That was early in 1988 when he had a small private screening of The Local Stigmatic. Except that in recent years, at least, Hoffman’s Method madness and eccentric choices (transvestism and autism) have been smashingly vindicated while Pacino’s film decision-making has brought forth only Revolution (which, by the way, he thinks was not a failure, only “unfinished because of time pressure”; he even talks wistfully of going to Warner Bros. and asking them for the raw footage so that he can take it into the editing room and recut it to fulfill the “silent-movie epic” vision of it he and director Hugh Hudson had). Just always rehearsing and calling the audience to watch rehearsals. These Method actors . It would be a 'relationship' Hamlet, about the family.. New York, the Brill Building: In a cell-like editing room off a back corridor of this hallowed venue where once the great girl-group tunesmiths toiled, Al is conferring with Beth, his new film editor on Stigmatic. “I think what appeals to you is the central act in the play—an aging actor being beaten to death merely because he’s famous. But Al had definite ideas about how he wanted to structure the process. Did he succeed in bringing this one off? I mean, Meryl's calling me "My lord." Maybe it’s our tragedy, not his: there’s been more of what he cares about (the absorption in the process of the clandestine phase) and less of what we think we want from him (more product). 103, pg. It's a funny line, but there's a double edge to it. "What if we opened with just an epigraph on a title card," a line he has in mind from another work of the same playwright that will keynote the theme. The key to getting the character, he says, was taking something away. But there was more than a drinking crisis behind that yearlong Lost Weekend of ‘76, when he just stopped working, stopped everything. Al says that "spouter" was the name given to child actors in Kean's time. Enjoy the best Al Pacino Quotes at BrainyQuote. He's probably one of the few actors who like the dread test-screening focus-group process, because it gives him the kind of opportunity to rethink his work that he usually gets only onstage during the course of a long run. He arranged a sporadic unpublicized series of college readings of his favorite “arias” from Hamlet, Richard III, Othello, and other, non-Bard drama and poetry. I’ve seen two more versions of it since that first screening, and though there have been changes in cross-fades, though flash-forwards have come and gone, the cobra-like menacing charm of Graham, the character he plays, remains riveting. "This was during the shooting of .. .And Justice for All. Where has he been? But Pacino's choices in it are so inspired that it's almost impossible to imagine any of it done any other way. Then he’d take his show on the road to his father’s house in East Harlem (his parents divorced when he was two). And I say, 'I never gave you aught.' Where has he been? Zoo is the operative word here: a lot of the early sketch material he recalled for me seemed to come directly from the wild life of his unconscious, cloaked in the shapes of animals. Anyway, I ask Al what kind of artistic advice Strasberg had given him when they were playing opposite each other. Hollywood is filled with stories of Oscar-winning roles and films Pacino was offered and then rejected. I just don’t agree. “Meryl came in and said [as Ophelia], ‘My lord, I have remembrances of yours that I have longed long to re-deliver.’ And I say, ‘I never gave you aught.’ And she says, ‘My lord . First in Godfather II as "Hyman Roth" (Strasberg's one great screen-acting role, an absolutely unforgettable take on Meyer Lansky, the Jewish Godfather), and then in . He'd taken him into the Actors Studio—treated him like a son, as his longed-for heir, the last, best vindication of his Method. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. I just don't agree. In the six years since. '', "Yeah," said Al, grinning, "but you've only begun to work with me on Stigmatic.". it failed originally . In fact, it was the bottle for him for a time, he says, a time that culminated in a kind of year-long Lost Weekend around 1976. Nor are his second thoughts merely dithering. He cited Olivier’s remark that the greatest reward of acting is “the drink after the show.”, But he never saw it as a problem until he found himself at one point “enjoying being out of work more than working. . "I haven't really heard in detail what Francis wants to do," he said, "but they do have the kids in common—that could bring them together.". I ask him if he thinks wanting fame or having it is the disgrace, the perversion. Jack Huston and Al Pacino attend the 2020 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on … There’s a whole couch-potato cult around Scarface, for instance. His obsession with this idea cannot be overestimated. His explanation for his preoccupation with Stigmatic is fairly vague—“It was a difficult piece . His movie-star fame was not giving him what he wanted—in fact, it was cutting him off from what he wanted to do, which was return to the stage, to “the wire.” And it was getting in the way of people’s perceptions of him when he did get back onstage. If Al was in disguise at the Sherman Oaks test, it was a good one; I couldn’t spot him as I settled down into the midst of a full house of Valley persons, who applauded when his name appeared in the opening credits. You need certain support systems, all kinds of support systems. Frank and another detective (John Goodman) decide to concoct a personals ad themselves in hopes of smoking out the woman they believe is doing the killing. (Pacino's stage work, most recently in Mamet's American Buffalo and Rabe's Pavlo Hummel, has consistently won him more critical praise and awards than his films. Now, National Anthems is the kind of play you'd ordinarily have to put a gun to my head to get me to sit through: an impassioned drama about a suburban-Detroit fireman (Al) seizing on a yuppie couple to act out the psychodrama of his nervous breakdown. Based on comments made in the focus group after the screening, the producers want to make the film move faster in the beginning, cut eight to ten minutes. “He doesn't have that urban street beauty he had,” says Richard Price, who wrote the script for Sea of Love. It’s something he insists you discover only from “doing things for a long time.” He did Buffalo in New Haven, New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Boston, London. ", At first, the discovery of these more intense emotional characters within him was liberating, Al says. I've seen two more versions of it since that first screening, and though there have been changes in cross-fades, though flash-forwards have come and gone, the cobra-like menacing charm of Graham, the character he plays, remains riveting. What made his choice so inspired and successful is that this gave him a vaguely nearsighted squint, which endowed him with an aura not merely of incompetence but of Holy Fool innocence. And yet, Al says, his first day’s scenes were all false notes. He's one of those stars whose magnitude has been sustained by the VCR revolution. “I remember reading about how the Lunts would spend three months just working on props. I think he was particularly affected by his experience with Richard III. I had thought the flash-forwards might be gone for good after their excision had met with such hearty approval from Miss Keaton a year ago. “I’ve always thought of Michael as the kind of guy who will do it. After watching the dailies he ran out and told the producer, Martin Bregman, that he had to do the whole opening over again. 1, Iss. That you can trust the faculty in yourself that says I'm ready to do it at this time, because there's not much more I can do, so I'll reveal it now.". Why? “But I dream about it: no clock. The kind of therapy that was ultimately most instrumental in bringing him out of his Lost Weekend impasse might be called clandestine Shakespeare therapy. I was watching someone searching for a character, but there wasn't a person up there.". It's there in all his best roles. But he had a tragic life; he couldn’t cope with fame,” Al told me. In fact, in the Brill Building elevator afterward, Al wonders out loud whether that second scene could maybe use a flash-forward. Nor are his second thoughts merely dithering. And Justice for All, Al’s methodological purism exasperated even the Great Teacher. “What’s big about him,” explained Al one night in L.A., where he was shooting Dick Tracy, “is that he’s the world’s largest dwarf.” We were standing on a sidewalk on Sunset Boulevard and he pulled out a Polaroid of himself in Big Boy makeup, looking like a malevolent cross between Peewee Herman and Richard III. "Because God knows who you are."). He brought it up again and again, sometimes as a lament, sometimes as a dream of how he'd like to work if he could have his way. .”. Joe Papp said, 'All right, Al, what is it?' He’s one of those stars whose magnitude has been sustained by the VCR revolution. "Right. In everything he did in the past, even Dog Day Afternoon, there was this sort of wildeyed gorgeousness. You can see the skull beneath his skin, and so, suddenly, can he. I’m having breakfast in my hotel room the morning after I arrive in L.A. to talk to Al while he’s finishing his Dick Tracy work for Warren Beatty. Needless to say, they get involved, and the deeper they get, the more she looks like the killer. "He's greedy," said Al, grinning. Al was staying at Diane Keaton's place in the Hollywood Hills (his own place is on the Hudson in New York, near Snedens Landing), but he preferred to talk elsewhere. They wandered in, got up onstage and started laughing with each other, and then they had some coffee. And in one of the final scenes in Godfather II, it was another last-minute prop decision that put the chill on the "elegant ice" inside Michael Corleone, who's had to kill everything human inside himself for the sake of the abstract honor of the Family and now is about to shut the door for the last time on his wife. The stardom was getting in the way of personal relationships too, he says elliptically, “things came to me too easily,” things he didn’t think he’d earned. I felt so free in a way. Synthetic drugs do that too, don’t they, in a way? They'd come in and spout great chunks of Shakespeare plays as after-dinner entertainment for adults. . “He’s one of the loneliest people I ever saw,” Pacino said of Deerfield. "At first, drinking was part of the territory, part of the acting culture," he said. "I want to sit on it," he says ruminatively, "maybe see it again.". Graham's a thuggish Cockney dog-track bettor who engineers the vicious beating and scarring of an aging actor merely, it seems, because he's famous. And I did stop drinking. . But what he really wants is to scheme and talk about it, which actually doing it would ruin.”. Photo: Kevin Mazur/VF20/WireImage. But by the time he played Al's grandfather in .. .And Justice for All, Al's methodological purism exasperated even the Great Teacher. We blow it up and sometimes—I guess that's what therapy's all about. It’s a phase he’s not entirely out of yet, at least stylistically. Did he succeed in bringing this one off? “When I saw it on the screen,” he says of the dailies, “I thought, There’s no one up there. Know what I mean? Talking about his Big Boy role always seemed to put him in a cheerful mood. I ask him if he thinks wanting fame or having it is the disgrace, the perversion. In October 1989, Vanity Fair tracked down Al Pacino after six years of relative anonymity followed his star turn in Scarface. Tells him that in the first one, a new cross-fade, they can either do a "slop" for $200 or go for an "optical" for $1,200. But then, there are a lot of things that do that. His most recent clandestine phase—all those unpublicized readings, the workshops, the decision to abandon product for process for a while—came from a similar impulse, he says, although it was less a desperate measure than a conscious choice this time. “It’s not like I never do anything,” he replied. "), He talks about the desperation he felt back then, the seriousness with which he viewed his despair, until at one point when he was most desperate, "I looked at a picture of myself when I was younger, when I was going through something. Part of the answer, at least, is The Clandestine Thing. Now he's emerging from his clandestine phase with Sea of Love, and preparing for Godfather III with Diane Keaton. (“I love working for Warren,” he says. He tells a funny story about the way this Method purism taxed even the patience of the Godfather of the Method, Lee Strasberg. “They got high cards,” he said of the audience-response forms. I didn’t pick up the Program, but I found it very supportive, meaningful. “The cards were high but . He had to start out that way to make his later transformation into his father's son have the dramatic impact it did. . When Pacino tells stories about his early, pre-Strasberg years as a performer, he sounds as if he were talking about a different person; he acts like a different person: you hear the unpremeditated exuberance of a natural mimic, the instinctive entertainer; he speaks freely, almost effusively, rather than choosing words as carefully as a tightrope walker testing his footing, as he does when he talks about his later work. Just always rehearsing and calling the audience to watch rehearsals. Might he have been a greater actor, or at least a more productive great actor, without it? And after you jump up and down off the box for several months you say, 'Now let's tackle that first scene.' In the six years since Scarface, the Hamlet of Hollywood has been locked into the pale cast of thought— doing covert stage work and obsessing over the cutting and recutting of a fifty-minute masterpiece.Now he's emerging from his clandestine phase with Sea of Love, and preparing for Godfather III with … "They [the producers] looked at the dailies, and they wanted to recast the part," he says. Well, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a python is just a python, and in light of what he tells me later, I think the performance anxiety here is really theatrical, not sexual. And Kate Beckinsale gleamed like an Oscar statuette as she arrived at the Vanity Fair Academy Awards after-party in Beverly Hills on Sunday. It suits him, the color of darkness. . And I did stop drinking. “He even asked me, ‘Al, have you ever said “Action” while the camera’s rolling?’ I said no. There's a whole couch potato cult around Scarface, for instance. To do it!’”. Among those standing around giving their reactions at that first Stigmatic screening I saw was Diane Keaton, Pacino's more or less steady companion for the past couple of years. ", And before even reading the first lines of dialogue, "I wanted to talk about how Hamlet talked to his father before he was the ghost. Why? She’s threading the big old moviola editing bed, preparing to show him the work she’s done on the two small changes he wanted to show me. ". . "I think finally to let go of the narcissism that has him isolated in himself. (In fact, all Pacino's best performances are about the paradoxes of power. . You know, Byron called him the sun's bright child. “It’s a tragedy there hasn’t been more for Al Pacino,” says one of Pacino’s close associates. Subconsciously he wants to be caught. “It goes: ‘Fame is the perversion of the human instinct for validation and attention,’” he says. What fed it, of course, was the racecar-driver thing and being such a superstar.”. 10/73. 11/73. It was still a time, he said, “when if your name ended in a vowel you always thought of changing it if you were going into the movies.”. At the last minute Pacino decided he needed something extra. First in Godfather II as “Hyman Roth” (Strasberg’s one great screen-acting role, an absolutely unforgettable take on Meyer Lansky, the Jewish Godfather), and then in . "Stigmatic was the catalyst for that," he says, the thing that got him out of the dumps, off the Hollywood production line, back on the wire again. Strasberg had been Pacino’s mentor, his spiritual godfather. "It goes: 'Fame is the perversion of the human instinct for validation and attention,' " he says. And after a while you have to take more of a look at yourself. But Al believes it’s about his process-versus-product notion. Vanity Fair vous livre les dernières actualités concernant Al Pacino. Anyway, I was trying to figure out where to suggest we meet after the day's work on the set was done. The key is the idea of “maybe never opening,” of working on a performance of a play until it’s ready, and then opening, or maybe never scheduling an opening at all, just inviting people to watch the process from reading to workshop to rehearsals. At the Sherman Oaks screening the audience of Valley guys and gals seemed to be with it all the way, gasping at the thriller-plot twists, laughing appreciatively at some of the trademark Pacino wise-guy wisecracks Price has tailored for him. Share with your friends. But Pacino believed that "Michael has to start out ambivalent, almost unsure of himself and his place. And he quoted for me something he claimed one of the Flying Wallendas had said: ''Life is on the wire. But Al arrives this afternoon with a brand-new notion he wants to try out on Beth and me. More to the point, perhaps, than any physical resemblance is that Hoffman shares a reputation with Pacino for Hamlet-like dithering over which roles to commit to.