SEEKING PACINO
Role as aging rocker Danny Collins offers actor his latest quest
Over the past six decades, Al Pacino has mixed it up with stage, screen and TV roles in his search for authentic moments of emoting.
Apparently, they are hard to find. Even when Pacino started out as a starving actor in 1960s New York, he realized playing it safe would never help him find what he was chasing.
“I would go to repertory (theatre) sometimes where you had to do two or three plays and I would be taken there for one specific play,” said the 74-year-old in a Canadian exclusive interview with Postmedia News.
“Invariably, I would not do as well in the play they wanted me to do, but better in the plays I didn’t want to do.” The lesson learned was simple: “Sometimes, we are not exactly aware of what we can do unless we try.”
So the Oscar-winning actor was, indeed, motivated to accept the against-type part of playing aging rock star Danny Collins based on some of those early repertory experiences.
Written and directed by Dan Fogelman, the comedy-drama follows Pacino as Collins, who is inspired to change his drug-addled, hedonistic ways after receiving a 40-year-old letter written to him by John Lennon.
Bobby Cannavale plays Collins’s estranged son and Jennifer Garner is his wife. Christopher Plummer portrays his loyal but crusty manager and Annette Bening is a small-town hotel manager who connects with Collins.
At the centre, of course, was Pacino on camera and off as he set out on yet another quest to keep it real.
That meant he worked closely with Fogelman to refine the script, loosely based on British folksinger Steve Tilston, who received an encouraging letter from John Lennon more than 30 years after Lennon wrote it.
Pacino was instrumental in hiring the actors he thought could pull off the main co-starring roles, but he refused to overwhelm the process when the movie began shooting.
“When filming started, Al got out of the way,” said Fogelman, who was making his directorial debut. “But I would be pretty stupid if I didn’t ask him questions and listen to what he had to say.”
If anything, it was Pacino keeping it light on a daily basis.
Pacino “spent a lot of time and energy making sure that everyone felt comfortable and good and everyone was at ease,” said Garner. “It was a lot of work being Al Pacino, but he loved it.”
But Pacino was all business as Collins when he performed the supposed Collins’ hit Hey Baby Doll live on stage, interrupting a Chicago rock concert at Greek Theatre in Los Angeles to do it.
“The early instincts are usually the ones you stay with,” he said of his performance. “And I had the instinct that (Danny Collins) was a cross between Barry Manilow and Rod Stewart — the love child of those two.”
The star who has lost his way was easier for Pacino to comprehend.
The actor admitted the fame and fortune he earned from parts in movies in the 1970s and ’80s proved to be an all-encompassing distraction, from which he slowly recovered with the help of friends and family.
“You know, you become this socalled movie star and it’s a different world,” he said. “Then it’s the combination of fame and being an actor and then the loss of anonymity, which I so loved and cherished.”
Just as pivotal as the redemption theme in Danny Collins are the Lennon songs, including such classics as Imagine and Working Class Hero. Again, Pacino was the key to getting the songs from Yoko Ono as a gift for the modestly budgeted film.
“Yoko is very responsible for giving his songs to us,” he said. “She really is an advocate for the movie.”
But Pacino said he feels better about himself now and he’s more in touch with who he is and in tune with the original purpose of his journey.
“I was acting since I was really young in schools, then I went to performing arts and then I was acting in Greenwich Village,” he said. “I would do 16 shows a week, revues and comedy, and pass the basket at the end of the shows, because that’s how we lived.
“When I was about 21, I realized I was able to find that world where I could exist in and express in and I knew everything was going to be all right because acting was what I was going to do.”