What Is Al Pacino's Next Big Move?
What Is Al Pacino's Next Big Move?
What Is Al Pacino's Next Big Move?
For six years, the actor who made his mark as Michael Corleone has been obsessing over a new movie
about that ancient seductress Salome
Al Pacino likes to make trouble for himself. Everythings going along just fine and I go and f--- it up,
hes telling me. Were sitting on the front porch of his longtime Beverly Hills home in the low-key
section known as the flats. Nice house, not a mansion, but beautiful colonnades of towering palms
lining the street.
Youd think Pacino would be at peace by now, on this perfect cloudless California day. But dressed
head to toe in New York black, a stark contrast to the pale palette of the landscape, he speaks darkly
of his troubling dilemma: How is he going to present to the public his strange two-film version of the
wild Oscar Wilde play called Salome? Is he finally ready to risk releasing the newest versions of his six-
year-long passion project, as the Hollywood cynics tend to call such risky business? I do it all the
time, he says of the way he makes trouble for himself. Theres something about that discovery,
taking that chance. You have to endure the other side of the risk. The other side of the risk? They
said Dog Day [Afternoon+ was a risk, he recalls. When I did it, it was like What are you doing? You
just did The Godfather. Youre going to play this gay bank robber who wants to pay for a sex change?
This is so weird, Al. I said, I know. But its good. Most of the time the risk has turned out well, but
he still experiences the other side of the risk. The recent baffling controversy over his behavior
during the Broadway run of Glengarry Glen Ross, for instance, which he describes as like a Civil War
battlefield and things were going off, shrapnel... and I was going forward. Bullets over Broadway! It
suggests that, despite all hes achieved in four decades of stardom, Al Pacino (at 73) is still a little
crazy after all these years. Charmingly crazy; comically crazy, able to laugh at his own obsessiveness;
sometimes, crazy like a foxat least to those who dont share whatever mission hes on.
***
Actually, maybe troubled is a better word. He likes to play troubled characters on the edge of crazy,
or going over it. Brooding, troubled Michael Corleone; brooding troublemaker cop Frank Serpico; the
troubled gay bank robber in Dog Day Afternoon; a crazy, operatic tragicomic gangster hero, Tony
Montana, in Scarface, now a much-quoted figure in hip-hop culture. Hes done troubled genius Phil
Spector, hes done Dr. Kevorkian (I loved Jack Kevorkian, he says of Dr. Death, the pioneer of
assisted suicide. Loved him, he repeats). And one of his best roles, one with much contemporary
relevance, a troublemaking reporter dealing with a whistle-blower in The Insider. It has earned him
eight Academy Award nominations and one Oscar (Best Actor for the troubled blind colonel in Scent
of a Woman). Hes got accolades and honors galore. In person, he comes across more like the manic,
wired bank robber in Dog Day than the guy with the steely sinister gravitas of Michael Corleone.
Nevertheless, he likes to talk about that role and analyze why it became so culturally resonant.
Pacinos Michael Corleone embodies perhaps better than any other character the bitter unraveling of
the American dream in the postwar 20th centuryheroism and idealism succumbing to the corrupt
and murderous undercurrent of bad blood and bad money. Watching it again, the first two parts
anyway, it feels almost biblical: each scene virtually carved in stone, a celluloid Sistine Chapel painted
with a brush dipped in blood. And its worth remembering that Pacino almost lost the Michael
Corleone role because he troubled himself so much over the character. This morning in Beverly Hills,
he recounts the way he fought for a contrarian way of conceiving Michael, almost getting himself
fired. First of all, he didnt want to play Michael at all. The part for me was Sonny, he says, the
hotheaded older son of Marlon Brandos Godfather played by James Caan. That is the one I wanted
to play. But Francis *Ford Coppola, the director+ saw me as Michael. The studio didnt, everybody else
didnt want me in the movie at all. Francis saw me as Michael, and I thought How do I do this? I
really pondered over it. I lived on 91st and Broadway then and Id walk all the way to the Village and
back ruminating. And I remember thinking the only way I could do this is if, at the end of the day, you
dont really know who he is. Kind of enigmatic. It didnt go over well, the way he held back so much
at first, playing reticence, playing not-playing. If you recall, in that opening wedding scene he virtually
shrinks into his soldiers uniform. Everything to me was Michaels emergencein the transition, he
says, and its not something you see unfold right away. You discover that. That was one of the
reasons they were going to fire me, he recalls. I was unable to articulate that *the emergence+ to
Francis. Pacino admits his initial embodiment of Michael looked like an anemic shadow in the
dailies the producers were seeing. So they were looking at the *rushes+ every day in the screening
room and saying, Whats this kid doing? Who is this kid? Everybody thought I would be let go
including Brando, who was extremely kind to me. Pacino was mainly an off-Broadway New York
stage actor at that point, with only one major film role to his name, a junkie in The Panic in Needle
Park. He was risking what would be the role of a lifetime, one that put him alongside an acting
immortal like Brando, because he insisted that the role be a process, that it fit the method he used as
a stage actor. He studied with Lee Strasberg, guru of Method acting, and he is now co-president of the
Actors Studio. I always had this thing with film, he says. I had been in one, he says. And *as a
stage actor] I always had this sort of distance between myself and film. What kept me in the movie,
he recalls, was my good fortune that they had shot the scene where Michael shoots the cop *early
on, out of sequence]. And I believe that was enough for Francis to convince the powers that be that
they should keep me.
***
Pacinos process gets him in trouble to this day. Before I even bring up the subject, he mentions the
controversy surrounding the revival of David Mamets Glengarry Glen Ross. Hed played the role of
hotshot salesman Ricky Roma to much acclaim in the film, but when he took on a different part in a
new version of the playthe older, sadder, loserish salesman played by Jack Lemmon in the movie
there was trouble. The other actors were not used to Als extended process, wherein he needs
prolonged rehearsal time to find the character and often improvises dialogue. The rehearsal process
stretched into the sold-out Broadway previews, sometimes leaving the other actorswho were
following Mamets script faithfullylost. Which led to what are often euphemistically termed
creative differences. Thus the Civil War battlefield, Pacino says with a rueful shrug, the shrapnel
flying. The fact that he uses the term civil war is not an accident, I thinkit was an exposure of the
lifelong civil war within himself about when the process has to stop. Ideally for Pacino: never. And it
sounds like hes still got PTSD from the Glengarry Glen Ross civil war, cant stop talking about it. I
went through some real terrors, he says. He wanted to discover his character in the course of playing
him, wanted him to evolve, but Im a guy who really needs four months *to prepare a theater role+. I
had four weeks. So Im thinking Where am I? What is this? What am I doing here? And all of a sudden
one of the actors on stage turns to me and says, Shut the f--- up! Pacinos response: I wanted to
say, Lets keep that in. But I figured dont go there....And I kept saying, whatever happened to out-of-
town tryouts? The play reportedly made money but didnt please many critics. Pacino nonetheless
discovered something crucial with his process, something about himself and his father. Its the first
time in many, many years I learned something, he says. Sometimes I would just say what I was
feeling. I was trying to channel this character and...I felt as though he was a dancer. So sometimes Id
start dancing. But then I realizedguess what, I just realized this today! My father was a dancer and
he was a salesman. So I was channeling my old man. He talks about his father, whom he didnt know
well. His parents divorced when he was 2, and he grew up with his mother and grandmother in the
South Bronx. And he reminisces about the turning point in his life, when a traveling theater group
bravely booked what Pacino remembers as a huge movie theater in the Bronx for a production of
Chekhovs The Seagull, which he saw with some friends when he was 14. And I was sitting with about
ten other people, that was it, he recalls. But if you know the play, its about the crazy, troubled
intoxication of the theater world, the communal, almost mafia-family closeness of a theatrical troupe.
I was mesmerized, he recalls. I couldnt take my eyes off it. Who knows what I was hearing except
that it was affecting. And I went out and got all Chekhovs books, short stories, and I was going to
school in Manhattan [the High School of Performing Arts made famous by Fame] and I went to the
Howard Johnson there [in Times Square] at the time, to have a little lunch. And there serving me was
the lead in The Seagull! And I look at this guy, this kid, and I said to him, I saw you! I saw! you! In the
play! Hes practically jumping out of his porch chair at the memory. And I said, It was great, you
were great in it. It was such an exchange, Ill never forget it. And he was sort of nice to me and I said,
Im an actor! Aww, it was great. I live for that. Thats what I remember.
***
That pure thingthe communal idealism of actorsis at the root of the troublemaking. The radical
naked acting ethos of the Living Theatre was a big influence too, he says, almost as much as Lee
Strasberg and the Actors Studio and the downtown bohemian rebel ethos of the 60s.
In fact one of Pacinos main regrets is when he didnt make trouble. I read somewhere, I tell him,
that you considered Michael killing [his brother] Fredo at the end of Godfather II a mistake.
I do think that was a mistake, Pacino replies. I think *that made+ the whole idea of Part III, the idea
of [Michael] feeling the guilt of it and wanting forgivenessI dont think the audience saw Michael
that way or wanted him to be that way. And I didnt quite understand it myself.
Francis pulled *Godfather III] off, as he always pulls things off, but the original script was different. It
was changed primarily because Robert Duvall turned down the part of Tommy [Tom Hagen, the family
consigliere and Michaels stepbrother+. In the original script, Michael went to the Vatican because his
stepbrother, Robert Duvall/Tom Hagen was killed there, and he wanted to investigate that murder
and find the killers. That was his motivation. Different movie. But when Bob turned it down, Francis
went in that other direction.
***
What emerges from this is his own analysis of Michael Corleones appeal as a character, why he
connected so deeply with the audience. You didnt feel Michael really needed redemption or wanted
redemption? I asked. I dont think the audience wanted to see that, he says. He didnt ever think
of himself as a gangster. He was torn by something, so he was a person in conflict and had trouble
knowing who he was. It was an interesting approach and Francis took it very he paused. But I
dont think audiences wanted to see that. What the audiences wanted, Pacino thinks, is Michaels
strength: To see him become more like the Godfather, that person we all want, sometimes in this
harsh world, when we need somebody to help us. Channel surfing, he says, he recently watched the
first Godfather movie again and he was struck by the power of the opening scene, the one in which
the undertaker says to the Godfather, I believed in America. He believed, but as Pacino puts it,
Everybodys failed you, everythings failed you. Theres only one person who can help you and its
this guy behind the desk. And the world was hooked! The world was hooked! Hes that figure thats
going to help us all. Michael Corleones spiritual successor, Tony Soprano, is a terrific character, but
perhaps too much like us, too neurotic to offer what Michael Corleone promises. Though in real life,
Pacino and Tony Soprano have something in common. Pacino confides to me something Id never
read before: Ive been in therapy all my life. And it makes sense because Pacino gives you the
feeling hes on to his own game, more Tony Soprano than Michael Corleone. As we discuss The
Godfather, the mention of Brando gets Pacino excited. When you see him in A Streetcar Named
Desire, somehow hes bringing a stage performance to the screen. Something you can touch. Its so
exciting to watch! Ive never seen anything on film by an actor like Marlon Brando in Streetcar on film.
Its like he cuts through the screen! Its like he burns right through. And yet its got this poetry in it.
Madness! Madness! I recall a quote from Brando. He is supposed to have said, In stage acting you
have to show people what youre thinking. But in film acting [because of the close-up] you only have
to think it. Yeah, says Al. I think hes got a point there. Its more than that in factthe Brando
quote goes to the heart of what is Pacinos dilemma, the conflict hes desperately been trying to
reconcile in his Salome films. The clash between what film gives an actorthe intimacy of close-up,
which obviates the need for posturing and overemphatic gesturing needed to reach the balcony in
theaterand the electricity, the adrenaline, which Pacino has said, changes the chemicals in your
brain, of the live-wire act that is stage acting.
***
Indeed, Pacino likes to cite a line he heard from a member of the Flying Wallendas, the tight-rope-
walking trapeze act: Life is on the wire, everything else is just waiting. And he thinks hes found a
way to bring the wired energy of the stage to film and the film close-up to the stage. Film started
with the close-up, he says. You just put a close-up in thereD.W. Griffithboom! Done deal. Its
magic! Of course! You could see that inSalome today. Hes talking about the way he made an
electrifying film out of what is essentially a stage version of the play. (And then another film hes
called Wilde Salome about the making of Salome and the unmaking of Oscar Wilde.) Over the
previous couple of days, Id gone down to a Santa Monica screening room to watch both movies
(which hes been cutting and reshaping for years now). But he feelsafter six yearshes got it right,
at last. See what those close-ups fix on? Pacino asks. See that girl in the close-ups? That girl is
Jessica Chastain, whose incendiary performance climaxes in a close-up of her licking the blood
lasciviously from the severed head of John the Baptist. I had to admit that watching the film of the
play, it didnt play like a playno filming of the proscenium arch with the actors strutting and fretting
in the middle distance. The camera was onstage, weaving in and around, right up in the actors faces.
And heres Pacinos dream of acting, the mission hes on with Salome: My big thing is I want to put
theater on the screen, he says. And how do you do that? The close-up. By taking that sense of live
theater to the screen. The faces become the stage in a way? And yet youre still getting the
benefit of the language. Those people arent doing anything but acting. But to see them, talk with
them in your face.... Pacino has a reputation for working on self-financed film projects, obsessing
over them for years, screening them only for small circles of friends. Last time I saw him it was The
Local Stigmatic, a film based on a play by British avant-garde dramatist Heathcote Williams about two
lowlife London thugs (Pacino plays one) who beat up a B-level screen celebrity they meet in a bar just
because they hate celebrity. (Hmm. Some projection going on in that project?) Pacino has finally
released Stigmatic, along with the even more obscure Chinese Coffee, in a boxed DVD set.
***
But Salome is different, he says. To begin at the beginning would be to begin 20 years ago when he
first sawSalome onstage in London with the brilliant, eccentric Steven Berkoff playing King Herod in a
celebrated, slow-motion, white-faced, postmodernist production. Pacino recalls that at the time he
didnt even know it was written by Oscar Wilde and didnt know Wildes personal story or its tragic
end. I hadnt realized that the Irish-born playwright, author of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The
Importance of Being Earnest, raconteur, aphorist, showman and now gay icon, had died from an
infection that festered in prison where he was serving a term for gross indecency. Salome takes off
from the New Testament story about the stepdaughter of King Herod (played with a demented
lasciviousness by Pacino). In the film, Salome unsuccessfully tries to seduce the god-maddened John
the Baptist, King Herods prisoner, and then, enraged at his rebuff, she agrees to her stepfathers
lustful pleas to do the lurid dance of the seven veils for him in order to extract a hideous promise in
return: She wants the severed head of John the Baptist delivered to her on a silver platter. Its all
highly charged, hieratic, erotic and climaxes with Jessica Chastain, impossibly sensual, bestowing a
bloody kiss upon the severed head and licking her lips. Its not for the faint of heart, but Chastains
performance is unforgettable. Its like Pacino has been shielding the sensual equivalent of highly
radioactive plutonium for the six years since the performance was filmed, almost afraid to unleash it
on the world. After I saw it, I asked Pacino, Where did you find Jessica Chastain? He smiles. I had
heard about her from Marthe Keller [an ex-girlfriend and co-star in Bobby Deerfield]. She told me,
Theres this girl at Juilliard. And she just walked in and started reading. And I turned to Robert Fox,
this great English producer, and I said, Robert, are you seeing what Im seeing? Shes a prodigy! I was
looking at Marlon Brando! This girl, I never saw anything like it. So I just said, OK honey, youre my
Salome, thats it. People who saw her in thisTerry Malick saw her in [a screening of] Salome, cast
her in Tree of Lifethey all just said, come with me, come with me. She became the most sought-
after actress. [Chastain has since been nominated for Academy Awards in The Help and Zero Dark
Thirty.+ When she circles John the Baptist, she just circles him and circles him... He drifts off into a
reverie. Meanwhile, Pacino has been doing a lot of circling himself. Thats what the second film, Wilde
Salome, the Looking for Oscar Wilde-type docudrama, does: circle around the play and the
playwright. Pacino manages to tell the story with a peripatetic tour of Wilde shrines and testimonies
from witnesses such as Tom Stoppard, Gore Vidal and that modern Irish bard Bono. And it turns out
that it is Bono who best articulates, with offhand sagacity, the counterpoint relationship
between Salome and Wildes tragedy. Salome, Bono says on camera, is about the destructive power
of sexuality. He speculates that in choosing that particular biblical tale Wilde was trying to write
about, and write away, the self-destructive power of his own sexuality, officially illicit at the time.
Pacino has an electrifying way of summing it all up: Its about the third rail of passion. Theres no
doubt Pacinos dual Salome films will provoke debate. In fact, they did immediately after the lights
came up in the Santa Monica screening room, where I was watching with Pacinos longtime producer
Barry Navidi and an Italian actress friend of his. What do you call what Salome was experiencinglove
or lust or passion or some powerful cocktail of all three? How do you define the difference among
those terms? What name to give her ferocious attraction, her rage-filled revenge? We didnt resolve
anything but it certainly homes in on what men and women have been heatedly arguing about for
centuries, what were still arguing about in America in the age of Fifty Shades of Grey. Later in Beverly
Hills, I told Pacino about the debate: She said love, he said lust, and I didnt know. The passion is
the eroticism of it and thats whats driving the love, he says. Thats what I think Bono meant.
Pacino quotes a line from the play: Love only should one consider. Thats what Salome says. So
you feel that she felt love not lust? He avoids the binary choice. She had this kind of feeling when
she saw him. Somethings happening to me. And shes just a teenager, a virgin. Somethings
happening to me, Im feeling things for the first time, because shes living this life of decadence, in
Herods court. And suddenly she sees *the Baptists+ kind of raw spirit. And everything is happening to
her and she starts to say I love you and he says nasty things to her. And she says I hate you! I hate
you! I hate you! Its your mouth that I desire. Kiss me on the mouth. Its a form of temporary insanity
shes going through. Its that passion: You fill my veins with fire. Finally, Pacino declares, Of course
its love. It wont end the debate, but what better subject to debate about? Pacino is still troubling
himself over which film to release firstSalome or Wilde Salome. Or should it be both at the same
time? But I had the feeling that he thinks they are finally done, finally ready. After keeping at it and
keeping at itcutting them and recutting themthe time has come, the zeitgeist is right. (After I left,
his publicist Pat Kingsley told me that they were aiming for an October opening for both films, at last.)
Keeping at it: I think that may be the subtext of the great Frank Sinatra story he told me toward the
end of our conversations. Pacino didnt really know Sinatra and you might think there could have
been some tension considering the depiction of the Sinatra character in Godfather. But after some
misunderstandings they had dinner and Sinatra invited him to a concert at Carnegie Hall where he
was performing. The drummer Buddy Rich was his opening act. Buddy Rich? you might ask, the fringe
Vegas rat-pack guy? Thats about all Pacino knew about him. I thought oh, Buddy Rich the drummer.
Well thats interesting. Were gonna have to get through this and then well see Sinatra. Well, Buddy
Rich starts drumming and pretty soon you think, is there more than one drum set up there? Is there
also a piano and a violin and a cello? Hes sitting at this drum and its all coming out of his drumsticks.
And pretty soon youre mesmerized. And he keeps going and its like hes got 60 sticks there and all
this noise, all these sounds. And then he just starts reducing them, and reducing them, and pretty
soon hes just hitting the cowbell with two sticks. Then you see him hitting these wooden things and
then suddenly hes hitting his two wooden sticks together and then pretty soon he takes the sticks up
and were all like this *miming being on the edge of his seat, leaning forward+. And he just separates
the sticks. And only silence is playing. The entire audience is up, stood up, including me, screaming!
Screaming! Screaming! Its as if he had us hypnotized and it was over and he leaves and the audience
is stunned, were just sitting there and were exhausted and Sinatra comes out and he looks at us and
he says. Buddy Rich, he says. Interesting, huhWhen you stay at a thing. You related to that?
"I'm still looking for those sticks to separate. Silence. You know it was profound when he said that.
'It's something when you stay at a thing."'
A Scientific Laboratory 170 Feet High in the Sky
Grand-scale ecology brings a Virginia forest under unprecedented scrutiny by Smithsonian researchers
Deep in the heart of Posey Hollow, on the grounds of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute
in Front Royal, Virginiapast the straight, sturdy hickories and a gnarled, 250-year-old black gum, the
oldest tree in a forest that was clear-cut for farming in Colonial timesa galvanized steel tower rises
170 feet into the sky. When construction was completed, in late July, it became the tallest structure
for at least an hours drive in any direction. When scientists install an array of instruments on the
tower next month, the surrounding forest will become one of the most closely studied in the world.
The tower is one of 60 to be built across the United States as part of the National Ecological
Observatory Network (NEON), a massive monitoring project, sponsored by the National Science
Foundation, that will take the pulse of the nations environment. For 30 years starting in 2017, when
the network is due to be completed, the towers will continuously measure temperature, carbon-
dioxide concentration, moisture and many other variables in 20 different types of ecosystems. Posey
Hollow is representative of a second-growth Eastern forest, there being virtually no old-growth forest
left in the Eastern United States. Another tower will be installed at a Smithsonian research center on
the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, to capture a Mid-Atlantic coastal ecosystem. At each NEON site
researchers also will monitor soil conditions and collect insects, birds, plants and small animals. Once
a year or so, airplanes carrying laser equipment will fly over the forests to create high-resolution
digital scans of the tree canopy so scientists can track its density and growth. The NEON project will
also incorporate data from 46 aquatic sites to paint a more complete picture of our ecosystem
nationwide. Ecology is going big-scale. If you want to understand how the environment works, you
need to sample widely and bring in as many variables as possible, says Bill McShea, a Smithsonian
wildlife ecologist. But so far, nobody has tried anything nearly as comprehensive as this. The
Conservation Biology Institute was founded to conduct research on endangered animals, and it is still
home to such creatures as cheetahs, red pandas and gazelles. But over the past five years researchers
have taken a magnifying glass to a 63-acre section of Posey Hollow to better understand a forest that
is growing without the pressures of encroaching development. Every tree in here with a diameter of
over a centimeter weve mapped, measured and identified, McShea told me in early June as we
hiked into the forest to see where the tower would be built. That comes to 41,031 trees of 65 species.
The scientists say the data gathered by the tower instruments will shed new light on the critical role
that forests play in the greater environment. What Im most excited about is a sensor that makes
continuous measurement of the exchange of carbon dioxide and water vapor between the forest and
the atmosphere, says Kristina Teixeira, a forest ecologist at the institute. From this, you can get the
total amount of carbon dioxide being taken up by the forest on a daily or annual time scale. By
comparing the rate of carbon dioxide absorption with surveyed tree growth, scientists will be able to
calculate how effectively forests like this one mitigate greenhouse-gas emissionsan increasingly
important issue as the climate changes. Other data will help researchers model how forests are
affected by drought, rising temperatures and other factors, and could help them determine how
certain native trees, such as that ancient black gum, withstand invasive species. One of the most
innovative aspects of NEON, though, has less to do with gathering information than with distributing
it: The data will be made publicly available in real time over the Internet, so everyone with a stake in
the ongoing changes to our environment will have a chance to monitor them. As Teixeira says,
Anyone with a good idea can just go in there and test their hypothesis.