aditya chopra interview

The movies have been his school, his playground. As far back as you can remember, Aditya Chopra, has been a watcher, scurrying to the cinema halls to see every new release, preferably on the first day itself. Any image that moves on the screen tickles his appetite for more. When he was a kid, like Oliver Twist, Aditya Chopra, has been a watcher, he would ask for more.

Ehave shifted, bag and baggage, into the Siri Fort auditorium, zipping in and out of movies, be it from Hungary, the Honduras or the Hebrides.

The first-born son of Yash and Pam Chopra is also a stickler when it comes to following the principles he believes in.He refuses to compromise his convictions.Perhaps that accounts for the honesty of thought in his debut feature, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, which evidently sprung from his stead-fast regard for unsullied family values

Although you have known Aditya aka Adi even since he was a sprightly teenager, the 24-year-old has avoided sitting himself down for a formal interview. Even if you've threatened him, periodically, that you'll quote his everyday statements anyway, he's been as elusive as the neighbourhood kid who rings the doorbell and bolts from the spot. On the FilmfareAwards night - following his triple triumph with trophies for the Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Dialogue - he senses that you'd feel disappointed if he doesn't show up for the post-function photo shoot. Just for that, he turns up, whizzes before the eye of the still camera.And a few days later, agrees to a conversation conducted in a mattress-lined ante-room of the Chopras' Juhu bungalow.

Here then is a replay of the Q and A with the director who, without doubt, is the hottest property in showtown:

First of all, let me ask you why have you shied away from interviews?

I don't know. I probably just want to stay away from the media as far as possible.A film should speak for itself.And now that my film has spoken so well for me, I can't better that. Basically, I'm shy. I'm media-shy definitely.

What is your first distinct memory of the movies?

That's very difficult for me to pin-point today. I'm told that I would hang out on the sets of Kabhi Kabhie... I must have been four then... with a viewfinder.Usually, shootings are considered to be quite boring but I would love every minute of the experience... subconsciously maybe those days have stayed with me.

This may sound weird but till I was 10-years-old, I thought that everyone... the entire world... did nothing but make films. I was sure that film-making was the only profession in the world.I was quite startled that some of my friend's fathers were into business... into making iron and steel etc. etc.I must have been quite heavily into films to think that way.My brother, Uday, who's one-and-a-half-years younger than me was brought up in the same environment... but he wasn't as obsessive about the movies as I was.

I don't remember seeing the camera for the first time or anything like that.I just remember the movies.It didn't matter who was acting in a movie or who had directed it. The Hindi feature film per se was the biggest high for me.

At times, haven't you felt that some of the films are senseless... that they're foolish?

No, no, not at all.Frankly till a certain age, I liked every film.I couldn't tell the good from the bad. It was only when I was 14 or 15 hat I could pass any sort of judgement.I actually hated one film I saw.And the first time I realised that a film could be good was when I saw Deewar. After that I became somewhat more discerning, I started noticing films more closely.

What were you like as a schoolkid?

I was a sports fanatic. I'd play football and every game I could handle. I wasn't a bad student though, I always ranked among the top 10. I think I was a balanced kid - when I had to study, I would concentrate on my text books with all my heart.And during the vacant hours I'd read books... fiction books which narrated stories with some craft and style... like the books of Jeffrey Archer, Sidney Sheldon and Ayn Rand.Earlier, of course, I was crazy about Enid Blyton's Famous Five and the Hardy Boys series.

I believe you wrote a script revolving around a bank robbery when you were in the fourth standard in school?

Oh that! I wasn't in the fourth standard... I think I was in the seventh standard.I must have been 11 or 12 then.It wasn't a full-blooded script as such, it was an attempt at a thriller about a man who kills someone and loses his memory.And then he becomes a police officer and is assigned to investigate the murder he has committed himself.(Laughs) It was just an attempt to form some sort of a storyline.And who knows? Perhaps, I could still make it into a film some day...
Have you ever written any short stories?

Not really. Occasionally, I' ve just jotted down some points. Often, ideas just float around in my head. Physically, the first time I actually got down to writing was with Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. I never thought I could actually sit down and write but I did.

Earlier, I'd merely suggest a story idea to dad. The germ of Darr came from Dead alm,an Australian film about an obsessed lover. I thought such an idea would end itself to an interesting film... the kind of film which hadn't been made by dad before. Only the climax which was set on the sea in Dead Calm was similar in Darr... apart from that, everything else was different.

Your father has seen extreme highs and lows with success and failure. Were you affected when the Yash Chopra banner was going through a low phase?

I was too much of a kid when Silsila, Mashaal and Faasle didn't do well. As a child, I was cushioned against the hard blows. Our lifestyle didn't change - we'd still go out on vacations, we'd eat the same kind of food and wear the same kind of clothes. I knew that dad was in a depressed frame of mind but he didn't let Uday and me get affected by what he was going through. Mum handled the situation beautifully.

However, I was directly affected when Lamhe didn't do well commercially. It was the first film I'd worked on... assisted on from scratch. Before that, I'd come into Chandni only halfway through. Those days, Lamhe was the film closest to my heart. When it bombed, it shook us up a lot. Perhaps that's why the success of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge did not send me on a great big high... I did not get swayed because I know that even today a Lamhe is possible.

Have you become aware of the negative aspects of the film industry... of the fakeness and the put-on attitudes?

A while ago, I didn't believe this was true of the film industry at ll. I thought film people were essentially good. But when I came in contact with the film industry, I did sense its negative aspects... which is true of every field. Fortunately, I've worked only with good, positive people. I've consciously tried to keep away from the negative side. I don't socialise much. If I don't come to know the industry too closely, it's just as well. Most of my close friends are from outside the industry... and I think it works better that way.

Directors often get emotionally involved with their artistes. Have you found this a problem?

It helps if you don't get emotionally involved. If you get too close to your artistes... to anyone as a matter of fact in your day-to-day work... you may realise that you don't like them. And I can't work with people I don't like. That's why I've chosen not to get too close.

Aren't you pretty close to Shah Rukh Khan?

I can't claim to be his best friend. But I can sense that there is a mutual respect for each other's work... which is a good thing.

Tell me, did you or your parents have any other career options for you?

No, my decision to be associated with the movies was taken very, very early. I didn't have even half-a-doubt that I would become a film-maker. Mum was keen that I should go abroad for further studies... in business management or whatever. But since I was sure that it was Hindi films for me, I felt the years abroad would have made me somewhat westernised. That stint would have removed me from the Indian way of thinking which I wanted to hold on to at any cost.

But aren't you a bit westernised?

Not at all... well maybe I'm a blend. Like my film... or the character of Raj... my exterior may seem westernised, but my inner thoughts and beliefs are absolutely Indian.

Would you say that you cut your teeth by assisting on Lamhe and Darr?

As I said, I came in half-way through Chandni. Gradually, I became well-versed with what goes on. I was also involved in one major schedule of Aaina. I didn't concentrate on the technical side of things though. Direction can't be taught, you have to acquire whatever you can by observing the entire process of film-making on the sets.

So far, I' ve paid more attention on character development and performances. I have to become more proficient in camera angles and the lenses which must be used for particular shots.

After the apprenticeship, were you ready or did you have to be goaded to direct a film independently?

I had to be goaded. Because I'm lazy, I don't like working. I have to be pushed. I guess the fact that I'd nurtured the idea of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge for two to three years, set me off on the road.

The original intention was to do a love story as an English language film. I wanted to show the international audience that India isn't a country of snake-charmers. Rather I wanted to acquaint them with how we Indians live, love, think and react today. Maybe I could still do this kind of international project some day.

After Darr, I was trying to find a story idea for dad. When I told him the basic premise of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, he didn't react immediately. But while I was narrating it to him, the visuals started evolving in my mind... so I thought, okay I'll give the story a shot myself. Something about it excited me. I felt it could be an absorbing love story through which I could say a few things that I wanted to.

What are the few things that you wanted to say?

The primary aim was to make a very honest love story... a love story that would make it at the box office. I wanted to make a film which I would to make a film which I would enjoy seeing. In that way I was being selfish - I was making a film for myself. A wholesome film which I wouldn't mind seeing again and again.

On a broader level, I was also trying to get something out of my system. I'd be quite troubled while watching those love stories in which the boy and the girl elope. I'd wonder how can they just cut themselves off from their parents who've done so much for them? How can they be so callous? They have no right to break the hearts of their parents. I wanted to say that if your love is strong enough, then you will come together... your parents will be convinced about your love ultimately.

I also wanted to comment on the position of the girl in Indian households. In fact, I'm especially proud of the scene between the girl and her mother. I think it describes the situation that Indian women are caught in very clearly. We may be in the 1990s but there are certain things about the Indian family structure that haven't changed at all.

I believe to start with, your dad felt that the mother-and-daughter scene slackened the pace of the film.

It was like this. When I wrote the complete scene and narrated it to my parents and some of the unit members, it was felt that it was a little long and that it would drag. But I shot it the way it was conceived... if it had slowed down the pace, maybe I would have cut out a few lines of dialogue. In fact, quite a few of the scenes were long... I was scared that they might bore the audience. They could have become restless... they could have hooted.

Yes...go on.

Like it was touch-and-go in the case of Shah Rukh's monologue towards the end which I felt was the base of the film. In the last reel, there's just this one man talking. If anyone in the audience had made a noise, the entire scene would have crumbled. But at the first show in the theatre, it was watched in pin-drop silence. And I knew we were through, I knew we had a winner.

But there were some abruptly brief scenes in the film. For instance, Shah Rukh's night out in the Punjab village with Parmeet Sethi and the other boys.

I was aware that the film was quite long. So I didn't want to deviate too much from the main plot. As a result, there were some brief, almost abrupt scenes. I also didn't want to create the character of a typical villain. I just wanted him to be a typical MCP... and not a pitch-black, nostril-flaring villain.

How much difference was there in the film's conceptualisation and final execution?

It turned out to be exactly the way it had been conceptualised... be it the scenes set in London's Trafalgar Square or in Punjab's sarson ke khet. Normally, things can change when you get down to the nitty gritty of shooting. Yet, everything seemed to fall into place at the locations and at the studio. Somebody up there was making it go all-right for me.
What do you have to say about the controversy over the script of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge... following Honey Irani's statements that she was denied credit?

I can answer that question only by saying that ever since I can remember the only thing I ever wanted out of life was to make films... the dream was to make films which were commercially successful and critically acclaimed. But the most important part of the dream was the sense of belonging, the feeling of being part of a group of wonderfully talented people.

Today after the success and appreciation of my film, I should feel that the dream has come true. But I don't. Because there is a doubt about my honesty, integrity and capabilities. As I told you, I've always believed that one's work should speak for oneself. So, I think I'll have to start all over again from the beginning - try and work harder, try and write a better script, make a better film and hope that it will meet with this kind of success and appreciation again. Hopefully then, there won't be any doubts left. Hopefully then, I'll feel that I belong here. Believe me, that's my honest response to your question... and that's all I will ever say on the subject.

Okay... were Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol your first choices for the roles of Raj and Simran?

Initially, I was keen to do the film with newcomers. But I sensed that the key scenes called for a high level of performance. Being new myself, perhaps I couldn't have extracted the kind of performances I needed. Kajol was the natural choice - she's the best... her potential hadn't been sufficiently tapped... I feel it still hasn't been tapped enough.

As for Shah Rukh, he hadn't done a pucca love story before. His negative image even helped me. To start with, the audience feels unsure about the boy - is he a haraami sort of fellow, a mischievous guy? The audience's trust in him was won slowly but surely as the story unfolded.


How did you handle your two lead players?

Their scenes and their characterisations were clearly defined. I just tried to create the right ambience for them... and let them be. I just held the reins in my hand, controlling them, pulling and pushing them according to the requirements of the scenes.

Often, both of them went beyond the script and the direction. I thought Kajol was brilliant in the scenes with Faridaji and Amrishji and also in that close-up when she meets Anupam. And Shah Rukh was outstanding in the climax... the bridge scene where he has to convey a sense of pain and anguish. Actually, I can't really be objective... I feel close to all the scenes.

A romance was suggested between Anupam Kher and Himani Shivpuri. But why was that nipped in the bud?

It was just a cute flirtation. If I had carried it forward, it would have distracted the audience's attention again from the main plot. It wouldn't have been correct to intrude in the romance between Raj and Simran. I did want Himaniji to be part of the group in the last shot, when the train is pulling out of the station. But her husband had passed away and she couldn't be there. If she was present at the schedule, I would have thought about this angle a bit more. It could have been a light touch at the end.

After Hum Aapke... and Dilwale Dulhania... won't elaborate wedding and engagement scenes become a staple of the Hindi movies?

I did not imitate Hum Aapke... Whatever I've shown was dictated by the script. The shaadi backgrounds in both the films were integral to the storylines. It was to catch the feeling of festivity, of celebration. After Hum Aapke... and Dilwale Dulhania, it has been understood that you don't always need to have plenty of action and a frantic pace. If I believe in what I'm saying then so will the audience.

You have stressed the sanctity of the family unit. But is that feasible in this day and age when the joint family structure is splintering?

I think family oneness is the essence of being Indian. To preserve the family unit isn't something rigid, regressive or backward at all. In fact, the west should learn a lesson from our family system. If there has been a splintering of the structure, I would say that these are exceptions to the rule. By and large, a solid family background is the base of every individual in our society. Also, you don't have to live together to feel close to one another. I would say that emotional togetherness and the respect for one's elders in India make us special.

You've touched upon the issue of the Indian settled abroad. Was this deliberate?

No, it wasn't deliberate. I wanted to create the character of a rather rigid father - to enhance his rigidity, I felt that the character of Amrishji could be shown to be far away from his roots. In a sense, he is a displaced person and yet his outlook is very stubborn. Without intending to, I touched upon the issue of the major generation gap that exists between Indian immigrants and theirchildren.

Have you used any moments from your own life in the film?

There's nothing from my life inDilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. But given the situations in the story, I would have reacted just the way Raj did. I put myself completely into the character.

Have you known a Simran?

(Laughs) No! Simran is like a collection of different girls. I've been very lucky to have close friends who are girls. Through them I've learnt how a girl reacts, behaves and thinks. Simran is also a little bit like what I'd want in a girl... how I think she should be. What am I saying? Forget this... please.

Don't get coy now. You tell the entire nation to "Come... fall in love." But have you ever fallen in love?

(Blushes cherry-red) Of course, I have... when I was in the third standard! I fell in love with a classmate because I saw her crying. She wasn't very lovely or anything like that... but I wanted to rush out to her and be nice to her. I felt this is what love is all about. Today, I'm still waiting to define love... to understand it fully.

So when will you get married?

Not for a very long time. What is this? What are you asking me? See, I'll get married when I meet a girl I want to spend the rest of my life with.

Would you go through all that Raj did?

Absolutely... if I love the girl to the extent that Raj did.

You haven't fallen in love to that extent yet?

Not really.

So what does love mean to you today?

(After a long pause... a half-smile) Let me see if I can put it in words... Hmmm... love is the emotion when you feel for and respect a person so much that you put that person above everyone else. According to me, respect is the most crucial part of love.

What do you feel about the sexual permissiveness of the '90s?

(Blushing violently again) Sex is there... it's on everyone's mind. You just have to know when to exercise self-control and not take advantage of the other person.

That people talk about sex, that it has come out into the open is a good thing. Mercifully, we aren't as repressed as we used to be. But when the talk becomes vulgar and excessive, I don't approve of it.

After a mega-success, another director would have announced his next project quickly. Why are you resting on your laurels?

I'm still trying to recover from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. I have to get it totally out of my system. If it still lingers in my mind, I'll end up merely making it all over again. I want to start afresh... and that moment could come next week, next month or next year.

Finally... what do the three Fimfare Awards mean to you?

I feel good, great. But also a bit scared, I don't know if I'll be able to live up to the higher expectations from me now on. The maximum satisfaction comes, of course, with box office success. And after that if you win awards, then you can't possibly ask for more.

Whither film criticism in the age of Rotten Tomatoes?

BARRY AVRICH

Special to The Globe and Mail

Last updated Thursday, Sep. 11 2014, 3:36 PM EDT

Film critic Roger Ebert saw himself as ‘the bridge between audiences and foreign, independent and documentary films.’

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Perhaps there is irony in selecting the print medium to explore the criticism of film criticism and the rise of cyber film critics, armchair bloggers and tweeters that might be leading to its alleged demise. And while this debate is hardly news, the emotion and passion was never more heated than after the sold-out Cannes screening of Life Itself, the Roger Ebert documentary that I attended in May.

Full disclosure: I’ve had my share of negative reviews from film critics; and yes, I often warm myself with words once imparted to me by the actress Tyne Daley on a flight from Los Angeles: “Barry, a film critic is someone who never actually goes to the battle, yet who afterwards comes out shooting the wounded.” Or my personal favourite from comedian David Steinberg: “Critics are like piano players at a gang bang.”
But I would be lying as a filmmaker if I denied the power, art and emotion of film criticism and the anticipation of opening the paper next day to see if I need a picture frame for a review or fish to wrap it in.
In Cannes, after the screening, several of us met to toast Roger and discuss whether there remains an audience for informed film criticism, and if reviews still have the power to influence the box office or an artist’s career as they did in the halcyon days of the best practitioners, such as Pauline Kael (The New Yorker), Andrew Sarris (Village Voice), André Bazin (Cahiers du Cinéma) and Stanley Kauffmann (The New Republic). It was Kael who wrote: “The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.”
In the Ebert documentary, Time Magazine’s film critic Richard Corliss is forced to apologize to Ebert for his attack in a 1990 essay in Film Comment. Possibly driven by self-importance, Corliss labelled Ebert as a “television evangelist” and “junk food” peddler arguing that the “well-turned phrase has been replaced by a gaggle of thumbs.” Ebert responded passionately: “I am the bridge between audiences and foreign, independent and documentary films.” Ebert attributed the malaise of film journalism to studio-driven marketing campaigns targeting “a star-obsessed public with choreography that puts a star on the cover of Vanity Fair and robotic appearances on a swarm of talk shows.”
Almost 25 years after Corliss’s essay, when I took the debate to a few current practitioners and influencers, the response was heated and enthusiastic.
Director Atom Egoyan, just back from Cannes, argued that critics still have a huge impact on creating awareness for new filmmakers and indie work, but “a new generation of cinephiles is less interested in following ‘guru’ critics and are looking for online aggregate scores. … There is a glut of film critics and it’s very tough to be discerning and to follow someone the way you used to follow Sarris or [The Times’s Vincent] Canby.”
“I remember when you walked out of a movie and read the blow-up review in the lobby to tell you why you loved the movie,” says Michael Barker, co-founder of Sony Classics, one of the most enduring indie film distributors.
Robert Verini, a regular contributor to Variety, observes: “Critics have the power to shape the commercial destiny of independent films in both mainstream outlets or on popular sites where Beasts of the Southern Wild or Winter’s Bone can get attention.”
Veteran Toronto Star critic Peter Howell argues that “readers expect critics to be consistent and also to give honest opinions, not just ones designed to impress other critics.”
While critics can influence indie films, Verini says, they have “much less power to shape the destiny of Hollywood product.” He references the power of social media – especially within small friend groups that can “largely determine which big studio films or gross-out comedies will smash or crash.” And he points to the online review aggregator, Rotten Tomatoes: “If all critics are aligned against a movie, its freshness factor will be low and the pic will likely tank, but individuals’ powerful words have little or no impact.”
The Globe and Mail’s Liam Lacey argues that “there were only ever a very few film critics that could be singled out as having a significant influence on moviegoers’ buying habits.”
TIFF artistic director Cameron Bailey agrees with Lacey but is more emphatic: Critics never had “absolute power to shape any film’s destiny.” Bailey points to a demographic shift: “Millennials simply aren’t as interested in being told what’s good and what’s not. They’ve grown up curating all the music, movies, TV shows, books and games in their life, and figure they can decide for themselves.”
Hot Docs’s head honcho Chris McDonald is even more discouraged: “The ivory tower of film criticism has been infiltrated by the great unwashed. We live in an age where the average filmgoer is more interested in Rotten Tomatoes than The New York Times.”
Michael Barker argues, however, that “with 25 films opening every Friday, the public needs guidance, especially with indie films. There are too many choices.” He adds that “there’s still a premium on thoughtful commentary, and most of that you’re still likely to find in print. However, we have less time for them.”
“‘Olympian’ doesn’t work well any more,” observes Vanity Fair’s David Margolick. “We’re more skeptical: A.O. Scott, senior film critic for The New York Times, is much less influential than Vincent Canby, just as Thomas Friedman will never have the influence of a Walter Lippmann or James Reston.” He warns that critics have to be more courageous: “They’re afraid of offending editors or friends or film-industry moguls – they don’t.”
Lacey agrees: “I think newspaper film reviewers, me included, still aspire to a kind of snappy condescension and irony that had an anti-establishment appeal but now feels trite. …” And he adds: “If you ever write any phrase that can be used for a studio pull-quote followed by many exclamation marks, you’re a lost soul.”
A.O. Scott of The Times says: “I’m not convinced that film critics ever had much power over a film’s immediate commercial fate, and plenty of moviegoers have always been happy to ignore what critics write.” Scott is passionate about the enemies of print, as was Ebert so many years ago: “I think advertisers, publishers and those who don’t see much of a purpose in the independent-minded assessment of film and other art forms use this as an excuse to abandon it.”
Adds Lacey: “Advertising dollars have shrunk and news editors feel more comfortable with objective Monday-morning box-office reports than subjective reviews.”
When I asked producer Harvey Weinstein, the subject of one of my documentary films and a man who easily used the power of reviews to shape iconic film campaigns, he took another position. “There’s no question that in the age of social media, anyone and everyone can be a film critic of sorts. However, I think those types of DIY movie reviews are only effective on the basis of quantity, not quality. It’s about that singular, powerful opinion that belongs to a known and trusted cinephile” he says.
And Weinstein has advice for film critics: “It’s not enough to just love movies, critics have to embrace the digital age.”
Richard Crouse, a critic who covers every possible medium in film criticism from television to print and online to radio, agrees. “Mini-reviews are often posted on Twitter before the end credits have stopped rolling, and for big critic-proof movies like Transformers: Age of Extinction, good or bad, those comments generate audience engagement.”
So is film criticism actually at death’s door or just moved to another medium? “Criticism as a profession is in some trouble, but criticism as an activity is an intrinsic and essential part of the life of any art form,” says Scott, who adds, “For the smaller number who are interested in criticism – as something to read and, increasingly, as a conversation to join – the influence and variety of criticism has never been greater.”
Roger Ebert had the last word before he died: “Those that still care about film criticism will always read film criticism.” Long live the film critics.
Barry Avrich is a Toronto-based director, producer, author and marketing executive. His films include The Last Mogul and Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Project.

Follow us on Twitter: @GlobeArts

Is indie really taking over Bollywood? > Ravikant Kisana

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Is indie really taking over Bollywood?

> Ravikant Kisana takes a stock of independent cinema in India which is at the mercy of Bollywood oligarchs for distribution

By Ravikant Kisana • Published on June 4, 2014

Illustration by Aniez Del Mono

Recently, a friend called me after having attended a talk from a leading ‘indie’ producer of Mumbai. The talk was meant to give young, ‘indie’ cinema enthusiasts, an insight into the world of ‘indie’ cinema finance, production and distribution. The producer gushed about Anurag Kashyap on more than one occasion. He is a genius. He has an eye. My friend, who had recently been to a few of these talks, called me with a slightly perplexing question – why is the name of Anurag Kashyap ubiquitous at such places?

why Anurag Kashyap is synonymous with the Indian ‘Indie’ scene – it is quite simply, because he ‘belongs’ to the scene. Or as his growing legion of admirers would put it, he ‘is’ the scene.

To a lot of people who work in the film industry, this is a non-question to begin with. The Anurag Kashyap success story is a well-documented one. He has been celebrated, and rightly so, as the pioneer of a new kind of aesthetics in stories, acting talent, music, cinematography and sound engineering. He has also acted as a conduit between the Indian cinema industry (represented by Bollywood and its ancillary cinemas) and the larger global film fraternity. One finds it difficult to think of any other contemporary filmmaker from India who has hobnobbed with international acting and production talent at film-festivals around the globe, presented his films on equal terms (and not as some exotic ‘Indian’ project) and got distribution rights picked up by major distribution companies.
In short, to answer my friend’s question, why Anurag Kashyap is synonymous with the Indian ‘Indie’ scene – it is quite simply, because he ‘belongs’ to the scene. Or as his growing legion of admirers would put it, he ‘is’ the scene.
That last sentence is the take-off point for this piece. But where one possibly differs from other such observations is on the count that one thinks this is not a reality that is to be celebrated. It is rather a cause of concern.
To begin with, let us try and understand what this scene is about. No terminology, fashionable in the tradition of ‘Italian Neo-Realism’ or ‘German Expressionism’ or the ‘French New Wave’ has stuck to it yet (I’ve heard of terms like ‘Hindi New Wave’ etc. being bandied about but so far there have not been too many takers). The scene is usually referred to as the ‘Indie cinema’ movement. What exactly makes a film ‘indie’ in this context is unclear at its best.
Trying to define ‘Indie’ or independent cinema in a more literal sense would make one ask the foremost logical question, what exactly is this cinema trying to get independence from? Cinema aesthetics? Filmmaking conventions? Finance and distribution models? Perhaps all of them together, then? This is a question that no scholar or critic or practising filmmaker/producer/actor seems to want to answer. And this is not a trifling question; it is a very important one with ramifications for the manner in which cinema development is unfolding.

The belief is that by making consistently good, thought-provoking cinema, the ‘indie’ movement is challenging the ‘Bollywood formula’, and is slowly but surely taking over it. The growing bonhomie between the Bollywood Czars and Anurag Kashyap is a proof of that.

There seem to be parallel cinema economies developing. The traditional Bollywood production powerhouses led by Dharma, Yashraj etc. along with the newer media conglomerates of Disney UTV, Balaji and all, have cornered the film production business neatly amongst themselves. They are also involved directly in the distribution and exhibition of the films they produce, by having a stake in the multiplex-led, urban city screening system.
What this effectively means is that everything from the production to the screening of the film is controlled by a handful of powerful entities each headed by a powerful cinema Czar (Aditya Chopa, Karan Johar, Siddharth Roy Kapoor etc.). Among them, they have complete control of what passes of as the Bollywood cinema of India. Which is why if an extremely talented and passionate filmmaker from Indore or Udipi wants to make a film – the only way he/she can get the production and distribution muscle behind the project to ensure a country-wise release is if one of these big Czars back it.
Access to the Bollywood film industry as an actor or a technician is heavily guarded and has always been dependent on an almost feudal blessing of these ‘big’ names. One cannot just walk into a studio’s office, secure an appointment with someone, give an interview and get a break. Here, only insiders are welcome.
It was exactly this sort of an ‘insider only’ club that Anurag Kashyap himself took over a decade to break into. He famously became an icon by representing the hope that talent and passion can still get you past the gates controlled by these power satraps of cinema. He became a beacon of hope that once he got in, he would work towards opening the gates so that a thousand cinemas could bloom. He was the antithesis to the hegemony of the corporate-financed, production-oligarchy oriented Bollywood cinema.
The belief is that by making consistently good, thought-provoking cinema, the ‘indie’ movement is challenging the ‘Bollywood formula’, and is slowly but surely taking over it. The growing bonhomie between the Bollywood Czars and Anurag Kashyap is a proof of that. Everybody wants to talk to Anurag Kashyap. Everyone knows it is good for business. It surely cannot be bad for Indian cinema if for instance, Karan Johar is moving away from his ‘formulaic’ films to endorsing the ‘Kashyap’ brand of cinema.

Bollywood is quietly appropriating the ‘Indie’ movement within its vast, cavernous folds. The ‘Indie’ scene depends entirely on the Bollywood oligarchy for distribution.

The hypothetical coming together of divergent forces, the famed Dharma’s muscle and Kashyap’s cult-creating aesthetics – that is surely a good fit. In fact why only Dharma, everyone wants such an arrangement. Everyone wants a piece of the pie. All the Czars want their own ‘indie’ gold. Surely the good days of ‘indie’ cinema are here now. And they seem too good to be true – ‘indie’ cinema is slowly transforming Bollywood, one hears the excited whispers of fan boys and girls.
On the surface, there seems to be considerable merit in this line of thinking. However, that is precisely what it is, an ‘on the surface’ reading.
It is not the Bollywood mainstream that the ‘Indie’ movement is taking over, but exactly the opposite. Bollywood is quietly appropriating the ‘Indie’ movement within its vast, cavernous folds. The ‘Indie’ scene depends entirely on the Bollywood oligarchy for distribution. Without the blessing of a major Czar, no film – not even Kashyap’s — can get a national release in the multiplex-screening model. Cases in point are the recent ‘Indie’ classics like Ship of Theseus, Lunchbox, Shahid, Miss Lovely etc. For all their aesthetic appeal, each of these films had to depend on the backing of a major Bollywood Czar to secure national marketing and release. In some cases, these films had been lying finished for years waiting for someone to take an interest in releasing them.
As of today, if an aspiring filmmaker wants to join that pantheon of modern-Indie greats of Indian cinema – this is roughly the path. Firstly, the filmmaker has to make a really good film from next to no money. Then, he/she has to possess enough enterprise to see to it that their film can travel to big international festivals. At these festivals, he/she has to ensure there is enough slick PR and buzz around their production for it to not get buried in the schedule.
Once the film has been through enough of these, the filmmaker has to sit tight and hope that the news, awards & PR around their production is exciting enough for one of the Czars to take note. Finally, two or three years after the film was completed, after countless festivals and awards, the film might get a national release in the multiplexes (depending on the lull weekend slots available on the calendar that have not been cornered off by the big studios amongst themselves). The film will then be marketed and released after the name of the patron Czar has been added under ‘Produced by’ or ‘Presented by’ in top billing, even though the latter has had almost no role in the making of the film itself.
The industry is full of such finished films, which are hoping that some studio biggie will take an interest in their project and give it a release. Young filmmakers are all trying to pitch the ‘next Lunchbox’ to the Czars, and in trying to appeal to the alternative content filters of these mainstream houses, the ‘indie’ scene is itself falling into a formula of what is considered alternative. The outliers will not get space in this eco-system of Bollywood-approved, indie geniuses.
To be considered ‘indie’ or ‘independent’, the filmmaking has to be truly independent of the existing oligarchy. There has to be space for a cinema to exist and be sustainable beyond the cinema of the Czars, beyond the 100-crore club and multiplex openings.  Is the Anurag Kashyap-led movement tending to that? Not really.
Anurag Kashyap, along with his extended circle of friends & collaborators, has either knowingly or unknowingly, allowed himself to be appropriated by Bollywood. By becoming part of the larger Bollywood machinery, he has now himself become yet another Czar. He is the need of the moment for the Bollywood oligarchy – a credible face of ‘standard’ cinema that can be marketed nationally and internationally to cater to that ‘discerning’ segment of film-lovers in India who are now big enough as a group to demand specific content. While this may be good for the said actors in question, it is by and large, completely detrimental to any development of independent filmmaking in India.
Anurag Kashyap has become the stamp of approval for any kind of alternative cinema development. What is not approved by him is possibly not ‘exciting’ enough or was not ‘relevant’ enough. The clamour over the non-selection of ‘Lunchbox’ was a case in point. In a thoroughly disgusting and petulant display of righteous indignation, Anurag Kashyap and (his friend Karan Johar) raged significantly on the social media. India’s best chance of an Oscar triumph had been squandered. How could we be so sure? Why, because Kashyap had said so. The reasons given for the film’s assured success were also extremely interesting – the said film had the backing of a major US studio and had gathered a lot of goodwill at the circuit. It was interesting that these reasons be mentioned, because on that count, a film like Lucia, non-Kashyap approved and made from crowd-funding (which one can consider truly indie from a financing perspective at least) would never be considered for selection.
So is that the message of the story? Only films with major studio backing and the validation from a studio-approved auteur should be considered for such international honours? Wonder what the great Satyajit Ray would have to say to that? How would he know anyway, not like he won an Oscar or anything.
From the perspective of good cinema development, I would argue that the need is not to hand the baton of trusteeship to a select few geniuses, to mentor the ‘movement’. The need of the hour is to do the opposite, to democratise filmmaking and let all kinds of people make all types of films. The idea is to encourage pluralist cinema traditions, both good and bad. But unless there is an initiative towards an alternative or ‘indie’ (if you will) distribution model – none of this is possible.
The need of the hour is to lobby and create screening spaces that are independent of the Bollywood-multiplex Czarist machinery. A multiplex should be only ‘one of the places’ where you can see a film, and ‘not the only place.’ YouTube need not be the only platform where aspiring filmmakers screen their work.
For starters, the Internet offers a ‘small-screen’, ‘non-community’ viewing experience. The idea of a ‘screening’ where a collected audience gathers is critical to the understanding of cinema itself. It would require a certain imagination and social entrepreneurship to make such places mainstream. A chain of small 20-30 seater, mini-theatre with moulded plastic chairs, with a canteen serving chai and samosa could be the answer. Let a thousand filmmakers bloom, let a thousand films bloom – different languages, different styles, each city having its own small geniuses the way metal and hip-hop in India have small but very opinionated sub-culture spaces. Let us have those spaces, and we’ll leave the 100-crore Dhoom-extravaganza to the Bollywood multiplexes.
Coming back to the original point of the piece – is Anurag Kashyap interested in seeing such a development emerge? I doubt it. By not claiming the distribution and exhibition space, the indie scene-makers have let the movement down terribly. The same filmmakers who ranted against the exclusionary nature of Bollywood Czars, are now not even blinking twice before accepting their blessing and perpetuating the same inaccessible structures. It is after all, far more profitable to become the toast of Cannes film festival (with the backing of the Czar-approved media budget & PR blitz) than to try and open independent screening spaces for young filmmakers in Indore or Udipi. It is not like you need to do the latter to be called a true ‘Indie genius’ anyway.
Lastly, this article has used the persona of Anurag Kashyap almost as a punching bag. The idea is definitely not to paint him as a monster, because he is not that. Someone might even argue that he is not as ubiquitous to the scene as this article makes it out to be. The point of this article was not to demonise a person or a scene.
The point of this article was to consider the alternative possibilities that have been and are being lost. The point of this article was to challenge young filmmakers to think beyond making a ‘festival film’ and breaking free from the model. The point of this article was to exhort individuals to seriously consider imaginative attempts at creating inclusive and independent screening spaces. The point of this article is to rouse those aspiring filmmakers who have a personal YouTube channel with 87 views for the short-film made for the college filmmaking competition – point is to rouse them to challenge the Gods and the Czars, not seek their validation.
The point of this article is to be fearless. Because unless you are fearless, you have no business being in cinema, independent or not. A good start would be, perhaps, not seeking a ‘special thanks’ from Anurag Kashyap but asking him what he has done for us? I mean, why shouldn’t we ask him that. Who’s afraid of him, anyway?
Ravikant Kisana is a film theorist with a focus on the developing independent cinema movement in India. He has completed his PhD thesis on the cultural memory of Bollywood in Kashmir and currently theorizes on the semiotic changes in the aesthetic mores of contemporary cinema in the country. He is also the founder of Azad Talkies, an independent, ‘garage’ studio that is interested in producing and screening alternative cinema.

Tagged with: Anurag Kashyap, Indian independent cinema, indie cinema

Caught in the Act What drives Al Pacino?

Profiles September 15, 2014 Issue

Caught in the Act

What drives Al Pacino?

By John Lahr

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“This is what I’m meant to do,” Pacino says of acting. “With this, everything suddenly coheres, and I understand myself.” Credit Photograph by Dan Winters

Nearly fifty years ago, when Al Pacino was at the start of his career, Marlon Brando gave him two pieces of advice: don’t go to court and don’t move to Los Angeles. At seventy-four, Pacino has managed to avoid the courts but not Beverly Hills, where he has taken up reluctant residence, for more than a decade, in order to share custody of his now thirteen-year-old twins, Anton and Olivia, with their mother, the actress Beverly D’Angelo. (Pacino, who has never married, also has a twenty-four-year-old daughter, Julie Marie, an aspiring writer and filmmaker.) Every half hour or so, an open-topped tour bus crawls its way along the wide, manicured boulevard where Pacino holes up for most of the year, with a cargo of rubbernecking out-of-towners, cameras at the ready. Inevitably, they stop in front of his rented house, which, like the actor, is elegantly dishevelled. Green canvas has been woven through the bars of the long iron fence to hide the place from street level; low-hanging Indian laurel trees seal off any visible signs of life from above. Nonetheless, the buses stop, the guides burble, and the tourists crane for a sign of the actor or his children. On my second day with Pacino, I happened to be parked in front of his house as a tour bus rolled up. The guide leaned down. “You were here yesterday,” he said. “You know Al?” I nodded. Above me, camera shutters clattered.

At that moment, Pacino was reclining in a deck chair at the far end of a wide lawn behind the house, doing business on a cell phone. Beyond him was a fenced-off swimming pool, and beyond that was what he calls “the bunker” (as in “I hunker in the bunker”), a drab beige outbuilding, where he sometimes goes to incubate his roles. Pacino was dressed for the bright day in his usual sombre getup: black jacket, shirt, slacks, and shoes, with a long gray cravat loosely knotted at the chest. He keeps a well-pressed assortment of these dark camouflage outfits on a wardrobe rack in the alcove off his living room, alongside his infrequently used barbells and a folded-up running machine. His comfortable house, with its absence of texture, is remarkable for its indifference to externals: no paintings, no designer furniture or fripperies. Pacino’s focus, the house makes clear, is resolutely inward.

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As an actor, Pacino has always been unafraid to do what he needs to in order to be in the moment; he trusts his instincts and explodes with whatever feelings come up. Performing, for him, is not so much a profession as a destiny. “This is what I’m meant to do,” he told me. “It’s the cog in my life. With this, everything suddenly coheres. And I understand myself in that way.” Pacino has given complex shape to some of his era’s most memorable creations: Michael Corleone, the college boy turned Mafioso, in “The Godfather” trilogy (1972-90); Frank Serpico, the police whistle-blower, in “Serpico” (1973); Tony Montana, the Cuban drug lord, in “Scarface” (1983); the hapless thief Teach, in “American Buffalo” (1983); Sonny Wortzik, the would-be bank robber, in “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975); the gangster Big Boy Caprice, in “Dick Tracy” (1990); Ricky Roma, the smooth-talking salesman, in “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992); and Roy Cohn, the closeted lawyer, in the HBO version of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” (2003)—to name just a few of the more than a hundred roles he has taken onscreen and onstage. In recent years, he has painted brilliant, eerie film portraits of such obsessives as the euthanasia activist Jack Kevorkian, in Barry Levinson’s HBO movie “You Don’t Know Jack,” and the eponymous swami of rock and roll, in David Mamet’s HBO film “Phil Spector.” Pacino regrets that many of his Hollywood movies of the past decade (“Righteous Kill,” “The Son of No One,” “88 Minutes,” “Jack and Jill”) have been business chores, taken on for primarily financial reasons. “If you don’t have that alacrity of spirit, then you have to check yourself—because where’s the pony in all this horseshit?” he said. “I worked for United Parcels once, and I don’t want to have that feeling with my own craft—that it’s just a job.”
Because of the protean nature of his attack, Pacino has often been compared to Brando, another truth-seeking force of nature. When Pacino was thirteen and performing in a school play, an adaptation of “Home Sweet Homicide,” he already identified so strongly with his role that when his character was supposed to get sick onstage he became nauseated. (“Somebody came up and said to my mother, ‘Here’s the next Brando.’ I said, ‘Who’s Brando?’ ” Pacino recalled.) But between Brando and Pacino there is this crucial difference: Brando, who, over time, became reclusive and indifferent to acting, disappeared into his gift; Pacino has survived his—and is still working to refine it. “I believe I have not reached my stride, which is why I persist,” he told me in an e-mail. “The day I turn to you and say, ‘John, what I just did in this role was a real winner,’ I hope you’ll have the courage and decency to throw a wreath around my head, and then so very quietly and compassionately shoot me.”
Pacino has three films awaiting release in the next year: Barry Levinson’s “The Humbling,” in which he plays an aging actor who has lost his magic; David Gordon Green’s “Manglehorn,” a film about an eccentric small-town locksmith; and Dan Fogelman’s “Danny Collins,” an amiable redemptive fable about a slick pop star who wants to turn his art and his lush life around. At seventy-four, Pacino sometimes asks himself, “When am I just gonna sit back and smell the golf balls?” But, with two new movies waiting in the wings (Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” about the man who supposedly killed Jimmy Hoffa, and a Brian De Palma bio-pic about Joe Paterno), and a David Mamet play, “China Doll,” in the works for Broadway in 2015, the answer is not soon.

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Most of Pacino’s house has been ceded to his kids. The den is a sort of Camp Pacino, overflowing with toys: a pinball machine, a drum kit, electric guitars, dolls, a mound of games, balls, rackets, and swimming gear crammed into baskets against the back wall. A low table holds a sprawling Lego construction in progress. Outside, a punching bag hangs incongruously beside the patio barbecue. (It’s there for Pacino’s son; when I asked Pacino if he used it, he said, “Like Oscar Wilde, whenever I get the urge to exercise I lie down until it passes.”) Pacino usually spends weekends with the twins, because “their mother knows I’m a slacker at the homework.”

At one point, Olivia came in to ask a favor:

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Olivia: Daddy, I really want to see the boy next door. He usually comes over by the weekend.
Pacino: Does he really? But I don’t even know what his name is. What’s his name?
Olivia: I forgot. It’s been so long since I’ve seen him.
Pacino: Do you want to go over and say— What do you want me to do? Me? I’m the— What am I, the go-between?
Olivia: No. Just see if Jared [Pacino’s weekend assistant] can call.
Pacino: But Jared’s not here. He could do it tomorrow, when he comes in. Do you want Mike [Pacino’s regular assistant] to do it now? Mike will do it.
Olivia: I don’t think Mike knows anybody there.
Pacino: Jared knows someone there? Ask Mike if he could just find out.

Pacino’s father left him and his mother when he was two, and he carries the shadow of that abandonment with him. “It’s the missing link, so to speak,” he said. “Having children has helped a lot. I consciously knew that I didn’t want to be like my dad. I wanted to be there. I have three children. I’m responsible to them. I’m a part of their life. When I’m not, it’s upsetting to me and to them. So that’s part of the gestalt. And I get a lot from it. It takes you out of yourself. When I do a movie, and I come back, I’m stunned for the first twenty minutes. These people are asking me to do things for them? Huh? I’m not being waited on? Wait a minute. Uh-oh, it’s about them! That action satisfies. I like it.”
He pointed out a watercolor beside the fireplace. “My son painted this when he was four. ‘New York in the Fall,’ ” he said, then steered me back into the living room and deposited me on a sofa to watch “Wilde Salomé,” a docudrama he directed, starred in, and largely bankrolled, which premières this month. The film represents Pacino’s eight-year attempt to “inhale” Oscar Wilde by chronicling the mounting of a 2006 Los Angeles production of Wilde’s 1891 tragedy, in which he was Herod to Jessica Chastain’s Salomé. (“Wilde Salomé” will be released in tandem with a film of the play itself.) Pacino first encountered “Salomé” in London in 1989, without realizing that it was written by Wilde. “Who wrote this? I’d like to know this person,” he recalled thinking. “I just felt a connection. A kindred spirit. I think it was a mischievousness, a subversiveness.” Pacino relates to Wilde as an outsider. “I feel like an outsider who got on the inside, so I’m inside out, if you know what I mean. Or outside in,” he said.
Like “Looking for Richard,” Pacino’s 1996 movie about Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” “Wilde Salomé” is a dramatic mosaic that jumps from historical facts to performance to interview to enactment. Pacino is the director yelling at the crew to hurry up; he’s the lubricious Herod eying his gorgeous daughter; he’s the interviewer prodding Tom Stoppard, Tony Kushner, Gore Vidal, and Bono to talk about Wilde; he’s the professor offering tidbits of Wildeana; and he’s the anthropologist trudging through the desert with kaffiyeh and camel. At one point, Pacino, with a carnation and a floppy handkerchief in his jacket pocket, even pops up as Wilde himself.
Part of Pacino’s fervor for Wilde comes from a desire to claim the writer’s intelligence and eloquence. “I’m quite timid when it comes to challenging the status quo,” he said. “Oscar had the brains to back it up.” Pacino, whose formal education ended in tenth grade, grappled for years with a sense of intellectual inadequacy. Early in his career, after a breakthrough performance in Israel Horovitz’s 1968 play “The Indian Wants the Bronx,” Pacino appeared on “The Merv Griffin Show,” and, in front of a television audience of millions, he froze. “He just couldn’t do it,” Horovitz recalled. “He felt he had nothing to say. He was humiliated by his own presence. He wasn’t the character he was playing—he was Al.” Pacino’s devotion to acting is, in a way, a defense against that self-doubt. Having a script to work from gives him, he said, a kind of license. “I can talk, I can speak, I have something to say,” he explained. “You don’t need a college education. All the things that you were inhibited to talk about and understand—they can come out in the play. The language of great writing frees you of yourself.”
Most actors of Pacino’s stature—Brando, Jack Lemmon, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro—began in theatre and rarely returned. Pacino, however, craves the derring-do of working in front of a live audience, an activity he compares to tightrope walking. Stage acting, he likes to say, quoting the aerialist Karl Wallenda, is life “on the wire—the rest is just waiting.” Onstage, in the zone, he told me, “you’re up in the sky with the theatre gods—love it, love it, love it.” As a list of some of Pacino’s more esoteric stage work demonstrates—Eugene O’Neill’s “Hughie,” Bertolt Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,” Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and “The Merchant of Venice”—the theatre is where he goes to challenge himself and to think. “There are more demands put on you when it is on the stage,” he said.
To Pacino, there is no such thing as a fourth wall. “The audience is another character in the play,” he said. “They become part of the event. If they sneeze or talk back to the stage, you make it part of what you’re doing.” Once, when he was performing “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,” the first play in David Rabe’s Vietnam trilogy, in Boston, in 1972, Pacino made a strong connection with a pair of penetrating eyes in the audience. “I remember feeling a focus I never experienced before—intense, so riveting that I directed my performance to that space,” he said. “I found at curtain call for the first time that I needed to find out who belonged to those eyes. So, as we were bowing, I looked over to the space where I believed the look was coming from and there it was, two seeing-eye dogs still looking at me. They must have found the curtain call as engaging as the performance.”
Acting, according to Pacino, is about “getting into a state that brings about freedom and expression and the unconscious.” Mamet compares Pacino’s excavations of his characters to the way Louis Armstrong played jazz: “He’s incapable of doing it the same way twice.” While Pacino was shooting his last scene for the movie “Devil’s Advocate” (1997), in which he played Satan, for instance, he suddenly broke off from the script to launch into a rendition of “It Happened in Monterey.” “It’s just absolutely out there, surreal and brilliant,” the actress Helen Mirren, whose husband, Taylor Hackford, directed the film, said. In the final movie, Pacino lip-synchs to Frank Sinatra’s version of the song; according to Mirren, the studio had to pay “a huge sum for the rights, but it was worth it.”

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Pacino sometimes develops his characters by observing others. When he was working on his performance in “The Indian Wants the Bronx,” he would walk for hours with Horovitz. “What he was doing was finding a character in life,” Horovitz told me. “He’d spot a guy on the street and go, ‘Wait, wait, wait!’ We’d follow the person for hours, just to observe the walk, the posture. And the costume was important, too. He had to find the costume, rehearse in the costume, live in the costume.”
“Some actors play characters. Al Pacino becomes them,” Lee Strasberg, the longtime director of the Actors Studio, said. “He assumes their identity so completely that he continues to live a role long after a play or movie is over.” Once, when Pacino was playing Richard III in Boston, Jacqueline Kennedy came backstage to greet him. “I didn’t even get up,” he said. “I was so into it that night that I continued to be the King. I can almost not forgive myself for that.”
When preparing for a role, Pacino has a tendency to circle the airport before arriving at his destination. “I’m a slow learner,” he said. “I don’t believe in memorizing lines. That’s not how I come upon a role. My thing is eventually coming to the words, making the words part of you, so that they’re an extension of your emotional state.” Pacino’s “nibbling away at a character,” according to Barry Levinson, is a subtle process. After the first few readings of the script for “You Don’t Know Jack,” Levinson recalls wondering “when Kevorkian will show up.” “I remember we were in wardrobe. Al had his hair done, and his suit. We were talking and, all of a sudden, I could sense that Kevorkian was coming alive,” he said, adding, “Once he latches on, then he’s off to the races.” At the finale of “You Don’t Know Jack,” after Kevorkian has unsuccessfully defended himself in court, the judge looks at him and asks if he wants to take the stand. Pacino doesn’t answer at first. “It takes literally a minute,” Levinson said. “He’s trying to decide if the defense rests. It’s a brilliant moment. No words—it’s a look, a glance, small things that really inform the character.”
Over the years, there have been rumblings about Pacino’s overacting. He can certainly roar; he can pound the furniture; he can go big with the facial expressions; he has made some dud movies. But the drama, for Pacino, is almost always inherent in the character he’s hoping to convey. His portrayal of the blind Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade in “Scent of a Woman” (1992), for instance, was considered hammy by some, but, in Pacino’s thinking, the character was a lunatic—a suicidal, narcissistic man who drew attention to himself through his affectation of swagger—and he played him that way. “I paint the way I see it, and some of the colors are a little broader and a little bolder than others,” he said, adding, “Sometimes you take it to the limit, sometimes you may go a little overboard, but that’s all part of a vision. I say, go with the glow. If an effort is being made to produce something that has appetite and passion and isn’t done just to get the golden cup, it isn’t a fucking waste. Yes, there are flaws, but in them are things you’ll remember.”

Pacino protects his talent by leaving it alone, which accounts for his vaunted moodiness. “There are various superstitions connected with reaching his center, and he doesn’t want to discuss them ever,” Mike Nichols, who directed Pacino in “Angels in America,” said. “He’s consulting somewhere else. And the somewhere else does not have to do with words.” Pacino almost never talks shop. When he was at the Actors Studio, in the late sixties, whenever Strasberg gave him notes, he said, “I would actually count numbers in my head not to hear what he was saying. I didn’t want to know. I thought it would fuck up what I was doing, where I was going with my own ideas.”
Even Pacino’s speech patterns, which forge a kind of evasive switchback trail up a mountain of thought, serve as a defense against too much parsing of his interior. “Al is dedicated, passionately, to inarticulateness,” Nichols said, pointing out that in conversation Pacino has no “chitchat.” Playing dead in social situations is his instinctive strategy. “He was so sensitive that he was insensitive to his surroundings,” Diane Keaton, with whom Pacino had an on-again-off-again relationship in the seventies and eighties, wrote in her memoir “Then Again.” “Sometimes I swear Al must have been raised by wolves. There were normal things he had no acquaintance with, like the whole idea of enjoying a meal in the company of others. He was more at home eating alone standing up. He did not relate to tables or the conversations people had at them.”
Pacino refers to acting as “close to magic.” To invoke that spell, he observes many rituals, which sometimes include shaking hands with everyone on a film set before shooting a scene, and heading off for a walk before going onstage. “The calm before the storm—only sometimes the calm becomes the storm,” he explained. In 2012, when he was appearing in Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” on Broadway, Pacino was skulking around midtown in a hooded coat when a parking attendant accosted him. “ ‘You! Get out! What are you doing here?’ ” Pacino recalled him shouting. He added, “Oh, it felt so good.”
While working on his first production of “Richard III,” in 1973, at the Church of the Covenant, in Boston, Pacino and his assistant developed a pre-show routine for launching him into the role of the anarchic, manipulative “lump of foul deformity” who would be king. Pacino’s dressing room was the church rectory. “She’d peek through the door and say, ‘Half hour,’ then, ‘Fifteen minutes.’ She’d come back again and say, ‘Five minutes.’ I would say, ‘Fuck off,’ each time,” Pacino told me. “She’d say, ‘The audience is out there waiting for you.’ And I’d say, ‘Fuck off!’ She’d say, ‘I’m coming to get you.’ She’d grab at me, and she’d throw me out of the dressing room. I guess it was the right spirit, because it worked. They called me out six times after I bowed.” After the show, he added, “I would bawl my eyes out. I roused so many things in myself.”

Pacino’s allegiance to the stage, his compulsion to connect with a live audience, is due, perhaps, to a need to re-create his relationship with the person he calls his first and “indeed my best audience,” his mother, Rose. To be seen and to be accepted was the promise behind his early performances. The theatrical interaction gives him, he said, “a sense of being at home, together again.”

Pacino’s father, Salvatore, was eighteen when Alfredo was born, in East Harlem, in 1940, and twenty when he left. He paid a few memorable visits, twice going to see his son perform in high-school plays, but Pacino saw very little of him, even after he had become a star. By then, Salvatore, who married five times and for decades worked as an insurance salesman for Metropolitan Life, owned Pacino’s Lounge, a restaurant and bar in Covina, California, where he frequently joined the band to sing, play the maracas, and shake his booty. “When a friend met my dad, he looked at him and said, ‘There it is with you, Al. I see it. The survivor,’ ” Pacino said. “I got that from my dad.”

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Rose, according to Pacino, was a reader who had “a sensitivity and a connection to the theatre.” She took Pacino to see Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” on Broadway. She was playful, with a good sense of humor, but also volatile and reclusive. She often refused to leave her room when company came over. “She reminded me of a Tennessee Williams character. She would have been a really good Laura, also a good Amanda. She had both,” Pacino said, referring to Williams’s play “The Glass Menagerie.” In other words, she was a troubled, fragile, controlling, somewhat hysterical soul, who fought a losing battle against her own desperation. Despite the family’s meagre income, Rose scraped together enough to pay for visits to a psychiatrist. To treat her chronic depression, she resorted to electric-shock therapy. Eventually, she became addicted to barbiturates, which may have been the cause of her death, at forty-three, in 1962. The stain of her possible suicide hangs over Pacino’s memory of Rose. “Poverty took her down,” he said. Not long before she died, Pacino recalls rushing to a casting session for Elia Kazan’s “America America.” “I had one of the few fantasies I’ve ever had in my life,” he said. “I would do well, my mother would be O.K. with it all, and I could say, ‘Mom, we got it. We’re gonna make some money. It’s gonna be O.K.’ ” As it happened, Pacino arrived late and missed the audition.
After Salvatore left, Rose and Sonny (as Pacino was known throughout his childhood) moved in with her parents, James Gerardi, a plasterer who was an illegal immigrant from Corleone, Sicily, and his wife, Kate. In their cramped three-room apartment in the South Bronx, which sometimes housed as many as seven people, Pacino never had a space of his own. (“I remember years of sleeping between my grandmother and grandfather,” he said.) At the same time, he was an only child, often left to his own devices. “I was always sort of building stories, creating stories,” he said. “It was a way of filling up the loneliness.”
Storytelling ran in the family. In warm weather, Pacino’s grandfather, with whom Pacino had what he calls “one of the great relationships of my life,” would sit with him on the tar roof of their tenement and spin tales about his rough Dickensian youth in turn-of-the-century New York. “He got the shit kicked out of him by cops with helmets and big clubs—‘You little wop! Get over here, you stinking Guinea!’ ” Pacino said. “He’d talk about running away from home, living off the farms, how he would steal milk. He just loved talking to me, like we were on some little rowboat.” The roof, Pacino added, “was our terrace. There was this cacophony of sound—the Poles, the Jews, the Irish, the German, the Spanish. This definitive melting pot is what I came from. In some Eugene O’Neill plays, you hear the same thing.”
Among many odd jobs, Rose worked as a cinema usherette, and when Pacino was three or four she began to take him to the movies. “The next day, I would act out all the parts,” he said. “I think that’s how it started.” Pacino was often coaxed into performing scenes for his extended family, which included a deaf aunt. His party piece was an imitation of Ray Milland in “The Lost Weekend,” playing an alcoholic writer desperate for a drink. Pacino would open cupboards and doors, pretending to search for a hidden stash of booze. “I never understood why they were laughing, because I didn’t think it was funny,” he said. “But I knew it produced laughs.”
On Bryant Avenue in the forties and fifties, people escaped their small, hot apartments to sit on stoops or hang out under street lamps to roll dice or play poker. To disarm bullies and find friends, Pacino used the same strategy on the street that he’d used at home: he performed and enlisted others to perform with him, earning the nickname “the Actor.” “We’d act out parts from joke books and comic books,” he told me. “Kids make videos today, but it was kind of an unusual thing then to get street urchins to join you in acting out comics. Of course, it never got off the ground; there’s a comedy in there somewhere.” “He was always full of drama,” said his neighbor Ken Lipper, who would later become the deputy mayor of New York and a producer and screenwriter of “City Hall” (1996), in which Pacino starred. “He loved to take on different personae. He used to go to 174th Street and pretend he was a blind child.” Pacino’s bravado and good looks got him noticed. “The girls in the neighborhood would say, ‘Sonny Pacino, the lover bambino.’ The boys would say, ‘Sonny Pacino, the bastard bambino,’ ” Pacino told me. “It started early.”
Pacino was smoking at nine, chewing tobacco at ten, and drinking hard liquor at thirteen. He walked the edges of rooftops and jumped between tenement buildings. His favorite place was “the Dutchies,” a swampy labyrinth on the Bronx River, where truant kids hid in high marsh grasses. Pacino played third base for the Police Athletic League team, the Red Wings, which became a “quasi street gang,” with Al as its de-facto leader. In black wool jackets with a red stripe down the sleeve, the Red Wings patrolled their turf and protected it from roaming invaders, like the Young Sinners and the Fordham Baldies. Once, when they were twelve and sitting on the steps of a tenement after finishing a game of stickball, Lipper said, “some guy came over who was thirtyish and started menacing us. Al got up and whacked him with the stick.” Pacino’s wild crew, “tough kids with high I.Q.s and tragic endings,” became a template on which he modelled many of his memorable characters. “These people were a springboard for my profession,” he said. “They were part of what I consider the best time in my life.”
Pacino was less popular with the authority figures around him. “I wasn’t out of control, but I was close,” he said. “My mother had to come to school to talk to the teachers. Their conclusion? That I needed a dad.” When Pacino’s junior-high-school drama teacher, Blanche Rothstein, climbed the five flights of stairs to talk to his grandmother about his acting skills, it was, he said, “the first time I ever had encouragement.” He went on, “The world we came from, the encouragement just wasn’t there. We weren’t seen. Or we weren’t regarded. Do you think ever, once in my life, my mother or any adult ever said, ‘How was school today?’ Never! It was unheard of.” Nonetheless, Ms. Rothstein spotted a spark when Pacino read Bible passages in school assembly—“I didn’t know what I was talking about, but I felt it,” he said—and she cast him in school plays. Thanks to his talent, at the end of junior high Pacino was voted “most likely to succeed.”
Pacino was accepted into Manhattan’s High School of Performing Arts, which meant that his South Bronx street life was more or less a thing of the past. “All that remained was acting,” he said. His stay at the school, however, was a short one. “You gotta be kidding,” he told his Spanish teacher, when he discovered that the class was conducted entirely in Spanish. And he found the Stanislavsky method boring. “What does a kid who was thirteen, fourteen know about Stanislavsky?” he said. “All I knew was you sing, you dance, you have fun, you imitate. Now I was looking at my navel twenty-four-seven. It took me I don’t know how many years to get over that.” By his own admission, Pacino was a “dunderhead” at academic work, and by the time he dropped out of school, at sixteen, to support his mother, he was ready to go. Rose, who had at first approved of his ambition, now saw it as foolhardy. “Acting isn’t for our kind of people,” she told him. “Poor people don’t go into this.” Pacino said, “I didn’t know what she was talking about. On an unconscious level I did, but it didn’t mean anything to me. I’m a survivor. Survivors only hear what they want to hear.”
Between odd jobs, Pacino attended auditions, where he soon learned that, as an Italian-American of a certain class and demeanor, he didn’t “look right” for most parts. His instinct was to bide his time. “I knew, when the opportunity came, all I’d have to do is be there,” he said. But his mother’s death, when he was twenty-one, sent him into a tailspin. Within a year, his grandfather, too, was dead. Pacino had buried the two people to whom he was closest. “And I had no father,” he said. “I think that was my darkest period. I felt lost.”

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On Pacino’s living-room mantelpiece is a small moody photograph of him in profile in his early twenties, in an Off-Off Broadway production of August Strindberg’s play “Creditors.” The image marks the seminal moment, he said, “when I knew that nothing mattered except that I became at one with the play.” “Creditors,” a tragicomedy about a credulous young artist whose mind is poisoned against his wife by her bilious ex-husband, was directed by Charlie Laughton, an actor turned acting teacher at the Herbert Berghof Studio, whom Pacino first met in a Village bar when he was seventeen. Laughton, who’d also had a hardscrabble early life, recognized both Pacino’s talent and his difficult circumstances. Over time, he became Pacino’s mentor, his sidekick, his drinking buddy, his dramaturge, and, ultimately, his business partner. Laughton also introduced the teen-age Pacino to the works of Joyce and Rimbaud. “He would read them, and then I would read them myself,” Pacino told me. In those knockabout years, he added, “I dealt with whatever was bothering me through reading. You could not find me without a book.”

Still, in the early days of rehearsing “Creditors” Pacino, surrounded by classically trained actors, panicked and wanted to quit the show. Laughton sat him down and went through the script with him until he fully understood what was going on. Pacino had been spooked in that way before, in his Off-Off Broadway début, in a production of William Saroyan’s “Hello Out There,” which grew out of Laughton’s classes. Pacino’s first line got a laugh, but he didn’t understand the joke. In the alley, during intermission, he burst into tears and didn’t want to continue. Laughton talked him through it. “It was a very important moment for me,” Pacino recalled. “I went back in there and finished the run.”
Laughton, who was for years wheelchair-bound with multiple sclerosis and who died in 2013, at the age of eighty-four, remained an emotional bulwark for Pacino until the end. Pacino visited him in his last days, at a hospital in Santa Monica, and they got to talking about the time that Pacino was taking Laughton’s class at the Berghof Studio and performed a scene from Reginald Rose’s “Crime in the Streets” in front of Berghof and the rest of the school. After he finished, he said, “Berghof got up there and started to put me down. He started screaming at me, ‘How dare you!’ He was absolutely flipping out.” Pacino asked Laughton, “What was going on?” “A new era,” Laughton said. “He saw a new era.”

On January 17, 1967, for his first scene at the Actors Studio, Pacino presented a monologue from Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” which morphed into a soliloquy from “Hamlet.” It was risky, but, as Pacino said, “It’s a risk not to take risks.” Breaking a long-standing Studio tradition, the audience of actors applauded his performance. Lee Strasberg then asked Pacino to play O’Neill’s character, Hickey, as Hamlet, and Hamlet as Hickey. Afterward, he addressed Pacino. “The courage you have shown today is rarer than talent,” he said. Pacino had broken through. “I was now an actor,” he said. “I had an identity.”

He spent much of the next year in Boston doing plays (Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing!,” Jean-Claude van Itallie’s “America, Hurrah”), in which, he said, “I played notes that fell flat and I didn’t connect.” But when Israel Horovitz delivered his one-act “The Indian Wants the Bronx” to Pacino, in a messy basement room in a building on West Sixty-eighth Street, where he was earning fourteen dollars a week as a superintendent, Pacino found the perfect vehicle—a script about two taunting teen-age louts in the Bronx who take out their frustrations on an Indian man at a bus stop.
Over the next months, Pacino and Horovitz performed the play in and out of town to raise interest in a production. But when a producer was eventually found she had her own ideas about casting. “On audition day, she brought in the actor she wanted: blond, blue-eyed, tall, untalented,” Horovitz wrote in a memoir. “I said no, absolutely no. She said, fine, O.K., she wouldn’t produce the play. I said, ‘Let both actors audition.’ ” Pacino was furious with Horovitz for putting him in this position; since he didn’t belong to Actors’ Equity, he was forced to attend an open call. “It seemed like every young, non-union actor in New York City showed up that day,” Horovitz recalled. When it was Pacino’s turn, he came out singing, then crossed to downstage center and looked directly at the producer:

Hey, Pussyface, can you hear us?
Can you hear your babies singin’ to ya?

“Startled and terrified,” according to Horovitz, she agreed to cast Pacino.

“The Indian Wants the Bronx” opened at the Astor Place Theatre, on January 17, 1968. Of all the débuts I attended in more than fifty years as a theatre critic, Pacino’s was the most sensational: immediate, arresting, and inexplicable. “I saw an actor up there with a shaking jaw, who was on the verge of tears,” Horovitz recalled. “The circumstance of the play was bringing him to a deep place of pain. And the audience connected to this terrible sense of humiliation, of unworthiness.” Pacino won an Obie for Best Actor, and a Tony the following year, for his performance in Don Petersen’s “Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?”

“All I could see was Al Pacino’s face in that camera. I couldn’t get him out of my head,” said Francis Ford Coppola, who nearly got fired from “The Godfather” (1972) for insisting that Pacino play Michael Corleone, the educated youngest son of Don Corleone, the Mafia kingpin. The studio lobbied for such bright box-office names as Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Ryan O’Neal. But Mario Puzo, who wrote “The Godfather” and adapted it for the screen, came to Coppola’s defense and gave him a letter to be used at his discretion. “Above all, Pacino had to be in the film,” he said.

On the day of his first screen test, however, Pacino was hung over: he didn’t know his lines, and he ad-libbed the scene. Puzo felt that Pacino “was terrible. Jimmy Caan had done it ten times better.” Puzo went over to Coppola. “Give me my letter back,” he said. “Wait a while,” Coppola said. Pacino tested three times for the role. The back-and-forth agitated him to such a degree that he finally refused to take Coppola’s calls and made the actress Jill Clayburgh, his girlfriend at the time, speak for him. “ ‘Francis, you’re making him crazy. He doesn’t want to be where he’s not wanted,’ ” Pacino recalls her saying.
When Pacino was finally offered the part, he almost couldn’t take it. A few months earlier, he’d signed on for an adaptation of the Jimmy Breslin book “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” and M-G-M and the producer, Irwin Winkler, refused to release him. Winkler and Horovitz were sharing a house on Fire Island, and Pacino begged the playwright to intercede on his behalf. “This was the door opening, and they wouldn’t let him out of his contract,” Horovitz recalled. “I went crazy with Irwin, and he said, ‘You find me a young Italian actor that’s as good as Pacino, and I’ll let him out.’ ” Horovitz took Winkler to see a performance by a young unknown named Robert De Niro. “He took De Niro, and he got two options on Pacino and two on De Niro,” Horovitz said.
After Pacino got the “Godfather” role (for which he was paid a flat fee of thirty-five thousand dollars), he walked from his apartment, on Ninetieth Street and Broadway, to the Village and back, thinking about how he’d play it. “I didn’t see Michael as a gangster,” he said. “I saw his struggle as something that was connected to his intelligence, that innate sense of what’s around and being able to adjust to things.” He added, “The power of the character was in his enigmatic quality. And I thought, Well, how do you get to that? I think you wear it inside yourself, and you find a way to avoid, as much as you can, the obvious.” However, after his first week of avoiding the obvious, according to Pacino, “they wanted me fired—they didn’t see what I was doing. Luckily for me, the Sollozzo scene”—in which Michael earns his Mafia spurs by executing two men in a Bronx restaurant—“was the next day. When they saw that scene, they kept me.”

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Pacino’s performance in “The Godfather” put him at the center of one of the great cinematic sagas of the century and on a first-name basis with the world. He was showered with accolades and offers. (Coppola asked him to star in “Apocalypse Now,” but he declined. “You know, sometimes you look into the abyss?” Pacino said. “I’m, like, this is the abyss. I’m not gonna go there.” He also turned down “Star Wars,” “Die Hard,” and “Pretty Woman.”) But perhaps the most satisfying response came from Puzo, who wrote, “It was, in my eyes, a perfect performance, a work of art. I was so happy . . . I ate crow like it was my favorite Chinese food.”
Pacino’s other great early successes—“Serpico,” “The Godfather, Part II,” and “Dog Day Afternoon”—only added to his momentum. But, of all his performances in those years, the sleeper was his embodiment of the garish, vulgar, sensationally violent Tony Montana, an impoverished Cuban refugee who becomes the most powerful drug trafficker in Miami, in “Scarface.” The role was dismissed as “macho primitivism” at the time, but, over the years, it has emerged as a challenger to Michael Corleone as Pacino’s most popular creation. The director, Brian De Palma, designed “Scarface” as a kind of hyperbolic pageant. “The picture had a fire to it,” Pacino said, in “Al Pacino: In Conversation with Lawrence Grobel.” “The violence blown up, the language blown up. The spirit of it was Brechtian, operatic.” To play Montana, Pacino drew inspiration from the swagger of the Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran and from Meryl Streep’s committed rendering of the traumatized Polish immigrant Sophie, in “Sophie’s Choice.” As an actor, Pacino said, “you’re always looking for that thing that’s going on besides the words.” In “Scarface,” he connected with Montana’s raging ambition and the rebelliousness in his epigrammatic lines: “All I have in the world is my balls and my word, and I don’t break them for no one”; “You know what capitalism is? Getting fucked!”; “You wanna play rough? O.K. Say hello to my little friend!”

In the twenty years following the release of “The Godfather,” Pacino made seventeen films and was nominated for an Academy Award six times. (He finally received one, in 1993, for his performance in “Scent of a Woman.”) But he was discombobulated by the distractions of his success. “I felt like the fighter that was in Round 8, exhausted in the corner, they’re pouring water over my head and rubbing Vaseline on my face, then ding went the bell, and I was back out there in another film,” he recalled. “It was a whirlwind.” Pacino disappeared into work, and, after hours, into a bottle. “I don’t remember much of the seventies,” he said. “All that stuff—the explosiveness of my life change. It would be almost fair to say I wasn’t really there. It was too much for anyone to handle.” Eventually, Laughton called Pacino on his alcohol abuse, which had been a constant since he was a teen-ager. He stopped drinking in 1977.
During his first year of sobriety, a time of great stress, Pacino made “Bobby Deerfield,” a plodding Sydney Pollack melodrama, in which he played a celebrity race-car driver, who hides his vulnerability behind sunglasses and a carapace of toughness. His next movie, “Cruising” (1980), William Friedkin’s thriller about a serial killer who targets gay men—which sparked protests in the gay community—was “a terrible experience” for Pacino as well as for the critics. “Author! Author!” (1982), which was written by Horovitz, was also a bust. “Scarface” came out to mixed reviews, and was followed by “Revolution” (1985), in which Pacino played a Scottish fur trapper with a Bronx accent, who gets embroiled in the Revolutionary War. “Revolution” was proof, if more was needed, that on the Hollywood merry-go-round Pacino had lost track of who he was. The movie cost twenty-eight million dollars to make and grossed less than $360,000. It was one disaster too many.
In a radical move, at the height of his celebrity, Pacino called a halt to movie-making and moved to Snedens Landing, in Palisades, New York, with Diane Keaton. There he settled, he said, “into something that was wonderful with Diane and my life. I didn’t feel rushed or that I had to put out. I felt relatively content.” The stoppage was a crucial emotional recalibration. “It is the very nature of fame that the light is on you a lot,” he said. “I sort of wanted to turn the light out of my face, so I could see.”
Pacino’s return to New York was also a return to theatre. He appeared in Dennis McIntyre’s “National Anthem” at the Long Wharf Theatre, in New Haven. He played Mark Antony, in a disastrous “Julius Caesar” at the Public, a role he could never find his way into. But his main creative focus was on “The Local Stigmatic,” a little-known 1969 one-act by Heathcote Williams, about two British ne’er-do-wells who grievously harm a famous actor whose success enrages them. Pacino produced and starred in a fascinating film version of the play. “I took almost a year to edit this fifty-two-minute play,” he said. “I had no one wanting it to work or not work. It was under my control. I was free.” (The film was never released theatrically but was included in the DVD boxed set “Pacino: An Actor’s Vision.”)
Although Pacino remembers this time as “probably the best period” of his adult life—“It was as close to egoless as I’ve ever been”—four years into his self-imposed exile from Hollywood he was running out of money and Keaton was running out of patience. One day, according to Pacino, she read him the riot act. “What do you think you’re doing?” he remembers her saying. “Do you think you’re gonna go back and live in a rooming house again? You’ve been rich too long, buddy. You can’t go back. You think you’re on the A-list, but you’re not. You’re out because you put yourself out. You’ve got to go back to work.” Keaton added, “This script. This is your thing. This is what you’ve got to do.” She handed him Richard Price’s screenplay for “Sea of Love.” “It was so sweet of her,” Pacino said. “It was so giving, so caring. I have to say, she was right.”
“Sea of Love” (1989), the story of a cop in a midlife crisis who falls for a woman who may be the killer he’s pursuing, made a star of Ellen Barkin and restored Pacino’s box-office clout. In the next five years, he made “Dick Tracy,” “The Godfather, Part III,” “Frankie and Johnny,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Scent of a Woman,” “Carlito’s Way,” and “Heat.”

As Pacino paced his living room, a tall, striking woman with long auburn hair swept in, draped an arm over his shoulders, and pulled him to her, like a swan taking a cygnet under its wing. Lucila Sola, a thirty-five-year-old Argentinean actress, spoke in Latin-inflected English. “I am his longest relationship—seven years,” she said, by way of introduction. Sola, who studied law and sociology before switching to acting, is the latest in a long line of strong, smart actresses with whom Pacino has been involved—Tuesday Weld, Kathleen Quinlan, and Marthe Keller, among them. The two met at a dinner party in 2005, when his twins were four and her daughter, Camila, was seven. They were both dating other people, but their kids got along and they found themselves going to movies together, swimming in Pacino’s pool, taking trips to San Diego, the beach. “We were friends. For two years—two years—nothing,” Sola said. “When people ask, ‘How long have you been together?,’ I say, ‘Forty-nine years.’ A year with Al is like a dog year because it’s so intense.” She explained, “He’s a medium. He’s channelling something. When he’s doing a part, it’s hard to be around him because he’s very different. Al has left the building.”

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The conversation turned to Diane Keaton’s bittersweet second memoir, “Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty,” which had been published the week before and in which she discussed “the lure of Al.” “His face, his nose, and what about those eyes?” Keaton wrote. “I kept trying to figure out what I could do to make them mine. They never were. . . . For the next twenty years I kept losing a man I never had.” Sola expounded on the astuteness of Keaton’s observation. “Al has this ephemeral, childlike quality about him,” she told me. “His friend Charlie used to say he’s like smoke. He’s there, but he’s not there. That’s maybe what drove the women crazy. You want to catch him, but you can’t because Al is—”
“Leave John alone,” Pacino cut in, bringing the conversation effectively to an end.
Sola had persuaded Pacino to accompany her to a friend’s birthday bowling party the next day. That evening, complaining about the “fucking bowling shoes”—“I can’t stand putting on my shoes every day. Imagine putting on bowling shoes,” he said—Pacino got behind the wheel of his white Range Rover and headed for Lucky Strike, in Hollywood, which turned out to be more of a bowling den than an alley.
A bookshelf extended from the entrance into the large underlit space; jokey signage—a poster advertising “10 Rules for Sleeping Around”—hung from the walls; from a distance, beyond the bar, came the echo of ricocheting pins. The birthday girl, Kam, in blue satin shorts and a diamanté tiara, waved Pacino and Sola over to the leather banquette where her posse of svelte girlfriends and their men were huddled. While Sola plunged into the crowd of chatty celebrants, Pacino took a barstool at a table behind them and ordered a plate of barbecued chicken. As he ate, the standup comedian Billy Bellamy, who is credited with coining the phrase “booty call,” appeared. “We’re blessed, man,” Bellamy said. “I’m blessed. You killed in that Liberace shit, man.”
“That was Michael Douglas,” Pacino said, wiping barbecue sauce off his fingers.
As Pacino was putting on his bowling shoes, a Lucky Strike staffer approached. “Sorry to disturb you,” he said, holding up his cell phone to indicate a promotional photo op. “But would you mind?”
“I don’t do that,” Pacino said.
Sola pulled him away toward the party. “Once that starts, it’s over,” she said.
Pacino guttered his first ball. His second swerved left and picked off five pins. By the next frame, his score was fifteen. He sat down on the sofa.
“I usually get myself into a Zen place and am just very quiet,” he told me later. “People give you room when you get real quiet with your disposition.” At the bowling party, however, the tactic wasn’t working. The phones came out, and Pacino was swarmed with requests for selfies. Having done his duty, he slumped back down on the couch. From his body language, Sola could tell that the night was over. Thirty minutes after they arrived, she was leading Pacino toward the exit.
In the garage, he fumbled for his parking ticket and couldn’t find it. “You know me, I’m in pictures,” he said to the attendant. At the exit, he struggled again, this time to fit his new ticket correctly into the machine. The barricade finally lifted. “I’m a natural, baby,” he said, as he accelerated into the balmy night. “I just pick things up.”

In mid-2010, Pacino learned that his business manager, Kenneth I. Starr, had been arrested for embezzling his clients’ money in a Ponzi scheme. (Starr is currently serving seven and a half years in prison.) There had been warnings. Early on, Mike Nichols, who had taken his money out of Starr’s company, had raised suspicions. “I’ll get to it,” Pacino told Nichols. “Then I never got to it,” he said. “Millions of dollars were gone,” Sola said. “Gone.”

Pacino took the loss in stride. “I thought, Hey, this is the world. It’s real,” he said. “Not one day I saw him down or depressed,” Sola said. “He was, like, ‘O.K., now what do we do? Roll up our sleeves and go to work.’ ”
Pacino’s agent, John Burnham, told me, “In his halcyon days he made around fourteen million a picture, but the industry’s changed. Nowadays, he gets five million. With a gun—seven million.” It has taken Pacino four years to work himself back to a position where, he says, “compared to a normal person, I have a significant amount.” He sold a Snedens Landing property, did commercials, took out a loan, and signed on for Adam Sandler’s dismal but profitable “Jack and Jill” (2011)—a “kids’ movie,” according to Pacino, in which he sent up both his legend and his financial predicament. In the film’s best moment, a hip-hop ad for Dunkin’ Donuts, Pacino can be seen dancing and pitching the “Dunkaccino”: “You want creamy goodness / I’m your friend / Say hello to my chocolate blend.”
“I’ve recently come to terms with the fact that I can only do something I am creatively connected to,” Pacino told me. “The Humbling,” based on the 2009 Philip Roth novel, which Pacino optioned, is part of that mission. The novel tells the story of a depressed, aging actor whose talent is slipping away and who tries to rejuvenate himself through an affair with a younger woman (who in the movie is played by Greta Gerwig). “I liked the idea that an actor is losing it and wants to revive not so much his career as his life, and finds that there’s no life there,” Pacino said. “He’s trying to be a real person, and discovering that he doesn’t have the appropriate tools to do this. I felt that these things were sad and almost farcical.”
Barry Levinson, the director, who enlisted Buck Henry to write the screenplay, was also taken with the novel. “It was a great character study,” he said. “We wanted to flesh that out a little bit more, to apply some of the things that Al’s gone through in his life, and, hopefully, not in a super-serious fashion. There’s a dark comedic trail to the piece.” The film was undertaken with a freewheeling spirit. “We did a lot of improvisation,” Levinson said. “ ‘The Humbling’ is about as homemade a movie as you can make. We made it for two million dollars in twenty days. We shot part of it in my house, because we didn’t have enough money to go somewhere else.”
Pacino’s legend is based on the films of his youth, for which he drew on his anger, his sexuality, his energy. The films he’s interested in now tend to dwell, like “The Humbling,” “Manglehorn,” and “Danny Collins,” on old age and the issues of decline. They are of a different amperage and a different spiritual mind-set. They are not, so to speak, the rock-’em-sock-’em Pacino of old but a new Pacino: a man who is consolidating his family, regretting some of his life choices, and living under the strictures of his fame.

In late June, I met up with Pacino in Boston, one of the twenty-three cities in which he would be performing “Pacino: One Night Only,” a business junket disguised as a lap of honor. The promoters referred to this form of entertainment as “talk theatre.” In essence, Pacino was taking himself on the road. He had flown in late the previous night from Ottawa, where he’d sold out a twenty-six-hundred-seat theatre at the National Arts Centre. In Boston, he was at the Wang Theatre, a fun palace built to hold thirty-seven hundred customers, who were shelling out up to a hundred and seventy-nine dollars a seat—plus an extra three hundred if they wanted to attend a meet-and-greet after the show.

June 14, 2010Buy or license »

A slick eight-minute montage of clips from Pacino’s movies opened the evening. He told Sonny Corleone, “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business”; he shouted, “Attica! Attica!”; he jumped Ellen Barkin’s bones. When Tony Montana drunkenly turned on the scowling patrons of a swank restaurant (“Say good night to the bad guy!”), the audience roared. The lights came up, and Pacino entered to a standing ovation. He let the volley of sound wrap around him, then, with his hands clasped together in front of him, he bowed low.
After a few reverent questions from Ty Burr, the Boston Globe’s film critic, who was his interlocutor for the evening, Pacino picked up his legend and ran with it: performing as a kid for the deaf aunt (“started my overacting, I guess”); the high-school teacher who called him a prodigy (“How do you spell that?”); when he knew he had “it” as an actor (“I hope I never do”). Pacino played off the hoots of approval—“riding the bull,” he calls it—taking the audience into his confidence, and, when he went off course, letting it guide him back to his story. “Where was I? Oh, yeah—I was a superintendent. . . . I put an eight-by-ten picture of me on the door—kind of looking handsome. Underneath, I wrote ‘Super.’ And there wasn’t a girl that went into that apartment that I didn’t go after!”
Afterward, at the meet-and-greet, Pacino sat on a stool in front of a camera for forty-five minutes while premium ticket holders lined up for a photograph. The night before, he had obliged a blind woman who handed off her cane and asked him to dance. Tonight, the fans approached him solemnly, like communicants, uncertain how to arrange themselves beside their icon. Some leaned in, some stood apart, some asked if it was O.K. to put an arm around his shoulder. (It was.) One woman planted a kiss on Pacino’s cheek, then placed a lily and a rose in his lap. Another woman, in formal evening gloves and a gray dress, who positioned herself in front of Pacino to speak to him, told me later that she had devoted her life to theatre after seeing Pacino act in “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,” on her twenty-first birthday, thirty-nine years before. “He gave me a passion for the theatre,” she said. “It was a great gift.”
At Logan International, a private jet was waiting to take Pacino and his crew to New York. “There’ll be a crowd at the airport,” Pacino warned me, as the bags were loaded into his two-car convoy. As predicted, a group of autograph hunters were waiting like spectres outside the reception area. “It’s their job,” Pacino said. “At first, I didn’t know. I just thought they were strange people who kind of looked alike, but they do it for a living.” As he got out of the car, the scrum of about twenty pushed forward. “Al! Al! Over here, Al!” they called, flourishing photographs and memorabilia. Head down, Pacino walked straight through the glass doors and into the bright silence of the lounge.
At takeoff and landing, Pacino crossed himself and kissed his fingers. During the flight, he talked about another kind of blessing he’d felt that day. In the late afternoon, with his bodyguard a hundred feet away, Pacino had spent an hour on Boston Common, sitting unnoticed on a bench and watching the passers-by. “It felt like I was back on the block, back home,” he said. “I felt lonely, but I always feel that way. I could feel connected to myself, just like when I sat there fifty years ago. I started there, in that park and that town. I didn’t feel I had changed. I was still me. The park was still the park. I’ll remember that moment.” The temporary anonymity had brought “a kind of peace,” which, he said, “is pretty much a luxury.” Later, he told me, “I haven’t been in a grocery store or ridden the subway in fifty years. My kids have a difficult time going out with me publicly. We have yet to go on a camping trip. But one day I want to rent a small house on a lake. It’s my dream—I don’t know how to get to it yet, but I’ll give it another year.” Still, he said, “I’m fine not having anonymity. I’ve learned how to live with the other thing, and the sort of enjoyment that comes with that. It ain’t bad.” He added, “Not that I recommend it, but, like they say, you should try it sometime.” ♦
Watch John Lahr’s commentary on films from Al Pacino’s career.