Pacino nearly fired from ‘The Godfather’; the rest is history
BEVERLY HILLS, California: On this, almost everyone was agreed: Al Pacino was looking like a disaster as Michael Corleone.
Shooting had begun in early 1971. Pacino recalls the Paramount suits looking at the rushes and saying: “What the hell is this kid doing? And he’s short to boot.” They thought he was delivering an “anemic” performance. The studio brass, Pacino says, “tried to fire me three times.”
There “was a movement not to have me in the part,” the 76-yearold actor recalls, sitting on the porch of his rental house in the flats of Beverly Hills. “I didn’t want me in the part.”
Paramount had wanted Ryan O’Neal or Robert Redford to play Michael in “The Godfather,” America’s great epic about violence and family. Pacino himself thought that he would be better as the hotheaded older brother, instead of in the role that secured his stardom. “Michael? Sonny would be more appropriate,” he remembers thinking.
But ultimately, he knew what he was doing. “I was trying to create a character who you don’t know where you’re at with him,” he says. “I knew it was a tough part to pull off. Michael’s so insular, so private.”
Writer and director Francis Ford Coppola believed. He had always envisioned Pacino, already an acclaimed New York stage actor, as Michael.
“His intelligence is what I noted first. He knows how to use his gifts,” says Coppola. “He uses what he has, this striking magnetic quality, this smouldering ambiance.”
Penchant for risk
Then came the Sollozzo scene. Michael, teeth clenched, eyes darting, grabs the gun hidden in the restaurant bathroom and shoots Corleone rival Sollozzo and corrupt New York police captain McCluskey. It’s the lawabiding son’s first mob hit, and it seals his fate as his father’s replacement.
The scene sealed the actor’s fate, too. Pacino, who will receive a Kennedy Centre Honour on Dec 4, stayed in the picture. Audiences saw what he was doing, having Michael’s character build with the story. Pacino, the New York Times noted, is “an actor worthy to have Brando as his father.”
Pacino is sipping tea, surrounded by hounds, in front of his white- columned house in this fabled, palm-lined enclave. He’s at ease, but he doesn’t fit, an inveterate New Yorker in a far too sunny place.
Buses loiter on his block every few minutes, tourists trying to steal a glimpse beyond the gates of the man whom film historian David Thomson in 2002 deemed “our greatest actor now.” Pacino is the winner of an Oscar (eight nominations), two Tonys, two Emmys, four Golden Globes (17 nominations) and a National Medal of Arts.
In person, he does not disappoint. He seduces. Call me Al. Here’s my cell number. A kiss on each cheek. Everything, except his physical stature, is outsize.
His skin is tanned the colour of cognac; the hair a tempest. His voice, a Bronx rasp, shades the world in italics. Where Robert De Niro recedes in public appearances, all nods and mumbles, Pacino offers a banquet of observations.
“Talk is therapy,” he says, opening his arms. “Everything’s therapy. I’ve been in therapy my whole life.”
Among Pacino’s ancillary talents is making fine Italian suiting — he’s wearing a tuxedo jacket for day — look like thriftstore rejects. It’s Salvation Gabbana. The get-up — baggy black T-shirt, baggy black pants, oversized silver and black ring — is impossible. And it all works.
“He never looks like a movie star,” says Ellen Burstyn, his copresident at the Actors Studio. “He always looks like he slept on someone’s couch.”
Pacino has been a star for 44 years, yet he still displays a penchant for risk and for working with young talent. Famous for saying no in the beginning of his career, “the last 20 years, I say yes more. I don’t know why,” he says. He’s filming “Hangman” with Johnny Martin, an unknown director.
He’s also that rare actor who is not just admired but loved by his peers. “I can’t think of any actor whom people care more about in films than Al,” says friend Alec Baldwin, who has appeared in two of his movies. “There are actors who are admired, but Al they embrace.”
In the span of a dozen years, beginning with 1971’s “The Panic in Needle Park,” he created a cinematic canon that few can best: the first two “Godfathers,” “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon” ( he initially turned down the great Sydney Lumet; “What can I say? I was ignorant”) and “Scarface,” eviscerated by critics at the time but ultimately placed atop pop culture’s altar.
He keeps doing theatre, his first love, including a 2010 New York performance of Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” that critics deemed revelatory. He has performed “Richard III” many times, including in “Looking for Richard,” a 1996 exploration of the work that he directed and financed. But, “Hamlet” is “my favourite play of Shakespeare,” he confesses. “I never thought of doing it. I didn’t feel right about it.”
Pacino has done exceptional television work: He played closeted New York superlawyer Roy Cohn, dying of AIDs, in “Angels in America;” pathologist and assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian in “You Don’t Know Jack”; the legendary record producer in “Phil Spector.” He has also made dreck — perhaps the nadir was “Al Pacino” in Adam Sandler’s “Jack and Jill” — which he prefers not to talk about. And then he does. “My accountant was put in jail,” he says. “That was part of the genesis.”
Pacino was one of many celebrities who invested their savings with financial adviser Kenneth I. Starr, who pleaded guilty in 2010 to stealing at least US$ 59 million from his clients. Known for his loyalty, Pacino shrugged it off, friends say, and went on.
Work keeps him sane. “He loves the whole aspect of making movies, and he’s sort of fearless,” says filmmaker Barry Levinson, who co-wrote the 1979 courtroom drama “... and justice for all” and directed Pacino in “You Don’t Know Jack” and “The Humbling,” a 2014 movie made for less than US$ 2 million. “He’s easy to work with. It’s fun. He’ll just say, ‘Let’s try this.’ You keep playing with it, keep trying and seeing what else is there.”
Pacino grew up in an era that was more Vito than Michael. An only child, he lived with his fragile mother, who was prone to depression and became addicted to barbiturates, and his Italian immigrant grandparents — his grandfather was from Corleone, Sicily — in a three-room, fifthfloor tenement apartment in the South Bronx. His given name is Alfredo, but he was nicknamed Sonny — the name of his character in “Dog Day Afternoon.”
He recalls that a junior-high teacher, Blanche Rothstein, came to the apartment and told his family, “You have to encourage your boy to act.”
“I wasn’t very good at school,” he says. “I wasn’t focused on my classes. My mother had problems, and there was no money coming in.”
After 10th grade, he quit Manhattan’s High School for the Performing Arts. He worked at various jobs, including as a Standard Oil office messenger with John Cazale, who would play his weak brother, Fredo, in “The Godfather.”
His mother died when he was 21, and his grandfather a year and a half after that. The Actors Studio rejected him, only to accept him four years later. The studio’s famed Lee Strasberg later became his mentor and friend (and played gangster Hyman Roth, whom Michael ordered killed in the second “Godfather”).
When Pacino finally landed theatre work, the reviews were rhapsodic. In 1968, the New York Times called him “the best young actor in town.”
He can become so preoccupied with acting that almost everything else falls by the wayside. There are stories of him misplacing cars, losing a new coat because, when he tried to go back to the store to pick it up, he’d forgotten where he’d bought it and had lost the receipt.
Offered almost everything
“Rehearsing is my favourite thing. It’s the closest you come to feeling like you’ve got something going,” he says. “And then the product comes out and,” he stops, sighs, “you didn’t” meet your expectations. The beauty of rehearsal is “that you imagined how the role would be.”
His only other driving passion is his children: Julie, a 27-year- old filmmaker, and 15-year- old twins Anton and Olivia; he shares joint custody of the latter with their mother, actress Beverly D’Angelo. Hence the move to Los Angeles, a place where he never planned to live.
Pacino has famously never married. ( His father, who left the family when Al was two, wed five times.)
“Sometimes I think I would have preferred that I did get married,” he muses. “One reason is I would have found out so much more than I think that I know.” He declines to discuss his current relationship, with Argentine actress Lucila Sola, 37.
He also resists making political statements of any kind, an anomaly in Hollywood.
“Scarface,” the 1983 movie that the actor calls an “operatic, Brechtian sort of treatise on greed and avarice,” written by Oliver Stone and directed by Brian De Palma, branded Pacino, in the lead role of Tony Montana, as a double-barrelled actor of seething intensity. It’s a fullthrottle performance, soaked in blood and powdered in cocaine, that’s not for everyone.
But the generalisation that Pacino is prone to histrionics misses his ability to delve deep into characters who are nothing like Montana. He has played plenty of cops and crooks — he’s playing a detective in “Hangman” — but he can exquisitely underplay a part, as in “Donnie Brasco,” where he portrays a fearful two-bit mob soldier who would register as lint to Michael Corleone.
Audiences pay a premium to watch Pacino become violent on the screen. After he became a star, he commanded US$ 14 million a picture. These days, “he gets five million” a movie, his manager told the New Yorker in 2014. “With a gun — seven million.”
Violent behaviour is actually anathema to him. “I know it’s going to seem odd,” Pacino says, “but every time I go to do a movie and there’s a gun, I have to ask them to show me how to use it. And they’re like, ‘ He’s putting me on.’ But I have an aversion to guns.”
After “The Godfather,” Pacino was offered almost everything, including roles that won other actors awards: “Days of Heaven,” “Taxi Driver,” “Star Wars,” “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Die Hard” and “Pretty Woman.” He told the Independent last year, “There is a museum of mistakes, all the movies I rejected.”
Celebrity and drinking — he’s been sober since 1977 — wore him down.
“It was a ride, hard to compute. I wasn’t really helping it along. I was having the whole thing of fame,” he says.
After “Revolution,” a fiasco in which he played an 18th- century fur trader and reluctant soldier that someone should have stopped him from doing, Pacino took a four-year break from movies, beginning in 1985.
“I was walking all over the city, seeing friends in Central Park. Having these little coffee klatches. It’s New York City, man, and I’m very happy there,” he says. “It was sort of enriching in a way. I felt more like myself, and I was living with Diane. It was wonderful.”
One day, walking in the park, “this guy is passing me, he says: ‘Al, what the hell happened to you? You don’t make movies. You got to make movies, man, c’mon.’ I never saw anything like it.”
He needed money and, as it turns out, to work. “Sea of Love,” a 1989 romantic thriller in which he plays another detective, reignited his career.
In the pipeline, a play about Tennessee Williams and, finally, the long-awaited “The Irishman” with De Niro and Martin Scorsese, his first time with the famed director. ( He and De Niro did Michael Mann’s 1995 “Heat” but famously had only one scene together.) Pacino will play Jimmy Hoffa.
Lear? “I’m ready. We’re talking about a movie on it,” he says.
Pacino long ago proved the studio brass wrong, that he’s the furthest thing from a disaster.
“You gotta realise yourself in all your roles. For me, the acting is very much a sanctuary,” he says. “It’s a place where I go and feel as close to what I should be doing in life, and why I’m here.” And so he acts, constantly. The 39th Kennedy Centre Honours ceremony will be held Dec 4 at 7pm in the Opera House. The taped presentation will be broadcast Dec 27 at 9pm on CBS. —WP-Bloomberg
I was trying to create a character who you don’t know where you’re at with him. I knew it was a tough part to pull off. Michael’s so insular, so private. Al Pacino, actor