Al Pacino refused to acknowledge a set note from Christopher Nolan
Director Christopher Nolan remembered a moment when Al Pacino declined to accept one of his notes while on set.
Nolan, who directed Pacino in the 2002 film Insomnia, was discussing the differences between lead actors and their abilities to translate different parts of a script when he mentioned Pacino’s refusal.
“I had gone up to Pacino after a series of takes and given him a note on what I wanted,” Nolan told The Los Angeles Times.
“He told me, ‘I’ve already done that. You can’t see it to the eye, but I’ve done it on the dailies,’” Nolan explained. “I looked for it and I was like, ‘Oh, my God,’ because there it was.”
“Great film actors can do that, and that’s what I had with Cillian [Murphy],” Nolan added, referring to the lead actor for his upcoming feature film Oppenheimer.
“He was so conscious of his iconography, very theatrical and self-aware,” Nolan said. “It’s too simple to say he was a dandy, but he knew the power of creating an iconic physical image for himself.”
Nolan had long considered Insomnia to be one of his best and least-appreciated films. “I’m very proud of the film. I think, of all my films, it’s probably the most underrated,” Nolan claimed in the book The Nolan Variations. “The reality is it’s one of my most personal films in terms of what it was to make it.”
“It was a very vivid time in my life. It was my first studio film, I was on location, it was the first time I’d worked with huge movie stars,” he added. “That’s not really for me to say, but every now and again I meet a filmmaker and that’s actually the film that they’re interested in or want to talk about. Yeah, very proud of the film.”
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