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| Al Pacino Poster de T.A. |
Al Pacino
interview:
'Being an outsider
is part of being
an artist'
STEPHANIE RAFANELLI
16 MAY 2015 • 8:00AM
AT 75, AL PACINO IS ON
FIRE: FLIRTY, JOKEY AND WITH HIS LUST FOR LIFE, ACTING – AND
COFFEE – UNDIMMED
I’m meeting Al Pacino in the kind of cafe that you would expect to be Al
Pacino’s local: an old-school joint in New York’s Upper West Side with leather
banquettes and good coffee. I assume he will be hidden in an alcove. But there
he sits quietly waiting, elegantly dishevelled in his civilian uniform: black
suit, louchely arranged silk scarf, a full head of electrified bed hair. After
four decades of exponential 'legendary’ status, he simply owns the room by
doing nothing at all.
'I used to be fairly reclusive for many years. Now I come out much more.
I like the people,’ he explains. 'When I go to restaurants and they want to sit
me in a private room I say, “Hey, I can do that at home!”’
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| Al Pacino |
Pacino is fuelled by two things: his enduring volcanic fervour for
acting, and caffeine – he drinks in both as if they were his oxygen. There’s a
takeaway cappuccino on the table, a black Americano in a cup, and he’s getting
a refill. 'This is how I used to order when I was drinking in the 1970s. I’d
have a beer. Then a martini. Then a beer. And then a martini... The bartender
would look at me and say, “Who the hell are you?”’ He chuckles. (He has been
teetotal since 1977.)
These days, his downtime indulgence is the odd game of low-stakes poker
with his cronies, 'a way to get off’ his roles. His 'old buddy’ Jim turns up
with an envelope full of 'ones and fives’ for later and wants to take a picture
of Pacino in my hat. Much boyish larking about ensues. His iPhone rings twice.
Kathleen Turner pops over to the table. It seems everyone wants a piece of
Pacino. He apologises profusely, but I’m starting to worry that this could be
like holding the attention of a high-spirited toddler.
Yet Pacino
is already sharply tuned in. Sensing my angst, he fixes me with eyes like two
black olives, and spends the next few hours listening intently to my questions
– though he’s not a big fan of talking about himself in interviews. 'But it’s
fine. I’m just chatting to a girl. In a hat. That I met at a bar. Why not?’ he
roars, good-naturedly. 'Did that before!’
Pacino has a
way of making you forget, very quickly, that he’s 'Al Pacino’. True, he has the
kind of presence that makes all 5ft 7in of him seem almost overpowering; he is
charismatic – in life, as on screen, you can’t take your eyes off his face. Yet
he is low-key, easygoing and incongruously humble. Pacino still appears
genuinely bemused by the commotion he has caused since he became the poster boy,
along with Robert De Niro, of the golden age of US cinema in the 1970s.
In the space
of five years, he conquered a series of self-eviscerating outsider roles that
are still considered some of the greatest in film history: the inscrutable,
passive-aggressive Michael Corleone in The Godfather I and II; the dogged
idealist Frank Serpico; the wired gay bank robber turned media hero in Dog Day
Afternoon.
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| Al Pacino (left) played Michael Corleone opposite Marlon Brando in 'The Godfather' |
Out of step
with the power franchises of the next decade, he fell out of favour in the
1980s – though the operatic paroxysms of Scarface struck a popular chord. His
box-office weight was reinvigorated in the more nuanced films of the 1990s,
with Carlito’s Way, Heat and Donnie Brasco, but he has been periodically mauled
by critics in recent years, perhaps for not re-summoning the rawness of his
youth.
'But you
can’t go back.You have to move forwards.’ Great parts, he says, like great
loves, are very rare. 'Most of the time you’re just trying to survive. All the
work isn’t the same. Sometimes there’s only so much you can do in it. You
reconcile yourself to that. Only occasionally you find a role that really asks
you to go there.’
Still, he
has 'gone there’ more times than most. He has performed in about 100 films and
plays, has been nominated for eight Oscars – he won for The Scent of a Woman in
1993 – and has been awarded numerous Emmys and Golden Globes. He also has two
Tonys and was nominated in 2010 for his Shylock in The Merchant of Venice on
Broadway. He is not the kind of guy to 'sit back and smell the golf balls’.
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| Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon |
For Pacino
gives no sense that he has in some way 'arrived’ anywhere or, indeed, that he
is a master of anything – he is still 'striving’ for all of that, he says. He
is insatiably questioning, grappling for the right words to accurately express
what he feels more as instincts; conveying his meaning instead with a glance or
a pause. As the director Mike Nichols has said, 'Al is consulting somewhere
else.
And the
somewhere else doesn’t have to do with words.’ He prefers the certainty of a
text on which to project his emotions; it 'frees him up’, he says. 'It’s all
about the play for me,’ he declares with the zeal of a wide-eyed undergraduate.
It is remarkable that he is so unjaded. It was his 75th birthday only a few
days ago. His girlfriend, the actress Lucila Solá, 36, and his children,
14-year-old twins Olivia and Anton, threw him a party. 'It’s three-quarters of
a f***ing century! I have no understanding of it. It’s good when you’re not
thinking about a clock, don’t you think?’
But he has
been ruminating on the decline of old age of late, partly due to a decision to
accept only roles that are 'part of what I am going through; it’s got to be a
little autobiographical’, after a few films in the past four years taken on for
financial reasons. (He lost millions in 2010 when his business manager was
found to be embezzling his money.) His recent work heralds a potential
fifth-act renaissance where he is once again emotionally in tune with his
material.
He won an
Emmy for his role as Jack Kevorkian, the euthanasia activist, in You Don’t Know
Jack in 2010. And late last year he delivered a self-reflective performance in
the darkly comic The Humbling, about the sixtysomething actor Simon Axler, who,
having lived vicariously through his roles, finds that, when forced to abandon
the theatre, he has no real life left to speak of.
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| Pacino played Bobby in The Panic in Needle Park |
Pacino’s own
compulsion for the stage seems inextinguish-able – by his own acknowledgement
acting is the very life-giving force of his existence. 'It’s sort of like
breathing to me. It gave me life. It educated me, as little as I am educated.
It saved me.’
In his new
comedy, Danny Collins, he portrays a Rod Stewart-style geriatric rock star who
was heralded as a folk genius in youth. There are resonances for Pacino. 'As a
kid [Collins] was touted as the next Bob Dylan. He’s completely shaken by that.
He’s so sensitive, fragile.’ And he engaged with the older Collins as 'a
survivor’. The script doesn’t do Pacino justice, but he is still irresistible
as an aged musician, jadedly living on sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, who attempts
to connect with his only son, the product of a groupie tryst, after receiving a
lost letter from John Lennon, written to him in 1971. (The plot is loosely based
on the story of the British folk singer Steve Tilston.)
Collins is
less Pacino than a version of the man he could have been had he not stopped
drinking. Like the young Dylan, Pacino was a 'purist,’ a South Bronx street kid
turned ardent theatre actor who was entirely unprepared for the distorting lens
of fame that The Godfather brought him in 1972. 'I had a strange reaction to
it. The reaction wasn’t positive. I was catapulted out of a cannon. People are
more accepting of fame today because of all the media outlets. Young people
even aspire to it,’ he says with incredulity.
But Pacino
'felt bombarded by life’ and by people who approached him on the streets. 'I
became more aware of myself, constantly reminded that I had this name because
[strangers] kept calling me by it.’ Pacino says he has always been 'a loner’,
'very sensitive’ – he still is. 'Being an outsider is part of being an artist.
You try to conform. But some of us just can’t. I didn’t know what was expected
of me. I still don’t.’
The details of
this time are sketchy because he has simply 'forgotten the 1970s. It was wild.
Who knows what was going on! It was a bit of a blur.’ This is because he was
drinking, seeking 'an anodyne’ to fame and a respite from the exhaustion of
assuming his characters’ identities. 'That’s how I played things then. I had to
absorb the character. I never protected myself. Michael [Corleone] affected me
for quite a few years afterwards. I sort of kept that internal thing.’
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| Al Pacino as the stage actor Simon Axler in The Humbling |
It did not
help that his mentor and acting coach, Charlie Laughton, was also 'an absolute
drinker. We went all over the world in various states of inebriation.’ After
Laughton finally sought help for his own addiction, he intervened. 'He made me
see… that I was destroying myself,’ Pacino says. 'I like it here, where my
senses are. I don’t need to be “put out” any more.’ The steadiness of therapy,
which he still does several times a week, also helped to support him. 'I’d be
on seven times a week if I could,’ he says, chuckling.
It would be
easy for a psychologist to view Pacino’s life as defined by the abandonment of
his father at an early age – and a subsequent search for paternal substitutes.
Twenty-year-old Salvatore walked out on his 23-year-old wife Rose when Pacino
was two; mother and son moved to her Italian-American parents’ three-room flat
in a tenement block in the South Bronx.
Forty years
after The Godfather, the absent father-son dynamic still seems to be fertile
territory for Pacino. 'Danny Collins reminds me of [my father]. He was a great
singer and dancer; he felt that was his calling. He wound up as an insurance
salesman. He was married five times.’
'Sonny’
(Pacino’s nickname; he was christened Alfredo) was instead close to his
grandfather, a plasterer, and – above all – his mother. Her various jobs
included cinema usher; sometimes she took him to work with her. An only child,
he retreated into his imagination, re-enacting scenes from the cinema to 'fill
up the loneliness’. At five, he was doing some of Ray Milland’s most dissolute
alcoholic scenes from Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend.
It is clear
that Pacino felt deeply connected to his mother. 'They used to call her Ava,
because she looked like Ava Gardner,’ he tells me, showing me a picture on his
phone. 'She was very well read, sensitive and intuitive, but troubled.’ He
sighs. 'She suffered from depression on and off.’
Pacino’s
life changed when he began hanging out on the streets with a group of newfound
compadres. By the age of nine he was smoking and, at 13, was supplied with
booze by the local cop. His baseball team doubled as a quasi-street gang. 'They
were the best friends I ever made. A lot of them died very young with the
needle, heroin.’ (In his first film, The Panic in Needle Park, in 1971, Pacino
played a junkie, a role that he based on his lost friends.)
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| Al Pacino (middle) stars as a 1970s rocker in his new film Danny Collins |
He left
school at 16 and moved to the West Village, working odd jobs to save for drama
school, and joining the 'fervent’ cafe theatre scene. It was here, at 17, that
he met Laughton, who would become a crucial professional and emotional fulcrum
for Pacino, helping to shoulder the catastrophic blows of the deaths of his
mother, when he was 21, and of his grandfather the following year.
He
channelled his disorientation and grief into his performances at the Actors Studio,
which he joined at 23, under the tutelage of Lee Strasberg, who encouraged him
to mine the emotion of real-life experiences. The class was predominantly
'educated’ students. Pacino hints at lingering feelings of inadequacy at that
time. 'I knew I was this vagabond kid,’ he says.
His
freewheeling approach to acting and an abyss of emotional potential was
precisely what lent his performances their potency, enabling him, as a short,
working-class Italian-American, to break into Broadway theatre in 1969, and
then into film two years later. But he had to fight. He auditioned three times
for the role of Michael Corleone – Francis Ford Coppola alone wanted him.
Paramount wanted Robert Redford or Warren Beatty – until Marcia Lucas, the wife
of George, who edited the multiple screen tests, told them, 'Cast Pacino. He
undresses you with his eyes.’ Through them alone, Pacino would drip-feed us
glimpses of what lurked beneath Michael’s froideur. None of this Pacino can
explain. Acting, for him, is 'freeing the unconsciousness, allowing it to take
over. Mostly consciousness gets in the way.’
In 1973,
when playing Richard III on stage in Boston, he was so consumed one night that
he wept after the curtain closed. 'I was doing Richard, but it was all part of
what I was going through. I was drinking. I was alienated from the world that I
knew.’ He understood Richard, as an actor-king, who could be corrupted by
power, as he could be overwhelmed by fame. 'I was in this state. I was feeding
it into the role.’
Richard III
has remained one of Pacino’s obsessions, joined by Oscar Wilde of late. (He
directed the docudramas Looking for Richard, in 1996, and Wilde Salomé, in 2011
– both complex, torturous ventures, which he 'fiddled about with’ for years.)
Pacino’s pet projects have become creative outlets for his old purist self,
allowing him to go back to basics. His first was the self-funded Pinter-esque
film The Local Stigmatic in 1990. Just before this he had undergone a four-year
hiatus from the film industry after a run of box-office failures that
culminated with Revolution in 1985. 'I was blinded by the spotlight on my face.
I needed to turn it around so that I could see out again,’ he says.
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| Pacino with his girlfriend, the actress Lucila Polak |
In 1989
Diane Keaton, his then girlfriend, had lured him reluctantly back to film with
the script for Sea of Love, about a detective who becomes romantically involved
with his murder suspect. Their 20-year on-off affair, like most of his
relationships, was 'complicated’. In her 2014 memoir Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t
Pretty, she wrote, '… those eyes! I kept trying to figure out what I could do
to make them mine… For the next 20 years, I kept losing a man I never had.’
A lone wolf,
Pacino has never married any of his girlfriends, a long list of strong, smart,
generally unstarry women including Jan Tarrant, the acting coach with whom he
has a 26-year-old daughter, Julie, and the actress Beverly D’Angelo, the mother
of Olivia and Anton. He has been with Solá for the past seven years. Will he
ever marry?
'I don’t
know about marriage yet. But when you are in love, that’s the height of it. So,
I probably should have got married a couple of times [back then]. I wish I
would have.’
His mobile
rings. The twins are calling from the West Coast (they live between LA and New
York, where Pacino is still stalwartly based). He slips outside but, on his
return, proudly shows me their pictures on his phone. 'My kids are part of why
I’m still here. When you have children you attack roles differently. They
become the priority.’ He tells me his 'bunker’ at his home in Beverly Hills, a
Pacino-esque version of a garden shed where he goes to focus, has been taken
over by them. 'So now I’m pottering around the house trying to find new corners
to work in. They just bought me a rocking chair for the porch.’ He beams.
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| Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro |
It 'bothers’
him that he has to schedule time with the children during the next few months
because of work commitments – he has David Mamet’s China Doll opening on
Broadway in the autumn, and he is currently on a global tour with An Evening
with Al Pacino. His new movie, Manglehorn, in which he plays a small-town Texan
locksmith, comes out in August. And he is in talks over a script about
Napoleon’s final days. It sounds rather morbid. 'Hey,’ he laughs, 'where else
am I going to go?’
He’s late
now. But he wants me call him again tomorrow because he knows he doesn’t speak
in soundbites. He insists on paying the lunch bill – 'Tell the paper it’s on
Al.’ The next day, when I call, he’s navigating uptown traffic. 'I’m a New
Yorker. I drive like a cabbie,’ he cries. He is fired up after seeing a
production of Hamlet last night. 'It’s so wild that play. I’ve read it since I
was a boy, but I still can’t get over it. I could see it a 1,000 times a year.
The joy! And I’m not even in it.’
He’s just
being Pacino: a juggernaut of boyish enthusiasm. 'The theatre is the flashlight
for me. It’s done everything for me since I was three years old. I’m not in the
playpen now. But I’m still playing.’
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