From “brilliant” to “absolutely terrible” and back again: the secrets of an iconic Al Pacino performance
Every artist has their process, and really, it doesn’t need to make sense to anyone but them. If it works and if it gets the best performance out of them, it’s the director and the rest of the cast’s duty to simply leave them to it. But anyone who ever works with Al Pacino has the same thought, and it’s always ‘what on earth was that?’
The different methods actors use to get into their role is something that fans have always been fascinated by. Different drama schools or different modes of thinking suggest different routes. For some people, it’s a calm and interior process where they simply sit with the script and really analyse their character’s inner workings and motivations, treating it more like a therapy session where the role they’re about to play is their patient, and they need to understand everything.
For others, it’s all in the body. They’ll go to movement coaches or accent coaches, learning to speak with whole different parts of their mouth or hold their face completely differently.
Some people take it to extremes too. The process of method acting has always been a divisive one. It’s led to some incredible performances, like Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker after isolating himself in a hotel room for a month, or Jim Carrey staying in character as Andy Kaufman the entire time they were making Man On The Moon.
However, as Robert Pattinson put it, “I always say about people doing method acting, you only ever see people doing method when they’re playing an asshole. You never see someone just being lovely to everyone going, ‘I’m really deep in character’.”
Al Pacino did his fair share of just about every type of preparation. For some projects, it definitely came close to traditional method acting as he spent time with Cuban immigrants to nail his accent for Scarface, or would often wear his character’s costumes for a good while during preparation.
But on set, his process comes in the form of a three-step sequence of takes. Director Michael Mann noted this on the set of Heat, telling Variety, “Al’s best takes are always five, six, and seven. It’s never the first two [takes because] he’s still experimenting around, and after five, six, and seven there’s a small change.”
The best comes a few takes in because he has a system. First, he throws it out there, loose and easy. Then, he gets crazy with it. Only after that, he locks in and delivers it best. “After he’d deliver a take that was fantastic and we’d both love it, he’d say, ‘Let me do a wild one’. What that meant is that he’d be completely unplugged, he’ll have absolutely no idea what we was going to do and he’d just let it loose,” Mann recalled.
Clearly, it’s Pacino’s way of shaking the nerves off that might cause a stagnant performance. It’s a way to refresh, or to go to the further lengths of a performance in order to then pull back and land where it should be. But for those around him, those crazy takes come as a strange shock, with Mann saying, “Sometimes, it was absolutely terrible, but often it was hilarious”.
