The iconic Al Pacino performance based on a deleted scene: “My entire character”
No actor is immune from having their scenes discarded on the cutting room floor if the director doesn’t think they’re good or important enough to make it into the movie, which left Al Pacino in a particularly unusual position.
The Academy Award-winning icon has always been known for his meticulous, methodical, and fully committed approach to building his most memorable characters, and on one occasion, he decided to use a single scene to inform everything about the person he was portraying. Unfortunately, that left audiences completely in the dark.
The standard practice is for the viewers to gradually learn about a protagonist, antagonist, or supporting player through their interior and exterior lives and the way they’re depicted onscreen, but Pacino opted to use a brief moment to illustrate why his character was behaving in the way he was.
It makes complete sense with the benefit of hindsight, but it went over everyone’s head at the time. Why is dogged detective Vincent Hanna so exuberant, excitable, and frequently manic during his pursuit of Robert De Niro’s elusive thief Neil McCauley in Michael Mann’s seminal crime thriller, Heat? Because he’s a cokehead.
“Hanna had problems as a human being, problems in his life,” Pacino wrote in his memoir, Sonny Boy. “He was volatile and edgy and apt to go crazy. He was also chipping cocaine, and I sort of based my entire character on that. We shot a scene where I went into a club, and you actually saw my character taking a hit of coke before he enters. For some reason, Michael kept that scene out of the film.”
Pacino explained how seeing Hanna hoovering up the white nose gold “did explain a lot of my character’s behaviour, and without that explanation, I can see how it made aspects of my performance seem extravagant.” The easiest explanation was that it was merely the latest overacting masterclass from one of Hollywood’s longest-cured hams, but there was a genuine method behind the veteran’s madness.
“If the audience had seen a moment or two when Hanna took a hit, I think they would have been better prepared to see what I did,” he lamented. Armed with that information, rewatching Heat makes it abundantly clear that the character is a bit of a coke fiend. However, Mann didn’t think it was necessary or relevant to the story he was telling, which is ironic when Pacino used that single moment of drug sniffing as his entry point into the film.
While the deleted scene doesn’t make Heat any better or worse when it’s a classic, no matter how much footage was snipped out in the editing suite, it would have made sense for Mann to include it when Pacino based everything on Hanna’s hidden fondness for narcotics.
