The first movie that inspired Al Pacino to become an actor: “I think it’s a memory”
Though it’s been a hot minute since his last great movie, Al Pacino is still regarded as a cinematic god, having turned in some of the greatest performances in some of the greatest films ever made.
His trophy cabinet is littered with every major award under the sun, and he has influenced hundreds, if not thousands others to follow in his footsteps, and that almost makes up for Jack and Jill…almost.
Before he was part of its DNA, Pacino was just a fan of cinema like the rest of us, growing up idolising the likes of Gary Cooper, who he once described as a “phenomenon”. Like many familiar stories of actors turning to the medium as a youngin, his parents divorced when he was just two years old, so the big screen became a place he could escape to.
Speaking with NPR, Pacino remembered some of his earliest interactions with movies, revealing that he would go with his mother to the cinema and then act out scenes from the films when he got home. However, one day, when they went to see Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, everything changed for him.
“I showed it to my mother,” he recalled, “My mother said, ‘Oh, what is this?’ And then she started laughing. Then she’d show it to the family… I never understood why they would laugh at someone in this predicament because it’s where he’s searching for a bottle of booze that he hid somewhere when he was sober, and now he couldn’t find it and… I think it’s a memory. And they would be laughing, and I would say, ‘Why are they laughing’ to myself.”
The film follows a recovering alcoholic Don Birnam, brought to life by Ray Millard’s Oscar-winning performance, who, after ten days of sobriety, falls off the wagon and falls hard; determined to avoid a family gathering, he descends into a whirlpool of booze and bad decisions as a result.
The film won both ‘Best Picture’ at the Academy Awards and Cannes Film Festival, the first time that had ever happened, with its unflinching depiction of alcoholism deemed years ahead of its time. It became such a mainstay that the title is now most often associated with famous people going on benders, most notably John Lennon.
Pacino would have been five years old when he saw this film, which is way too young, and how his mother even got her son into the theatre is a minor miracle. It was a good thing she did, though, as he would grow up, ultimately putting his ambitions to play professional baseball to one side and follow his acting dreams. He endured many years of hardship trying to make it big, including his own run-ins with booze, and following a few years of success in the theatre, he landed his first big break in The Godfather; the rest, as they say, is history.
It might not have been the best parenting from Mrs Pacino, but a young Al was simply destined to be in that screening of The Lost Weekend, for if he hadn’t gotten that early dose of stardom from his amused family members, there’s every chance he might not have chased that high all the way to the top.
