7 Things We Just Learned About Al Pacino
Pacino, at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival
Al Pacino has long been regarded as one of American cinema’s great actors, but a recently published New Yorker profile by the magazine’s drama critic, John Lahr, reveals him to be quite the character off-screen as well. Lahr — who witnessed Pacino’s stage debut in the 1968 one-act drama The Indian Wants the Bronx — spent a few days hanging out with the now 74-year-old Godfather star in Los Angeles and came away with some remarkable experiences…and quotes. Here are seven things we learned about Pacino from Lahr’s article, “Caught in the Act,” from the September 15, 2014 issue of the New Yorker.
1. He Almost Lost the Role of a Lifetime. Pacino didn’t exactly give Francis Ford Coppola much help in the director’s crusade to get the actor into The Godfather. He flubbed his first screen test (thanks to a nasty hangover), and went through three subsequent rounds of tense auditions that put him so on edge, he repeatedly ducked the director’s phone calls. Pacino’s first week on the set was equally disastrous, as he underplayed everything to the point where people wondered when he was going to finally start acting. “They wanted me fired—they didn’t see what I was doing. Luckily for me, the Sollozzo scene [where Michael pulls his little bathroom trick to bump off his father’s would-be killers] was the next day. When they saw that scene, they kept me.”
2. Growing Up, He Was More of a Sonny Corleone Than a Michael. As a young boy, Alfredo Pacino went by “Sonny,” a nickname he shares, of course, with the Corleone clan’s eldest son. And young Al shared Sonny’s hot temper as well, drinking, smoking and heading up a kiddie-baseball team that, when they weren’t on the diamond, functioned as a street gang. He also had a real way with the ladies, as his neighbor — and future deputy mayor of New York — Ken Lipper recalls: “The girls in the neighborhood would say ‘Sonny Pacino, the lover bambino.’ The boys would say, ‘Sonny Pacino, the bastard bambino.’” So why didn’t he play Sonny onscreen? Because Coppola had envisioned him in the Michael role from the start, fighting for Pacino over higher-profile actors like Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Ryan O’Neal and James Caan. (Paramount wanted Caan badly enough to insist that he be cast as Sonny after Coppola muscled Pacino into the part of Don Vito’s youngest son.)
3. He Told Coppola: Apocalypse, No. After discovering and nurturing the young actor in the first two Godfather movies, director Francis Ford Coppola asked Pacino to travel upriver into the heart of darkness as the lead in his Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now. But Pacino sensed that rocky waters were ahead for what became a famously turbulent shoot. “You know, sometimes you look into the abyss? I’m, like, this is the abyss. I’m not gonna go there.” Among the other high-profile movies he turned down were Pretty Woman, Die Hard and the role of Han Solo in Star Wars, declining the role in the latter because, as he told MTV, “I remember not understanding it when I read it.”
4. Diane Keaton Dragged Him Out of Retirement. Hurt by a string of bombs and wearied by the Hollywood grind, Pacino took a sabbatical from acting in the mid-’80s, moving to upstate New York to live in bucolic splendor with then-girlfriend (and Godfather wife) Diane Keaton. But after four years out of the spotlight, Keaton handed Pacino the script for 1989’s Sea of Love and told him to get back to work, saying, “What do you think you’re doing? Do you think you’re gonna go back and live in a rooming house again? You’ve been rich too long, buddy. You can’t go back.” (Keaton expanded on their love affair in her second memoir, Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty, writing: “His face, his nose, and what about those eyes? I kept trying to figure out what I could do to make them mine. They never were…”)
5. He Does It His Way. While filming his climactic scene as Satan incarnate in Taylor Hackford’s supremely enjoyable guilty pleasure The Devil’s Advocate, Pacino suddenly started singing the Frank Sinatra tune “It Happened in Monterey” in lieu of speaking the scripted dialogue. Hackford liked the improvisation so much, he got the studio to pay (through the nose) to use Sinatra’s track in the finished film. Just think of how much more a Pacino-led rendition of “Flagpole Sitta” would have improved 88 Minutes.
6. He’s Concerned That He’s Becoming Al “Paycheck” Pacino. Pacino may be a Great Actor, but he’s also a working actor, which means he’s gotta take some jobs to pay the bills and keep the lights on, especially after he lost millions of dollars to an unscrupulous business manager. That’s how he explains away such work-for-hire gigs as Righteous Kill, 88 Minutes and Jack and Jill (pictured), suggesting that his grim performance in those movies wasn’t an act. “I worked for United Parcels once, and I don’t want to have that feeling with my own craft — that it’s just a job.” Well, watching Jack and Jill definitely qualifies as hard labor.
7. He’s Not Michael Douglas. In one of the profile’s funniest moments, Pacino is chowing down on some barbecue chicken at a birthday party when he’s approached by comedian (and immortalizer of the phrase “booty call”) Bill Bellamy, who praises his work in “that Liberace shit” — meaning the HBO movie, Behind the Candelabra. “That was Michael Douglas,” Pacino casually responds, while keeping his fingers free of BBQ sauce.
Photo credits: Everett Collection
