March 20, 2005

Does the pessimism of the films reflect his world view? ‘Well,’ Pacino says. ‘In the end you’re just playing a role.’ He says he is just like a cellist or painter, but he is painting pictures or making music with his body

He’s the archetypal screen tough guy, womanizer, psycho — but Al Pacino hates guns, drinks only coffee and yearns for a girlfriend. I have been watching Al Pacino movies for days now. I’m getting to a stage where I can’t tell one from the other. In five movies on the trot he is shot — Dog Day Afternoon, Scarface, Serpico, Carlito’s Way, Insomnia. In two of them, he manages to die at the beginning and end. In Heat he doesn’t get killed, but he sees off De Niro. In The Insider, he wins again, but it’s a pyrrhic victory. He’s destroyed.

He didn’t act so much as inhabit his characters. He expressed himself in the tiniest gestures. He showed ambiguity with consummate economy, saying one thing with his voice and something completely different with his eyes.

In The Merchant of Venice he plays Shylock, yet another man emptied of hope and defeated by life. His Shylock could be another Carlito or Corleone: a monster, but possibly the most moral man in Shakespeare’s Venice; a man who keeps his word.

After quitting the movies in despair for four years in the late 1980s (after the epic flop,Revolution), Pacino has had an incredibly successful 90s and noughties. In the 1990s he won his first Oscar (after six nominations) for the soppy Scent of a Woman, and scored huge critical successes with Heat, The Insider and Donnie Brascoe. A UK TV poll last year named him the number one movie star of all time.

He schlumps into the room, almost as broad as he is wide, belly sagging, face weathered. He is dressed totally in black - jacket, sweatshirt, trousers, socks, shoes, ring, and squiggly pendant round his neck. Al Pacino looks like a gorgeous dosser. He flew into London from LA yesterday, and hasn’t caught up with his sleep. (Actually, he says he hasn’t slept decently since making Insomnia.)

The Merchant means a lot to him. Pacino loves his Shakespeare. Having directed the documentary Looking for Richard (a lovely, funny film that tries to make sense of Shakespeare and his stage version of Richard III), this is his first straight Shakespeare movie.

I ask him if he thinks of Shylock as a hero or a villain.‘I get all sluggish when I talk about it. Because I see good and bad in all of us, I can’t answer that question. I have to say a good-bad man.” He’ll probably read this quote one day and change his mind, and decide Shylock is a bad-good man. He says he often reads things he has said, and thinks he didn’t quite mean that. It’s not that the words have been distorted, it’s simply that he didn’t quite articulate what he meant.

As he struggles to make up his mind, I ask him about another character — useless bank robber Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon : hero or villain? He laughs. “You know I’m not going to answer in two seconds. He seems like a hero to me.”

Ok then, what about Scarface’s Tony Montana, recently voted Biggest Movie Badass of all time in Maxim magazine. Pacino grins. “You know I’m going to say hero. Anybody who says ‘go shove it’ when somebody’s got a chainsaw that’s about to take your head off — I think pretty much that is a hero in anybody’s language.”

I tell him how depressing I found it watching his movies en masse. He says I’m not the first person to have said that. “Does the pessimism of the films reflect his world view?”

“Well,” he says. “In the end you’re just playing a role.” He says he is just like a cellist or painter, but he is painting pictures or making music with his body.

The stories are legion of how he got lost in his roles — how when he was playing a lawyer and a friend told him he was having conveyancing problems, he asked to see his contract; how he fell with his eyes open, just as a blind man would, when playing Lt Col Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman; how he did shifts in a cafe, tossing pancakes, to prepare himself for Frankie and Johnny.

But what about when you were playing those psychos, I ask. Surely if you were method-acting a monster, you became a monster. No, you’ve got it wrong, he says quietly; they are not monsters.

“One doesn’t see it as a monster. You don’t look at it like that. It’s passion and emotions, and it’s in all of us.” You have to look for the human in all the characters you play, he says.

Did you become a nightmare to be around? “Well, I was affected by it.” He pauses. Actually, he says, what saved him when making Scarface was his girlfriend. “When I was doing Scarface, I remember being in love at that time. One of the few times in my life. I would come home and she would tell me about her life that day and all her problems and I remember saying to her, look, you really got me through this picture because I would shed everything when I came home.”

Does he like guns? “I’m not crazy about the guns, that’s not my thing.” Has he ever owned one? “Never! I’ve never cared for guns. In fact, when I did Scent of a Woman I had to learn how to assemble one.”

Is he as hard in real life as he is in movies? He looks at me as if I’m bonkers. “I couldn’t possibly be. “Having told me what isn’t him (guns and violence), he tells me what is him: theatre, Shakespeare and comedy. “Did you know I started out as a stand-up comic?” He performed in revues in New York’s Greenwich Village, doing physical comedy, and that’s what he really loved. “That’s how I saw myself, and I didn’t know I would do this with my life. If you look back to Dog Day Afternoon you can see the physical comedian in him. “That’s where humour lives for me. In the body. The Steve Martin kind of stuff or Jim Carrey, that’s what I like.”

In some more recent roles, such as Scent of a Woman and The Devil’s Advocate, he has hammed it up to great effect. His critics suggest that he’s also hammed it up in his serious roles. He looks a little hurt when I mention it. “You can’t call Shylock hammy,” he protests. No, I say, but there are certain films. “Yes, certain roles go too far,” he concedes. “But part of what you hope to do is not censor yourself, and then find a way to pull back, and sometimes you don’t censor yourself and you get caught off guard.”

He says it’s the director’s job to rein him in, and they don’t always bother. At his best, directors such as Sidney Lumet seem to ask him for less rather than more. “Sidney is a great director, one of the greatest I have known. And one thing Sidney does do is rehearse you. You have three weeks’ rehearsal, like you’re doing a play. And the more rehearsal I have, the more likely I am to find the right levels.”

At 64, he’s still known as a man who operates better at night than in the day. He has had numerous famous girlfriends, numerous unfamous girlfriends and he never married. He has a daughter of 15, and four-year-old twins with a different mother, Beverly D’Angelo, from whom he is separated. I ask him if he is seeing anybody at the moment. “I’m single and I don’t particularly like it. It’s good to have someone in your life that you’re going through this thing with. That’s a thing in life that I aspire to.” He comes to a stop. “You understand after a while why people stay together is because of children. I never knew that.” He sounds so innocent, so regretful.

Pacino says he finds everything so much easier these days — life, movies, being himself. In the early days, he almost lost his soul to his work. Yes, he says, he is still attracted to those complex baddie-goodies and goody-baddies, but he hasn’t got a clue why. “When I try to explain anything I always end up trying to be right usually, but not truthful necessarily. Trying to give the right answer or what I think is the right answer.”

Winter’s setting in, the afternoon’s getting dark and eerie. I ask him what he dreamed about last night. He looks surprised. “How did you know I had this strange dream? Well, that is for me to know, and you to find out. I’ll give you the number of my therapist.”

Have you really got one? “I knew you’d say that. Yes, it’s good to have someone to talk to, it’s helped me a great deal in my life. The problem with me is, I guess, the way I express myself, you have to be with me 50 years before you can get a sense of what I’m talking about.”

Has it taken him that long to understand himself? “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, it has.” —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.

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