Pacino: Kevorkian Role Unlike Any He Ever Played
Only a handful of people have won an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony Award for best actor. The combustible, gritty, larger-than-life Al Pacino is on that short list.
Next week he will turn 70 years old. The day before his birthday, he'll star in an HBO movie playing Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the crusader for assisted suicide. It's one of Pacino's meatiest roles in years. Though he has made a living in front of the camera, he's notoriously private.
But at this point in his life and career, with a new movie he's proud of, he decided now was a good time to talk about himself and his most important roles, including the one that made Al Pacino - Michael Corleone in "The Godfather."
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"When you were on the set of that movie, did you realize this is going to be more than a movie? It is going to be a classic. Did you have any conception of that?" "60 Minutes" correspondent Katie Couric asked Pacino.
"No. Just get me through the day," he replied, shaking his head.
Asked if he was that miserable, he told Couric, "Oh, I mean, with Diane, and I'll never forget it. We did a scene there, at the table…at the wedding, and we went home that night, just got drunk, and we just said this movie's going to die."
Not only did Pacino think the movie was going to bomb, he never expected to get the part playing opposite Diane Keaton.
A successful stage actor, he was virtually unknown in Hollywood when director Francis Ford Coppola picked him to play the pivotal role in the movie.
"Nobody wanted you in the role but him," Couric remarked.
"He was the only one," Pacino recalled.
Pacino says executives at Paramount were adamantly against casting him, and even dismissed him as a little runt.
Only after being made to audition four times did the studio reluctantly give him the part. But Pacino didn't feel secure in the role and worried he might be dropped even after filming began.
"And even Francis started to lose it a little bit because I wasn't producing what they expected at that time. And I kept thinking, 'Well, it's gonna come later,' you know," he recalled.
"Because you wanted to show how Michael evolved, how he became…one of them," Couric remarked.
"I had this in my head, I worked on it for a long time before we went to shoot, for months, I mean, I just focused on that character," he replied.
"But what happened was, they got to do the Sollozzo scene, where Michael shoots Sollozzo…they kept me after that," Pacino explained.
Asked what he thinks the studio execs saw in that scene, Pacino said, laughing, "Well, I shot somebody and it worked."
That scene transformed Michael Corleone from war hero to mobster and launched Pacino's career.
His movie career spans four decades - 42 films and eight Oscar nominations.
His performances are often defined by volcanic moments, so much so that some of his directors wonder where his intensity comes from.
"Sidney Lumet once said of you, 'Everything stems from some incredible core inside of him, that I wouldn't think of trying to get near because it would be like getting somewhere near the center of the Earth,'" Couric quoted.
Pacino reaction to that statement? "Whoa!"
"But where does sort of the explosive nature of your performance, where does that come from?" Couric asked.
"We all got that in us. I see it every day. I see it in babies, I see it in animals, I see it in people all the time," Pacino replied.
He was talking about rage. "It's right there in everybody. It's just that actors access these things."
A conversation with Al Pacino twists and turns, drifts and digresses. His mind goes in so many different directions at once, following him isn't always easy.
But it's this kinetic thought process that serves his acting so well. He used to walk from one end of Manhattan to another, talking to himself, trying to absorb his character. His latest character is controversial Dr. Jack Kevorkian.
In the film he looked and acted eerily similar to the real Dr. Kevorkian. How did he do it?
"What I did with Jack Kevorkian is I worked. I went into my little bunker by the house. A lot of acting is private time," he explained. "I'm watching the pieces. I'm reading the script. I'm listening to the sound of him. It's like work."
When he took on the role of New York cop Frank Serpico nearly 40 years ago, he became so immersed in the part he had trouble getting out of character.
"I was in a cab once, and I was Serpico. I was playing Serpico. And there was this truck, and for years, it's been a pet peeve of mine when they blow out that carbon monoxide from the back and it's all black. It pisses me off, really. So I saw that thing and I just rolled down my window and I just, 'Pull over!' 'Pull over!' I was going to pull him over and put him under a citizen's arrest, I guess," Pacino recalled.
Pacino was raised on the rough streets of the South Bronx by a single mother and his grandparents.
He dropped out of high school at 16 and eventually headed to Greenwich Village to act in small plays. His only money came from tips; he was broke and homeless.
"You learn to go without food," Pacino recalled.
"But, you were sleeping in, under storefronts and…stages," Couric remarked.
"I remember at one point I would sleep there at night on the stage. They had a lovely couch. It was very comfortable," Pacino replied.
But he got his first break when he was accepted at the Actor's Studio in midtown Manhattan, where Marlon Brando, James Dean and Paul Newman were trained in method acting, which teaches actors to draw on their own life experiences.
Asked if he thinks he'd be successful today if the studio hadn't been in New York, Pacino said, "Well, it think it had a lot to do with my success because when I was younger they weren't hiring people like me to play in Shakespeare, or anything else, or Moliere or Noel Coward. You could do everything here."
On the streets of Greenwich Village today, walking with Al Pacino feels like old home week, where he is stopped by passersby.
Asked if it happens wherever he goes, Pacino said, "If I go with a big camera and you, I think then it might happen."
His mother never lived to see moments like these. She died when he was 21.
"Was it hard that she never saw you attain success?" Couric asked.
"Yeah. It was. And my grandfather too who raised me. Those are the two most important people in my life. But they never saw it, no," he replied.
They never saw him win an Oscar for his role as the blind Lt. Colonel Frank Slade in "Scent of a Woman."
While he was preparing for the part, Pacino picked up the character's signature phrase, "Hoo-wah!"
"I had this guy, this sort of lieutenant colonel guy working with me. Because he taught me how to assemble and disassemble a .45 blind. And I just practiced with this guy. And then finally when I would get it, the colonel would say, 'Right. Hoo wah!' 'Hoo wah' he'd say to me. And I thought, 'Hoo wah.' What the heck is that?" Pacino remembered.
Every character is a work in progress, and he has been known to improvise.
Take the 1975 film "Dog Day Afternoon," where he plays a bumbling bank robber, who has a faceoff with an army of cops.
"And we were doing the scene as written. And this great assistant director Burtt Harris comes up to me and he whispers in my ear, he says, 'Al, say Attica.' I said, 'Attica?' 'Just say Attica,'" Pacino recalled.
The Attica prison riot that was brutally suppressed by police was emblematic of the anti-authority sentiments of the time.
"So I tried it. I just said, 'Attica!' Boom!" he recalled. "The next thing you knew, the crowd just came alive."
"And this whole scene evolved from this very brilliant assistant director. Just threw it at me," he added.
"You pay such attention to detail, sort of, every minute detail," Couric remarked.
"Sometimes. Sometimes I don't…and I always pay a price for that," he admitted.
Asked when he doesn't pay much attention to detail, Pacino told Couric, "When I'm not that interested in what I'm doing."
Asked if there was a role he feels he didn't pay enough attention to, Pacino said, "Well, there might have been a couple, you see them on television occasionally, I go 'Whoa, what was that? What was I thinking there?'"
Pacino says he's never felt comfortable with fame and had trouble dealing with his rise from obscurity to stardom.
He had some dark days. "I was drinking. That was part of my life. It's part of the climate. As they asked the great Sir Laurence Olivier, 'What is the best thing you like about acting.' And he said, 'It was the drink after the show.' I was doing it to excess."
But his drinking days are over.
He says he hasn't had a drink in 30 years. He keeps a low profile, but has had a series of leading ladies in his life, which begs the question: why has he never gotten married?
"I dream about that question, that someone's going to ask me that question on national television, and I'm going to say, 'I don't know.' I'm also going to say, 'Well, maybe I will one day.' Or, you know, 'I'm too, I'm a little young for marriage,'" he joked.
When Couric brought up his nine-year-old twins, Pacino said, "I can tell you, I should've…"
"What, you should've?" she asked.
"Now, a couple of times," he replied.
Who?
"I can't say," he replied. "But I should've. I made a mistake not to."
"Really?" Couric asked.
"Yup. If that means anything. So, there's hope, is what I'm saying," Pacino said.
Much of his free time is spent directing his own quirky, independent film projects.
For four years, he's been obsessed with his latest movie about Oscar Wilde's play "Salome."
Asked how much of his own money he has spent on the project, Pacino joked, "How about this. I have to go back to work."
This week, Al Pacino is back at work in the movie "You Don't Know Jack."
In 1998, Dr. Kevorkian went on "60 Minutes" with Mike Wallace and showed a tape of himself giving a lethal injection to a patient. In the movie, across from Mike Wallace sits Al Pacino as Jack Kevorkian.
"It gave me an opportunity to do something I haven't done before, I think that's what is interesting. In all my roles, I don't think there's anyone like that," Pacino explained.
Pacino has been at the center of so many iconic movies. But after all these years, he's still most comfortable on the stage, reciting Shakespeare, as we discovered with this impromptu parting performance.
"Arise fair sun, kill the envious moon who is already sick and pale with grief that thou her maid art far more fair than she. That's all you're going to get from me," Pacino joked.
Watch an excerpt of Mike Wallace's 1998 interview with Dr. Jack Kevorkian:
Produced by Kyra Darnton, Draggan Mihailovich and Michael Radutzky