King of New York

Without doubt one of the truly greatest actors in the history of cinema – at any rate, he would be on everybody’s all-time shortlist – Alfredo James Pacino’s monumental body of work bears favourable comparison with any film CV on the planet, despite occasionally curious choices. Tirelessly prolific, the now 63-year-old Pacino has yet to show the faintest sign of slowing down, as befits someone whose declared ambition is to live to be 250. Deeply driven and committed, the man who popularised method acting continues to invest every role with Shakespearean seriousness.

He does so often irrespective of the project’s relative quality – for every Scarface, there’s a Dick Tracy disfiguring the guy’s record – but even in his more obviously pay-the-rent jobs, Pacino never seems to coast or sleepwalk in the manner of latter-day Robert deNiro, with whom he has been very frequently compared down the decades. Pacino’s trademark nervy, volcanic intensity – with a constant air of apparent frazzlement – ensures that, though versatile, he can never be the blank canvas many actors aspire to be. Rather, his screen persona is firmly fixed in most minds as a kind of gangster demi-god, to be fucked with at your peril, thanks to a series of tirade-throwing, eyebrow-narrowing performances in such underworld classics as the two Godfathers, Scarface, Heat, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon…the list is a lengthy one, and a virtual roll-call of modern American masterpieces.
Pacino came to prominence relatively late, having endured his share of anonymous struggling-artist poverty after a turbulent South Bronx upbringing largely spent in the care of his paternal grandparents. Even as a child, little Al loved to recite out loud the voices of various characters he’d seen in the movies, and though school bored him senseless, he found school plays a perfect outlet, eventually graduating to the prestigious Actors’ Studio in 1966 and commanding instant attention (as well as awards) for a sequence of arresting stage performances.
He had also begun to appear in feature films – Me, Natalie (1969) and The Panic in Needle Park (1970) – but it was still a massive surprise (to the studios, the producers, the cast and probably the tea-boy) when the relatively unknown, diminutive Italian beat off competition from the likes of Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Robert deNiro and Robert Redford to landed the hugely-coveted part of Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather opus. Pacino, perhaps driven by the constant fear of being replaced at any minute, rose to the occasion with a stunning performance that engraved his name indelibly on film history.
The rest has been a dizzying success story, with crime dramas Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975) ensuring that he became the first actor nominated for ‘Best Actor’ three years running by the Oscars committee. Pacino rarely allowed commercial considerations to intrude on his decisions, and turned down hugely lucrative parts in Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, Kramer vs. Kramer and Pretty Woman, invariably preferring more challenging roles. He hit an arguable career high with an unforgettably magnificent, expletive-strewn performance in 1983’s Scarface, but the disastrous fate that befell 1985’s ridiculous Revolution precipitated Pacino’s prolonged four-year exile from movies. (He was known to have faced – and beaten – a nasty alcohol problem, a subject he is uninclined to discuss with the press. He is equally reticent about his former high profile romances with Diane Keaton and Beverly d’Angelo, but has somehow retained the distinction of being one of the very few Hollywood leading men never to have married.)
Pacino resurfaced in 1989 as a hard-drinking cop in the murder thriller Sea of Love, and spent the next few years appearing left, right and centre in movies that veered from the sublime (Glengarry Glen Ross) to the pretty ridiculous (Frankie and Johnny, Scent of a Woman). Amazingly, it was his performance in the latter that landed Pacino his first Oscar for Best Actor: his performance as a blind man, while entertaining enough, is hardly his finest hour. Much of the actor’s finest work was just around the corner, though: a trio of acclaimed gangster classics (Carlito’s Way, Heat , Donnie Brasco), an engrossing Shakespeare adaptation (Looking For Richard, which he also directed), Michael Mann’s The Insider, and a stunning turn in Oliver Stone’s American football drama, Any Given Sunday.
Currently, Pacino can be seen in People I Know, a jaded, world-weary thriller with Al croaking his way magnificently through his role as a sleazy Bobby Zarem-a-like publicist in a manner that befits a sidelined celeb-pusher in desperate need of some kip and a steady supply of nicotine patches. This slow-burning affair sees Al dragged into a scandal involving his oldest client, Ryan O’Neal, but the film’s gloomy New York-as-Gotham atmospherics proved too controversial post-9/11 (it was completed a mere ten days beforehand), and some scenes featuring Al’s drug-fuelled hallucinations around the World Trade Centre were cut. A hasty low-key release six months after the event did People I Know no favours either, and the movie struggled to take $120,000 in the US – a sad state of affairs for a deliciously downbeat low-budgeter with a script strong enough to have tempted the stars aboard in the first place.
It’s certainly a change of pace from the $11 million-a-movie club where Pacino is generally happily ensconced, but it does bring the legendary thespian back to his lo-fi ‘70s, though-not-indie roots – “You know, when I made movies in the ’70s, there was no talk about a film like this not being done by a studio,” says Pacino, “they would’ve done it then. So this is all new to me. I think this might be the first independent feature outside of my own (Looking for Richard). I think I would more readily make a picture like this today than I would ten years ago.
“It has a lot to do with the exposure that independent movies have had. And also, that scripts come to you. You start to realise that you can almost say – I hate to say this – the worse the script, the more money they’ll give you. It’s almost a given. I think that is definitely a change, but I think in independent film you get the great writers and the great filmmakers. And they come along and they have an idea because it’s coming from them and not from a need to satisfy another kind of thing. Unfortunately, sometimes you’re stuck ‘cos you’re working in conditions that aren’t the best and you find you have to go through a lot just to get here. But a lot of the stuff we were surprised by, we couldn’t believe was happening. And it’s odd – a young man was telling me the other day that somebody saw this movie on an airplane. So that’s sort of like ‘well, what do you do?’ It’s a funny kind of thing, this world. It gets out of your domain, your control, and it’s very strange to hear that. It’s like somebody saying hey, they saw you on a certain thing and you say ‘Hey, I never did that!’ It’s like a nightmare.”
Does he prefer when the screenplay requires a New York setting? Does he feel more at home?
“I get a lot of energy from New York, and it’s particularly hard for me when a movie pretends to be in New York but is really shot somewhere else. When I first started some of the early directors I worked with derived all of their energy from the city – the city that never sleeps – that is so accessible to everything. It can take anything. It can take anything that happens to it. And that kind of vitality is there for us and its extraordinary. So that’s why the character I play stays there.”
Did he base his character with specific reference to Bobby Zarem, the renowned New York film publicist?
“It was certainly the image that Robby Baitz, the screenwriter had,” explains Pacino, “I think that he had the idea of what was going on – he was feeling something – and when he picked the publicist he picked Bobby Zarem for a reason. I guess somehow he could tell a story through that image, and I think that Robby than made it into his own. There was an aspect of Bobby Zarem to him, or rather, there was an aura of him but we didn’t get into the specifics of it.
“I mean the fact that he is from Georgia, he does have some of these political views. But that’s it, because I think then we departed the character. I got help with the accent from someone who knows about these things, you know, cos like New York has all kinds of accents. There’s the Bronx, the Brooklyn and Queens accents, they are different. And there are people who help us.
“You say you want a specific town then they work with you. And you work on it that way. Wurman seems to be someone who is unable to get that thing of the past. Even at the end, which I noticed last night when I saw it – when he says ‘I don’t know what else to do’ in response to Ryan O’Neal. It’s as though he never made that break in a lot of areas of his life, which I found very interesting.”

People I Know is released on February 13