as a major film star. He reprised the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part III (1990), but it was his hilarious portrayal of grotesque gangster Big Boy Caprice in Dick Tracy (1990) that won him a supporting actor Oscar nomination. Frankie and Johnny (1991) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), both adaptations of plays, continued his string of well-received films, and he won a best actor Oscar for his portrayal of a bitter blind man in Scent of a Woman (1992). Pacino’s other notable films of the 1990s include Carlito’s Way (1993); Heat (1995), a crime drama in which he played a detective hunting a thief (Robert De Niro); Donnie Brasco (1997), in which he starred as a low-level mobster who unknowingly befriends an FBI agent (Johnny Depp); and Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday (1999). Also in 1999 Pacino appeared opposite Russell Crowe in The Insider; based on real-life events, it examines tobacco companies and their efforts to conceal the dangerous side effects of cigarettes.
