The one movie that saved Al Pacino’s career: “From having no money to being back in the chips”
Sitting in his lawyer’s office in 1989, Al Pacino realised he was in deep trouble. He hadn’t acted in a movie for four years, and the health of his bank account was circling the drain. Luckily, his girlfriend Diane Keaton was at the meeting with him, and she took the opportunity to tell him about a project she felt would get him back in the game. It was a script about a New York cop hunting a serial killer who becomes embroiled in a torrid affair with the woman who may be his prime suspect. A burned-out Pacino reluctantly agreed to do the movie – and Keaton’s advice saved his career.
Pacino’s road to leaving Hollywood behind for nearly half a decade began in March 1985, when he developed pneumonia while shooting the American Revolutionary War drama Revolution in Norfolk. The movie, directed by Hugh Hudson, was a disaster from start to finish, with Pacino feeling completely out of his element in a period film. The sick, lonely, homesick star muddled through the production as best he could but was then stunned when the studio released the movie in a state that could charitably be described as incomplete. He was aghast, as he had assumed it would go through a lengthy post-production process to try to fix its myriad problems. Instead, he endured some of the worst reviews of his career, and the film tanked at the box office.
“I expected they would have worked on that film, but they just let it go,” lamented Pacino years later. “They put half a film out. I was appalled and shocked by that. I didn’t know what to do. It was that single film that took the rug out from under me. I lost interest for a while.”
Indeed, when Pacino says he lost interest in Hollywood for a while, he means it. He retreated to his first love of theatre and worked on Broadway for four years. During this period, he got together with Keaton, who he had starred alongside so memorably in The Godfather years earlier. She was still working regularly in Hollywood at the time and had her ear to the ground for projects, so when she realised her boyfriend was haemorrhaging money with his theatre sojourn, she decided to step in.
According to Pacino, when Keaton told him about Sea of Love, she assured him, “This is a good picture for you.” He didn’t know if he genuinely wanted to get back into the Hollywood rat race, and he worried that the industry and audiences alike would have forgotten about him. Still, he had to admit, “I knew I had to work. I needed the money, too.“
Ultimately, Keaton was bang on the money about Sea of Love: it was certainly a good picture for Pacino. As directed by Harold Becker, who would later re-team with Pacino on City Hall, it was a razor-sharp thriller with a lurid plot and a dynamite lead role for Ellen Barkin as the ultimate femme fatale. In his memoir Sonny Boy, Pacino gushed that the actor, “blew the screen apart, sensually and artistically. What a performance. I was lucky to be a part of it.”
These days, the film is primarily remembered for an explicitly bizarre sex scene between Pacino and Barkin. Audiences loved it, but Pacino later admitted to feeling awkward about the whole thing. He mused, “I’m not usually one to perform graphic lovemaking scenes, and I don’t think many other actors like to do them either. It can become sort of borderline porn.” Still, he credited Becker with choreographing the scene in a unique, memorable way.
Ultimately, the movie was a massive hit at the box office, making $110million on a budget of only $19million. This was by far and away Pacino’s biggest hit since The Godfather in ’72, and it reintroduced him to Hollywood with a bang. As he put it in Sonny Boy, he went “from having no money to being back in the chips.” Suddenly a hot property again, the star parlayed Sea of Love’s success into a run of hits in the ’90s, including Dick Tracy, Scent of a Woman, Heat, and The Devil’s Advocate.
