“James Dean was an acting sonnet. Marlon was a planet unto himself. But he needed to explore his gift and fail with it. I always felt success had an adverse effect on him.”
So said Al Pacino. The man who grew up watching Dean’s vehement talent. As a young boy who enjoyed acting, he was once told after a good night on the stage, “You’re a Marlon Brando.” And Pacino, still just a teenager, still just a Dean fan had turned around and memorably said, “Who is Marlon Brando?”
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Years later ofcourse, he would fittingly play Brando’s heir in The Godfather and Brando would save him from being fired from the sets with a succinct observation, “He is a brooder. And if he is playing my son, that’s what you need.” Trivia like this is hard to unearth, if as an interviewer you are not interested in your subject beyond his fame. If you are not in tune with your subject’s mental and emotional expanse, cannot sense intuitively which questions must be asked and which withheld.
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Interviewing is an art where the interviewer must stay invisible except to serve as a gentle trigger, a safety net, a search light rather than a blinding headlight. More than anything else, it is a skill where you don’t paint but allow a picture to emerge. Where you facilitate rather than a create. No one knows this better than Lawrence Grobel whose revealing interview with the notoriously difficult Marlon Brando, caught the eye of a young but already famous Al Pacino in 1979. Even though uncomfortable around the press, Pacino agreed to be interviewed by Grobel. And the latter’s visit to Pacino’s modest, unkempt brownstone apartment resulted in 40 hours of taped conversations and 2000 transcribed pages. Grobel and Pacino spoke on many occasions after that.
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The book, Al Pacino-In Conversation With Lawrence Grobel is a deliciously detailed summation of the decades that Grobel spent decoding one of the most gifted actors of his generation and a man who is as simple as he is complex. What emerges from the interviews that Grobel documented from 1979 to 2005 is the incredible story of a teenager from South Bronx who grew up with his single mother, his grandfather and had no clear picture of his future. And his journey to vertiginious fame as a global superstar from the depths of genteel poverty and a succession of jobs as a shoe salesman, a newspaper boy, a supermarket checker, a mail boy, a janitor, a cinema hall usher who was fired for looking at himself one too many times in the mirror, a mover who once broke an expensive sculpture and a student who was turned away from Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio.
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He was accepted a few years later as by now Pacino had found a mentor in acting teacher Charlie Laughton and was already a star at the Herbert Beghof’s Actor’s Studio. Once on stage, fame would follow as a matter of course but the book reveals more than just Pacino’s trajectory. It takes you right to the core of the artiste who when asked, “Were you born to act?,” says without any hesitation, “Yes.” And believes with every cell in his body that an actor’s job is to act, not to chase roles. Even when, it wasn’t clear whether he would get to do Michael Corleone, he knew the role would come to him because,’The less you want things, the more they come to you. If it’s meant to be, it will be. Every time, I have forced something, it hasn’t been right. You just get a sense of things sometimes. You just know it. It’s kind of simple to assess something if you allow it to happen. It’s when the ego and greed get in the way that it’s harder to assess. If you step back and you take a look at it, you can sense what’s going to happen.If I hadn’t gotten the Godfather role, it would have surprised me, frankly.”
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This we learn is the root of Pacino’s success. This preoccupation with work. Not with its trappings. The reason why he did not let seven fruitless nominations at the Oscars get to him and did not allow all the awards that came later to change him. Why he still walks the streets of New York and does not court the media or TV talk shows. Why he has respect for his peers and never undermines them on-screen or off it. Why he does not jump on couches on TV or make a mockery of his private life in public, Because, to him acting is about that scene with Diane Keaton when Brando came and stood right in front of the camera to watch him. Suddenly a leaf fell off the tree onto Pacino’s shoulder and he flicked it off. And Brando told him after the shot, “I liked what you did with the leaf.”
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Moments like these are momentous for Pacino and also the chance to interpret the world as a performer. As an outsider. He says, ‘Actors are always outsiders That gets distorted when you become famous. Our roots are always outside-we are wayward vagabonds, minstrels, outcasts. And that is why so many of us want to be accepted in the mainstream of life. And when we are-here’s the contradiction-we sometimes lose our our outsider’s edge.”
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Pacino never did. You see that edge alive in well in most of his performances including Sidney Lumet’s searing Dog Day Afternoon (1975) where he stomped the screen with an improvised cry of “Attica Attica” in the famous bank robbery scene.
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He says, “I need to do it (acting). My favourite line in Richard 111 is,”Nay, for a need.” The need is everything. That is what it is about. Appetite and need. I acted. I had to. I had the need to.”
Easy to see why he inspires his critics, colleagues and directors to spout poetry in prose. Like Oliver Stone once said about him, “Al is sweetness and dark. He is intense and volatile. But very, very, very sensitive. He really listens to other actors, he is really attentive. And also an explorer.”
Or as Ben Brantley of The New York Times once wrote,”He has specialised in incarnating either Faust or Mephistopheles and sometimes both at the same time.” A man capable of buying and selling a soul. An actor who can be Shakespeare’s Shylock. Richard 111. Milton’s satan. A blind colonel who thunders,”Who the hell do ya think you’re talking to? I’ve been around, ya know? There was a time I could see. And I have seen.”
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He is the master of monologues that set the screen on fire and yet says about his artistic process something touchingly simple,”I’m very inarticulate unless I’m emotional. I can’t express myself unless I’m emotional.” And adds,’I won’t act for money.’ He is not just an actor, as Grobel reveals but an artiste who rejects flashy projects to do Brecht, O’Neill, Mamet and Shakespeare on stage. Who loves theatre because, ‘ You walk on a wire if you’re a tightrope walker. You go way up there, and if you fall, that’s theatre! In movies there’s a wire, but it ‘s on the ground. That’s the difference.” While he masters this balancing act, he also philosophises, ‘There’s no such thing as happiness, only concentration. When you’re concentrated, you’re happy. Also, when you’re not thinking about yourself a lot, you’re usually happy.’ That statement, both universal and personal, has the same Shakespearean sweep of his performances.
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“Acting,” he had once said, “miraculously has taken me far. It’s beyond my wildest dreams. My imagination could have never gone there.” And in going beyond his own imagination, he has taken us with him too. And but for Lawrence Grobel, we would not have known just who it was we were travelling with.
with Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be.