The director Al Pacino wants to work with forever: “Somebody you can get a sense of”
Name a famous director from the past four decades, and chances are good that Al Pacino has worked with them. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, Brian De Palma, Christopher Nolan, and Quentin Tarantino are just some of the certified auteurs who have managed to entice the actor into their movies. Pacino has been one of the most respected actors in the business since the 1970s, and filmmakers have been falling over themselves to work with him.
It’s hard to encapsulate Pacino’s career in one or two movies, but most people would probably start with The Godfather. Playing the youngest son of the Corleone family who inherits his father’s position as the don of their criminal network, he somehow managed to outshine Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro as a sympathetic character who descends into greed, isolation, and self-destruction. Pacino was nominated twice for the role, once for the first film and again for the second.
Although Michael Corleone is a tough act to follow, Pacino proved time and again over the decades that he was far from a one-hit wonder. Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Scarface, and Heat all demonstrated his range and intensity. He’s earned nine Oscar nominations over nearly five decades and is churning out movies.
Like any star of his longevity, Pacino has made his fair share of terrible movies, too. The aughts and early 2010s were particularly punishing. Gigli, Jack and Jill, and 88 Minutes were trashed by critics and threatened to muddy his legacy, but he’s rebounded with films like The Irishman and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The truth is, though, that many actors would rather work on a well-intentioned failure with a director they love than on a soulless hit with a filmmaker they aren’t crazy about. Just listen to Michael Douglas try to explain the basic plot of Ant-Man and you’ll realise pretty soon that passion for a project and box office returns are not connected.
If you were to guess which director Pacino adores working with most, you might assume that he’d say one of the most critically acclaimed, like Scorsese or Coppola. But he didn’t. In a 2015 interview with IndieWire, he singled out Barry Levinson. “I’ve worked with him a lot,” he said. “I hope I work with him forever because it’s good to have somebody that you can get a sense of. You’ve seen all aspects of that person, so you get to know them on that level.”
The duo worked together on the 2010 television movie You Don’t Know Jack, for which Pacino won an Emmy, and the 2014 movie The Humbling, which earned significantly less praise. More recently, they made the television movie Paterno about the Penn State football coach contending with a child sex abuse scandal. Outside of his collaborations with the actor, Levinson directed everything from Rain Man to Good Morning, Vietnam and worked as a screenwriter with Mel Brooks before that.
None of Pacino or Levinson’s collaborations have been their greatest works, but their working relationship endures. They are set to make a film that reframes JFK’s assassination as a mob hit by a Chicago kingpin. Brendan Fraser and Bryan Cranston are already on board as co-stars.
