Photograph by Justin Bishop.
The actor sat down with us to talk about his latest film, Manglehorn.
BY JULIE MILLER
Al Pacino seems tired, and understandably so. At 75, while most men of his age and means are retired, the Oscar winner is recovering from directing a production of, and accompanying documentary about, Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé—a two-pronged passion project which took him six years. He is promoting the third in a trifecta of indie movies released in two years in which he plays a character grappling, in some part, with age. And he is readying himself to return to Broadway this October to star in the new David Mamet play China Doll. About a billionaire on the verge of semi-retirement, Mamet said he wrote the play specifically for Pacino, and teased the project as being “better than oral sex.”

Wearing a rumpled pinstriped suit during a recent sit-down in Beverly Hills, Pacino was feeling less enthusiastic about the venture. “I would rather work less, to be honest with you. I have young children [14-year-old twins with actress Beverly D'Angelo] that live out here so I’d like to be more involved with them, because I am a single dad. I share custody. So that gives me a lot to do. What I’d like to do now is,” he trails off, seemingly unsure of what that is exactly aside from not working. “I've gotta do the Mamet play, which is daunting and large. It’s just two characters. So I’m right now just coping with that.”

What’s most impressive about Pacino’s workload, other than the apparent stamina it requires, is that he’s managed to find so many recent roles that fit his two qualifications these days: they are age-appropriate, and they are unlike any character he’s played in his hundreds of varied projects over the past five decades. While Pacino is the first to admit that his female peers have a much harder time finding roles once they pass Hollywood’s perilous 40-year mark, the actor says that even he has difficulty getting parts that are suitable for a septuagenarian. (And Pacino, being one of the finest living actors, period, still gets a lot of scripts.) So when he stumbled upon the recent string of indie projects, and the opportunities to play people struggling with some of the same human issues he is, he jumped. (He stars as an aging, eerily Pacino-esque actor in The Humbling, an aging musician in Danny Collins, and an aging locksmith in the David Gordon Green drama Manglehorn, out in theaters this Friday.)

Although reviews were mixed about the first two films, Pacino enjoyed his recent on-camera experiences. “I like the three roles I did recently because they all go into what it is to be aging, what it means, how it changes you,” he said, speaking slowly, like he was working out a complicated math equation aloud. “I didn’t do these movies to get off some kind of track. I did them because they were there, and they were age appropriate, and they were covering some aspect of my understanding at this point in life. I like the idea of being able to feel a certain confidence in the fact that I am expressing something that I have some sort of knowledge of,” he says. “There are fewer age-appropriate roles as you get older. As long as you know that,” he says, letting his fingers, covered in chunky, Scarface-appropriate rings, gesticulate the end of the sentence.

When we asked which of his characters Pacino would want to revisit if the opportunity presented itself in Hollywood’s current shameless reboot climate, the actor says, “None of them.” Still fearless in his appetite to explore uncharted emotional territory, Pacino likens his creative process to that of Jackson Pollock, the abstract painter who created his work impulsively. “Jackson Pollock paints all at once, and if he sees a figure in the painting that he recognizes, he throws the painting away. He paints from the unconscious. . . . I like to work from that.”

Naturally, talking about and analyzing his roles with press seem to defeat his creative mission statement—to feel, without much thought or analysis. Although he did less press in the days of The Godfather, Scarface, and Serpico—believing that audiences were better able to accept actors they knew little about personally—Pacino has recently found himself doing more interviews for his films. Still, he tries to keep certain details private.

When we bring up the fan letter Pacino says he recently wrote Tom Hanks, the actor declines to disclose the role that so impressed him, only saying, “It was a recent one.” He explains that he doesn’t make a habit out of writing letters to fellow actors, but in this case, “I don’t know why but I was so taken with a particular thing he does. Tom is affable and so amiable a guy that you don’t think of him as one of the greatest movie actors that ever lived. He does it easy. I just felt so moved by what he did. ”

At a different point in the interview, we ask which co-stars Pacino keeps in touch with. “I see Bobby [De Niro] every time I go to New York, so I see him a lot,” he says, thinking. “I see Bobby Cannavale a lot. I enjoy spending time with them.” When we follow up, asking what Pacino and De Niro do during their meetings of the great Godfather acting minds, Pacino deadpans, “Basket weaving.” (And no, Pacino does not have an update about that long-gestating film reunion between De Niro and Pacino that Martin Scorsese is attached to direct, The Irishman: “I would imagine [we’ll still make it], because the script is so good. But it’s been a long time that it’s been on the burner, so to speak.”)

Pacino is more comfortable talking about his Manglehorn co-stars, both of whom are unlikely—Harmony Korine, the Spring Breakers filmmaker and a white fluffy cat who plays Pacino’s only confidant. Of Harmony, with whom Pacino shares some great comedic chemistry, the actor says, “I am in awe of this guy. . . I started a scene with this guy and he starts [improvising], I couldn’t keep a straight face. After [the scene] is over, I went up to him and said, ‘You’re not an actor only, are you? Because you’re like a genius. You’re like the James Joyce of acting.”

As for the cat: “I’ve always had an affinity with animals. Actually, I live with dogs. Dogs and kids [and] every animal that comes over. I had a bird in my house the other day. I don’t know how it got there.” He stops smiling to issue a very serious warning should we ever co-mingle pets in our household. “You have to watch out for the friction between the animals.”

Pacino brightens the most, however, when he speaks of those kids he would love to get back to. The youngest still have not seen his movies, and Pacino is fine with that. (“I’m dad to them. Dad is dad. There’s the lamp. There’s the TV. There’s the couch. There’s dad,” he laughs. “I fall into that category. Furniture.”) His eldest, Julie, is an aspiring filmmaker, whom Pacino is happy to have in his industry. “I stay away from encouraging it too much. But I do my body-language thing. But if one of my children has certain talents, why not encourage it? And appetite is big. You like to encourage appetite, and appetite changes. But I’m so happy that Julie is sticking with it.”

Pointing out proudly that she has already eclipsed her father at one skill, Pacino adds, “She was one of the top softball players in the state of New York. She won a prize. It was impressive, I must say. I used to be a baseball player. I remember being very encouraging about playing ball with her. She turned out so good, so much better than I was ever. But while she was doing her athleticism, she was [also] making little movies at age 14. My youngest daughter, she's been doing it since she was six or seven. Today, they grow up with the Internet, animation and all of that. It’s another world. I like it because it’s creative. And it’s active, it’s not passive.”