Big Al

INTERVIEW:He's treated like a god, but he's really just one of the gang. The Pacino, Hoffman De Niro gang that is. DONALD CLARKEmeets screen idol Al Pacino on a visit to Dublin

PACK OF EAGER fame hounds is massing outside the Merrion Hotel. That luxury establishment has, over the years, welcomed more than a few celebrities. Al Pacino is, however, in a whole different class to those piffling rock stars, Nobel Prize winners and prime ministers.

The night before we meet, Pacino attended a screening of Wilde Salome, his eccentric new documentary, at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. A visiting deity would have brought less fervour to the lobby of the Savoy cinema. Here he comes. Slightly dishevelled in a black tuxedo-style jacket, an enormous ring on his creased finger, he pumps my hand warmly and – he's an Italian-American, remember – orders an espresso with a twist of lemon. How odd it must be to be treated like royalty wherever you go. He is, after all, a working-class boy from the South Bronx.

“You get used to it,” he says in his gruff drawl. “But I do try to be surprised by it every time. You sort of know that, in time, the conversation will loosen up. Experience tells you that. You realise that, when you’ve been acting for this length of time, that a lot of people grow up with you. There’s a sense of familiarity that feels like family.” He recalls a conversation he had with Lee Strasberg, the great acting teacher, in an elevator many years ago. “Someone said to him: ‘Oh, I know you.’ He replied: ‘You know my name. You don’t know me’.”

He does feel a little bit like family. No film enthusiast under the age of 50 will remember a world without Al Pacino. A great stage actor in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he broke into the mainstream with his extraordinarily focused performance as Michael Corleone in The Godfather. Electric turns in Dog Day Afternoon, Serpicoand Scarfacefollowed.

He was part of a generation that changed the business. Whereas the likes of Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando always seemed like outsiders in the Hollywood of the 1950s, the succeeding mob of method actors became (for a moment at least) the new cinematic establishment.

“Dustin Hoffman, me and Bob De Niro were classed together in the 1970s,” he says. “There was maybe an innate competition. When somebody sees you in the street and calls you by another name, that’s natural. ‘Hi Bob!’ or ‘Hi Dustin!’ they’d say to me. “It seems that we are not only being compared in terms of our acting, but in terms of our physiognomy. Ha ha! I remember somebody was very complimentary to me about a movie that Dustin made. I was thrilled.”

He's a talker, this Al Pacino. Give him a nudge and he'll meander cheerily through every byway on his long, agreeable route to some vaguely defined destination. He compares journalists to the editors on Wilde Salome. His amusing documentary on the origins and meaning of Oscar Wilde's Salomerequired a degree of disciplined reorganisation from the men and women in the editing suite. "I expect you to make sense of all this," he says to me.

Let’s give it a go. Alfredo Pacino was born in Manhattan in 1940. When he was just two years old, his mother, recently divorced, moved the family to the South Bronx. As he describes it, the area was, at that point, a classic variation on the American melting pot. He remembers sitting on the roof and listening to a beautiful array of accents drifting up from the street. “That was our penthouse,” he says. But, for all the excitement, it was a tough neighbourhood.

“Oh yeah. They used to call it Fort Apache – the 41st Precinct. But that was the start of the heroin thing. Around 1948 that’s when the drugs came into New York. That’s when the trouble started. Of all my dearest, closest friends from that time, none of them survived.”

As is often the case with actors from tough backgrounds, a caring teacher saved young Al from oblivion. One day, when he was 12 or 13, he saw his drama teacher talking very seriously with his grandmother. He now believes she was explaining that he had the chops to make it as an actor. A few years later, he found himself living in Greenwich Village with a young hopeful named Martin Sheen. "I loved that world that I found in the theatre," he says. "The family that I found in the Village was very important. My real education really started in the Village. When I found plays by Strindberg, Ibsen and Shakespeare, I found a way into my own raison d'être." After training at the Actors Studio – the Mecca of Method – he fairly rapidly found himself in demand from theatrical producers. By 1970, he had won a Tony and an Obie (the off-Broadway gong), but had yet to make any serious lunge towards movies. His turn in The Panic in Needle Park, an undervalued picture concerning heroin addiction, attracted the attention of a young Francis Ford Coppola and, throwing caution to the tempest, the director decided to cast his friend in The Godfather.

"I was at a crossroads of my life then," he says. "What am I going to do? I was confused by the success I'd had. I'd moved from my off-off-Broadway roots and was now in the more commercial theatre. I didn't know where I was headed. I had a girlfriend. I imbibed. I was a drinker and I enjoyed my weed. Then I get this call. Francis says: 'I got The Godfather. Have you read the book?' "

Pacino couldn't quite process the information. When Coppola said he "had The Godfather"the actor thought he was merely holding a copy of the paperback in his eager fist. No. It transpired that the folk at Paramount had handed one of the era's most desirable projects to a largely unknown director. Now, Francis wanted to give the role of Michael, the young Don, to some obscure theatre actor. What about Warren Beatty? What about Steve McQueen?

"Naturally my first thought was: I can't play that. It's a really hard part," he laughs. "Can't I play Sonny? That's a good part. Then all this screen testing began. It was the Scarlett O'Hara of its day. Francis put that cast together and they okayed everybody except for me and Marlon Brando. Finally, they okayed Marlon. 'But this kid? No way!' " Pacino explains how Coppola – constantly threatened with the sack – held out and demanded that the young actor stay on board. Gradually, as the rushes came in, the studio began to gain a degree of confidence. The film became a colossal hit and helped secure Pacino his current regal status. Some actors become a little weary of discussing their first great success. But I get the impression that Pacino could deliver anecdotes about The Godfatherfor the remainder of the century. He tells me how he once found Coppola, depressed by the lack of support from head office, weeping hopelessly on a gravestone. He chats enthusiastically about Brando.

“All the actors gathered around me and protected me, including Marlon,” he says. “I loved him. He was such a sensitive person. He saw the difficulties I was having and I think he saw a little of himself when he was young. I was in awe. I remember once he came up behind me and gave me a little message. ‘You okay?’ he’d say.”

Over the next decade, Pacino and his contemporaries helped spread a fresh energy about Hollywood. The new actors kept their ethnic names and refused to ape Anglo-Saxon manners. (In another era, Al might have become Alfred Perkins). American cinema buzzed with post-1960s idealism.

Then something odd happened. Hollywood drifted back to romantic fantasy and Pacino found it increasingly hard to find parts that suited his earthy talent. "Yeah, something happened in the 1980s that is hard to define," he says. "It had something to do with the movies that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas – both very close friends of Francis – started to make. I met them when they were kids. I saw them as real film people. I got no feeling of theatre from them. They are geniuses. But they set the standard for a new kind of movie. You also can't discount the impact of television. It's a complex story. Those socially concerned movies like Serpicoor Dog Day Afternoonor Taxi Driverwere no longer as doable." Those films became independent film. They were no longer launched as brassy marquee features. "That's exactly right. You look at The Panic in Needle Park: a film about two drug addicts in the city. That was made by Fox. They could never get that made today."

Still, one film he made in the 1980s eventually ended up being recognised as a classic. When Scarface, starring Pacino as a demented Cuban gangster, was released in 1983, it received truly appalling reviews. A decade or so later, it gained an odd school of fame as the DVD every rapper must display when being interviewed by MTV's Cribs.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “We couldn’t show our faces after it opened. I was at a party after a screening at Sardi’s. I walked in and the faces looked like those in a wax museum. People were sitting so still. Liza Minnelli was there. She hadn’t seen the movie. She came up to me and said: ‘What did you do to these people?’ ” And yet it survived.

Rather quaintly, Pacino remembers hearing "Snoopy Dogg" discuss his affection for the film on a DVD. He goes on to recall a trip to Israel. "The only movie they talked about was Scarface –both the Jews and the Palestinians. It brings people together. Who'd have thought it? It found an audience that keeps rediscovering it."

Though he enjoyed high profile relationships with such celebrities as Tuesday Weld, Diane Keaton and Beverly D'Angelo – and has three children – Pacino somehow never quite got around to getting married. But he seems enviably at ease with the universe. Just look at his new film. Wilde Salomesees Al attempting to stage a public reading of Oscar Wilde's Salomewhile simultaneously making some sort of quasi-documentary on the subject. He travels to Ireland. He stomps about the desert. The film has interesting things to say about Wilde, but it is more revealing about Al Pacino. He comes across as a good-spirited, irresponsibly enthusiastic oddball. "It doesn't feel like a marketable movie," he says. "But I am glad I did it. I went to see this production of the play by Steven Berkoff . . ." And he's off on another amble around the conversational foothills. What a likable deity he is.