Cinema

Al Pacino: Every Powerful Man Has a Child Hiding Inside Him

Al Pacino tells Husam Sam Asi how he found the child inside Jimmy Hoffa, the secret of playing kings, and why he waits for a role the way Picasso stared at a canvas while De Niro is simply there.

Husam Sam Asi 19 November 2019

Husam Sam Asi with Al Pacino during promotion for The Irishman. — Husam Sam Asi with Al Pacino.

Al Pacino strode into the interview room at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills and announced, in that deep, gravelly voice, that it was a beautiful day. At 79, he has the energy of a man in his twenties, and The Irishman makes the most of it, digitally shaving decades off him so he can play the Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa from the 1950s, when he took control of the union, to his disappearance in 1975.

Hoffa ran his union hand in hand with the Mafia, using its muscle to keep the members in line. Under John F. Kennedy, the government went after him. Convicted in 1964 of jury tampering and fraud, he went to prison in 1967. Richard Nixon commuted his sentence in 1971, and Hoffa set about reclaiming the union over the Mafia’s objections.

Pacino sees a crusader in him.

“We came out of a world in the twenties and thirties when there was child labour,” he said. “He was a kid, a teenager, and he was getting in with the union, and the union became his life and his cause. And of course he got mixed up with people, because that was all part of the ambience of the union.”

“When he went to prison, he organised the prisoners. He galvanised them. He didn’t like the way they were being treated and how they lived. He had this tendency to want to bring people together, especially when he thought people were taking advantage of the working people. That was something he believed in, something he had a passion for, and that was his guide.”

Hoffa has been played before, by Jack Nicholson in Hoffa in 1992. The Irishman tells his story through the eyes of Frank Sheeran, the hitman who became his bodyguard and his go-between with the Mafia, and who claimed in his memoir, I Heard You Paint Houses, that the mob ordered him to kill his friend. Few who investigated the case believe him.

“I knew of him growing up,” Pacino said. “I found out he was the second most powerful man in the United States, to the president.”

How to play a king

Pacino knows a thing or two about power on screen. Michael Corleone made him an international star in The Godfather in 1972 and earned him his first Oscar nomination. He was nominated again for The Godfather Part II and returned to the role in The Godfather Part III in 1990. It remains one of the greatest performances in the history of cinema.

He shared the secret of playing a king, borrowed from Charles Laughton, the star of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Private Life of Henry VIII: make sure everyone around you treats you as one. When they open the door for you as you walk into a room, you feel like a king.

Corleone, Tony Montana in Scarface, now Hoffa: Pacino’s kings are criminals, and audiences adore them anyway. I asked him how he makes us like such men.

“In order to make you actually experience the character, you have to give an audience something that they could like, or be able to accept,” he said. “It’s a frame around the character, these human things that make you laugh. I go for that. It may be unconscious. I don’t think of it consciously, but hopefully it’ll seep in.”

Then he revealed what he found inside Hoffa. “I guess he was like all powerful men and women. They have their idiosyncrasies, their eccentricities, their needs, and a lot of them have that sort of childish thing in them,” he said. “Once you tap into that a little bit, it’s very interesting. Look how he loves this guy Frank. The feeling he has for this guy is revealing.”

Two Sicilian New Yorkers, together at last

Pacino and Martin Scorsese are both New Yorkers of Sicilian descent, and yet The Irishman is the first film they have made together. Pacino joined the shoot weeks after it began, Scorsese told me, and there was hardly any rehearsal. He did not need it.

“Fortunately there’s so much on Jimmy Hoffa: 16-millimetre documentaries, videotape, speeches,” Scorsese said. “I knew that if I pointed him there, gave him the right research, he would come back and say something to me about this or that documentary or this scene. He didn’t say anything that would make me feel that he had a very different concept of the character, or that he was going to imitate the character.”

“You try to put together your own mosaic of this character,” Pacino said. “And even though you forget it when you’re in the moment, it’s in the back.” The result, he added, is a trio: “You’re really doing the author’s version of Jimmy Hoffa, and your version, together with Martin Scorsese and his interpretation. So it’s a trio of a person.”

What Scorsese wanted above all, he said, was “the love between him and Frank”.

Al Pacino talks to Husam Sam Asi about Jimmy Hoffa and how his method differs from Robert De Niro’s.

Pacino waits like Picasso. De Niro is just there

That love is real. Pacino and Robert De Niro have been friends for half a century, since their struggling years as young actors in New York. Both appeared in The Godfather Part II without sharing a scene, and before The Irishman they had acted together only twice: in Michael Mann’s Heat in 1995 and in Righteous Kill in 2008. Scorsese and Mann both describe them as opposites. Pacino prepares for weeks and likes to rehearse. De Niro would rather find it on the day.

“With Bob, whatever you do, Bob is there. He’s so totally in the moment,” Pacino said. “That’s what you go for all the time. The whole thing is to get to the unconscious, and when you’re in the unconscious is when you’re free, because the unconscious starts to work for you. That’s the whole reason to do research. And then you just wait. It’ll come.”

“I heard Picasso just looks at a canvas. Whether this is true or not, you don’t know, but it sounds really good. He looks at the canvas and he waits, staring at it for 12 hours. That is inspiring to me,” he said. “It takes me a long time before I digest it and it comes out.”

De Niro refused to rehearse Heat, Pacino recalled, and he was right: they were playing two men who did not know each other. In The Irishman, they play two men who come to know each other as the film unfolds.

Pacino has won an Oscar, two Tonys and two Emmys, one of the few actors to conquer cinema, theatre and television alike. Critics are already tipping his Hoffa for a ninth Oscar nomination. At 79, he still walks into a room like a king, and everyone in it treats him like one.