Al Pacino names the single greatest scene of his career: “I have one moment”
When you’ve built a body of work like Al Pacino has, unforgettable scenes become second nature. He’s got more in his locker than most of his peers, past or present, but there’s only one that he called the pinnacle of his performative output.
That said, there hasn’t been a new addition for a while. What was the last truly iconic Al Pacino moment in cinema? For some people, for their own reasons, it’s the Dunkaccino scene from Adam Sandler’s Jack and Jill, but for those who aren’t fucking insane, you might have to go back to Michael Mann’s Heat.
The Academy Award winner built the character of Vincent Hanna on the bedrock of a cocaine addiction that never made it onscreen, but you can’t really tell when watching the movie, since mid-1990s audiences were well used to watching the star lose his shit by then, and he’s among the best at doing it.
From his “Attica!” moment in Dog Day Afternoon and his intense first meeting with Virgil Sollozzo in The Godfather, to Scent of a Woman unleashing his signature war-cry of “Hoo-ah!” on an unsuspecting world for the first time, or any number of seminal sequences from Scarface, Pacino has been seared into the cinematic consciousness for over half a century.
While you won’t find him turning up any trees these days, although The Irishman and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood showed that he could still hold his own in awards-baiting prestige pictures when he’s not phoning it in or screaming at the top of his lungs, there aren’t many names in Hollywood history who’ve been in more seminal scenes than Pacino.
During a conversation with Lawrence Grobel, Pacino was asked if there were any moments in his filmography that stood out above all others as especially memorable. His response was more subtle than you might expect, given his love of going apeshit, but it’s an undeniably powerful exchange.
“I have one moment in Godfather II; nobody sees it,” he opined. “Michael and his sad brother Fredo are in Cuba, seeing the Superman show in the nightclub, and Fredo tells Michael, ‘Johnny always used to take me here’. And you see in that moment that Michael realises his brother betrayed him. That’s my favourite moment, but it’s subtle.”
The fanfare usually goes to the spine-chilling, “I know it was you, Fredo,” when Michael Corleone informs his brother that he knows about his treachery and seals his fate with a peck on the cheek that doubles as a kiss of death, but the exact moment the character first cottons on to the betrayal is Pacino’s preference.
There’s no grandstanding, no bellowing, no wild-eyed fury; basically, the antithesis of everything that’s turned Pacino into a modern-day meme. Instead, a flicker and an almost imperceptible gesture lingers in the veteran’s memory as the most impactful scene he’s ever been a part of.
