Where could I emote?

When​ he was nineteen or so, Al Pacino was taking acting lessons at the Herbert Berghof Studio on Sixth Avenue in New York while earning a living (just about) as a cleaner, busboy and removals man. At night, he sometimes took to the streets to declaim Shakespeare soliloquies, freed by the thought that he needed no one’s permission to play ‘Prospero, Falstaff, Shylock or Macbeth’ in the dark of the city:

If the hour was late and you heard the sound of someone in your alleyway with a bombastic voice shouting iambic pentameter into the night, that was probably me, training myself on the great Shakespeare soliloquies … I’d do it by the factories, at the edges of town, where no one was around. Where else was I going to go? Where could I emote?

Using Shakespeare to emote has been one of the constants of Pacino’s life and may well have been more important to him than cinema. Marlon Brando (his co-star in The Godfather) apparently once said that he would make the ideal Shylock. ‘How Marlon saw that in me, I’ll never know,’ Pacino notes in his memoir, Sonny Boy, skilfully co-written with the culture reporter Dave Itzkoff (the title refers to the nickname his mother gave him).

Brando was right, judging by the 2004 movie version of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford. The film itself is a pedestrian and pretty adaptation that can’t quite decide where it stands on the antisemitism of the main characters, but Pacino is an excellent Shylock, emphasising the character’s furious dignity in the face of prejudice. ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ takes on an added power when the eyes are Pacino’s giant brown hooded eyes, so intensely expressive at times and so terrifyingly deadened at others. When the film came out, Frank Kermode wrote in the LRB (6 January 2005) that ‘to give Pacino his due, he plays [Shylock] as a human being, increasingly vicious as his wrongs accumulate, totally lacking the sentiment of mercy, but always true to his culture and its eloquent exponent.’ Pacino reprised the role in 2010, in what sounds like a much more interesting production, staged in Central Park and directed by Daniel Sullivan. Pacino says he had developed what he brought to the character: ‘Night after night, I’d show up, go on that stage, and say: tonight, I will play this role, and I will play it without knowing what I will do next.’

Pacino says his love of Shakespeare came from an acting teacher called Charlie Laughton whom he first met in a bar (not to be confused with the British actor Charles Laughton). Pacino writes that he ‘knew’ straightaway that Laughton, who worked at the Herbert Berghof Studio, was destined to be his teacher. Laughton, who was described as a ‘sensory’ acting coach, became a father figure to Pacino (he was about ten years older) and remained a mentor until his death in 2013. Long after he became a star, Pacino would ask Laughton’s advice about scripts and parts. He decided not to take the role of Han Solo in Star Wars partly because Laughton couldn’t see anything in the script. Because the teenage Pacino had no money, the studio let him go to classes for free, in exchange for cleaning the hallways and dance studios. Laughton ‘possessed a literary brilliance’, Pacino writes, and introduced him to many writers, such as William Carlos Williams. This was the late 1950s, and Pacino says he would often go to an automat with a book and make a single cup of coffee last for hours. Laughton also encouraged him in his Shakespearean ambitions: Pacino’s audition piece was ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’

Alfredo James Pacino was a lonely child, and to keep himself company he used to act out scenes from films he’d seen with his mother. As a five-year-old, his ‘routine’ was to impersonate Ray Milland as an alcoholic in the 1945 noir The Lost Weekend. He was particularly taken with the scene where Milland has come off the drink and ransacks his apartment, desperately searching for the bottles he hid somewhere when he was drunk. Pacino’s relatives would ask for his Milland act and find it uproariously funny to see a small child perform the scene with such intensity. ‘What are they laughing at?’ Pacino remembers wondering. ‘This man is fighting for his life.’

Pacino had seen The Lost Weekend because his mother took him to the cinema with her from the age of three or four. She was a beautiful and depressive woman who had split from Pacino’s father before he was two. An extremely handsome man whose nickname was ‘Ty’ because he looked like Tyrone Power, his father was only eighteen when Alfredo was born; his mother was in her early twenties. She made ends meet with factory jobs and other low-paid work, and going to the cinema with her son was one of her few pleasures. When she could afford it, she took him to see Broadway plays. ‘She didn’t know that she was supplying me with a future.’ His mother’s parents – with whom they shared a tiny top-floor apartment in a six-storey tenement in the South Bronx – came from Sicily. It was only after he was cast in The Godfather that he learned the extraordinary coincidence that his grandfather, Vincenzo Giovanni Gerardi, came from the town of Corleone.

When he was six, there was a ‘commotion’ outside the tenement. His mother was being taken away by an ambulance, having attempted suicide. Pacino was 22 when she died of an overdose, choking on the regurgitation of her own pills, ‘like Tennessee Williams’. He resists calling it a suicide, observing that in contrast to her attempt fifteen years earlier, she left no note. He says the cause of her death was ‘poverty’. Pacino is haunted by the thought that ‘therapy, moderation, security – these things could have helped her.’ He wishes he had been able to reassure her that he was ‘going to succeed and was going to take care of her’. He says he was certain of this even when he was ‘down and out, sleeping in hallways and on floors of theatres’.

Despite his ‘zombielike’ period of mourning after her death, Pacino credits his mother with saving his life (along with Chekhov and Shakespeare). He had a wild set of friends: Bruce, Petey and Cliffy were into stealing cars and doing drugs and climbing on the rooftops of the tenements of the South Bronx. They called him Sonny or Pistachio, because he liked pistachio ice cream. Cliffy was the leader ‘and even at thirteen never without a copy of Dostoevsky in his back pocket’. But where the others differed from Pacino was that his ‘mother paid attention to where I was in a way that my friends’ families didn’t’. The other three all died young of heroin overdoses. ‘Sonny doesn’t need drugs,’ Cliffy would say, ‘he’s high on himself!’

Despite her love of cinema, his mother tried to protect him from an acting career, saying it wasn’t for poor people. Pacino squandered his first big chance. One of his friends from Laughton’s acting classes was a half-Spanish boy from Ohio called Ramón Estevez – or Martin Sheen (Laughton must have been doing something right). Pacino remembers that Marty did a monologue from The Iceman Cometh that ‘blew the roof off’. Before long, Sheen had moved into Pacino’s South Bronx apartment so that they could split the rent. They both worked cleaning toilets at the Living Theater in Greenwich Village, one of the original venues for off-Broadway productions. The shows – which the pair would watch from the back of the orchestra pit after they had finished cleaning – were the kind ‘that made you go home afterward and lock yourself in your room and just cry for two days, staring at the ceiling’, Pacino says. A few years later, in the early 1960s, Sheen was ‘on his way’, as Pacino puts it, with a string of parts off-Broadway, while Pacino, grieving for his mother, was not in a good place, personally or professionally. One day, wearing a long ‘dusty thrift-store coat’ and shoes with holes in them, he met Sheen on the subway. Sheen was starring in The Wicked Cooks, a Günter Grass play, at the Orpheum on Second Avenue: he had come a long way from cleaning toilets. He asked whether Pacino would do him the ‘honour’ of being his understudy. Pacino agreed to do it for the money, but when Sheen came down with laryngitis, giving Pacino the opportunity to go on in his place, Pacino couldn’t do it because he hadn’t learned the words. He had been ‘hiding out in some corner of the theatre, sitting alone and reading Spinoza’. The director fired him on the spot; it was only then he discovered that Sheen had been paying him out of his own pocket.

As this story illustrates, Pacino comes across as possessing a curious mixture of ambition and lack of it; of swagger and self-effacement. He seems to have believed fiercely in his own art, but he was far more interested in the work of acting itself than in climbing the ladder and says he never had any interest in having a career. Probably the most important relationship in his professional life was with a manager-producer called Marty Bregman who supplied the worldly ambition Pacino lacked. Bregman was alerted to Pacino’s work after Faye Dunaway – then a huge star, fresh off Bonnie and Clyde – went to see him in The Indian Wants the Bronx in which he appeared with John Cazale, who would play Fredo in The Godfather. The first performances of The Indian Wants the Bronx were in a venue so tiny that the audience had to walk across the stage to reach the exit. But then it moved to a venue off Broadway, which is where Dunaway saw it. Pacino and Cazale both won Obie awards (Tony awards for off-Broadway). Bregman – a hotshot who took meetings with a gun in his pocket – told Pacino he was taking him on because he’d made the mistake of letting Dustin Hoffman pass him by. From the moment Bregman was representing Pacino, he was on a different path.

‘I’m not gonna make you a star, you are a star,’ was one of Bregman’s mantras. It was Bregman who set him up with his first major screen role, in The Panic in Needle Park, with a screenplay written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, in which Pacino played a sweet-faced but criminal young heroin addict called Bobby opposite Kitty Winn (a soft-voiced screen presence who won best actress at Cannes and quit the film business soon afterwards). Bregman was right: Pacino is already a star in The Panic in Needle Park, as touching and soulful in the quieter love scenes with Winn as he is brash and bouncy while stealing and dealing dope or playing street games. In the film’s happier moments, he is cool and scruffy and very New York; and he performs having a heroin overdose with such bleak realism that I forgot he was acting. The Panic in Needle Park won him the part of Michael Corleone, despite Paramount’s jitteriness about casting an unknown. The studio, which was also reluctant to cast Robert Duvall and Brando, wanted many actors more than they wanted Pacino. ‘They wanted Jack Nicholson. They wanted Robert Redford. They wanted Warren Beatty or Ryan O’Neal.’ Imagine The Godfather with Robert Redford as Michael! But Francis Ford Coppola had wanted Pacino from the start and was finally able to persuade the studio execs after they saw eight minutes of footage from The Panic in Needle Park. Pacino had to fly to California to do a screen test, which he didn’t want to do, but Bregman bullied him onto the plane and gave him a pint of whiskey to drink on the flight. Before the screen test, Coppola took him to get a 1940s haircut – the one he has in the opening scene, when he arrives at his sister’s wedding in army uniform as the family outsider, trying to explain some of its strange ways to his girlfriend, Kay (played by Diane Keaton in that first screen test, as in the film). It is a sign of how much hype there was about the movie version of The Godfather before it was even made – because of the wild success of Mario Puzo’s book – that the barber who gave him the haircut started shaking when he realised what it was for. Pacino later found out that the man had suffered a heart attack.

One​ of the many things that makes Sonny Boy a cut above the average Hollywood memoir is the sense it gives of just how much of a shock The Godfather’s impact was in 1972 – to Pacino, as much as anyone else. In some ways, he seems to have spent the last fifty years trying to get back to the bohemian person he was before he became a film star. For a while, in those pre-Godfather years, he thought his calling might be composition: he made up tunes on a rented piano. He says he tried to compose like Beethoven but his music always came out like Satie. When he had finished work on The Godfather, he was still so short of cash he was supported by his then girlfriend, the actress Jill Clayburgh (one of a string of short-term partners, almost all of them actors, including Keaton and Penelope Ann Miller, his co-star in Carlito’s Way, and Marthe Keller, his co-star in Bobby Deerfield; he has never married). As soon as The Godfather was released, ‘everything changed.’ He realised things were different when a middle-aged woman came up to him and kissed his hand and called him ‘Godfather’. ‘I was shy about it, and the world wouldn’t let me be shy.’ Shrinking from the eternal glare of publicity, he was extremely sensitive to his work being panned. ‘It seemed like every time I brought something to the public, to the commercial world, I was scrutinised and put down for it.’ By contrast, any time he was performing Shakespeare, he felt at home.

Knowing that the question Pacino was asking himself as an actor, from a young age, was ‘where could I emote?’ casts some light on the central mystery of his film acting: how can he be so very subtle at times and so very unsubtle at others? After watching a lot of Pacino films back-to-back, I emerged puzzled that an actor who can rein himself in when playing some parts can allow himself to be so over the top in others. As Michael Corleone, Pacino delivers an introspective study in compressed anger. Through those vast brown eyes you feel as if you are watching Michael’s tumultuous inner transformation, culminating in the murder of his brother Fredo, played by Cazale. (Incidentally, Pacino described Cazale, who died of lung cancer aged 42, as the ‘sweetest man ever’.) Pacino’s aim by the end of Part II was, he says, to show someone ‘so withdrawn that he’s practically mummified’. His vast brown eyes become deader and deader, in shocking contrast to the boyish and smiling soldier who flirtatiously asks Keaton whether she likes her lasagne in the opening scene.

As with Macbeth, you can endlessly change your mind about whether Michael Corleone is a sociopath all along, or whether he is made evil by circumstance. Pacino argues that the character only fully becomes himself after his father is shot. In the thrilling scene when he goes to the hospital to stand watch over Vito, he is ‘still not quite Michael’, Pacino says; he only starts to recognise his own authority when he sees that the hand of Enzo the baker, the only person there to help him, is shaking whereas his own hand is still. In the first week and a half of filming Pacino deliberately did almost nothing with the character, trying to indicate that he wasn’t yet the terrifying person he would become by the end. But this downplayed acting made the execs at Paramount question whether he was right for the part. Coppola took him to one side to warn him that he was ‘not cutting it’ and moved forward the filming of the scene in which Michael kills two of his father’s enemies in a restaurant to reassure the studio that Pacino had what it took.

Compare and contrast with Pacino’s performance as a suicidal blind war vet in Scent of a Woman (1992). No one can ever have worried that he was downplaying things here. This was the schlockbuster for which, after numerous nominations, he finally won an Oscar for dancing a tango and shouting ‘Hooooo-ah!’ at every opportunity, a mannerism he stole from a military officer who taught him how a blind person would take apart and put together a gun. He asked the crew to treat him as if he couldn’t see, refused to look at anyone on set and at one point fell over into a bush, scratching his cornea and temporarily suffering real blindness. Pacino says he modelled his idea of the way a blind person would act on what happened when he asked his three-year-old daughter to pretend she was blind. He describes her contribution to his performance as ‘genius’, although he does admit that he sometimes went ‘overboard’ in the role, that he was ‘too big for it at times’.

Even so, his performance in Scent of a Woman is probably less crazy than the one he gives in Heat, Michael Mann’s stylish but over-long policier. Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, his character in Scent of a Woman, is clearly intended by the script to be ‘just nuts’, as Pacino puts it. If you can swallow your embarrassment, there is much to enjoy in the way he turns up every dial to max and then turns it up a little bit more, assisted by Chris O’Donnell as a surprisingly effective straight guy. To me, Heat is a stranger case. Pacino puts in a bizarrely strident and overblown performance as the cop to Robert de Niro’s robber. De Niro is nuanced and understated whereas Pacino is preposterously pop-eyed, bellowing and unhinged. When I first saw Heat, I assumed that Pacino just hadn’t noticed that he was acting in a totally different register from De Niro, but if his memoir can be trusted, the opposite is true. During rehearsals, Pacino recognised that ‘Bob’ – someone who became a very ‘dear friend’ – was ‘giving a performance that was more contained and low-key … It was beautiful. I knew that I would go in the other direction.’ Pacino’s one regret is that Mann removed a scene in which his police lieutenant was shown ‘taking a hit of coke’, which he claims would have explained his character’s behaviour: ‘without that explanation, I can see how it made aspects of my performance seem extravagant.’

There’s a widely held view that Pacino’s film career splits down the middle between the years when his acting style was restrained and the later years when he got too shouty and big. But the evidence doesn’t bear this out. In some of his best early films – such as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Panic in Needle Park, all of which are perfect vehicles for his strangeness and charisma – he flits between modes, from almost catatonic stillness and introversion to wild bombast and back again. What I hadn’t appreciated before reading Sonny Boy was that – for the most part – when Pacino is histrionic, it is deliberate. He presents himself as choosing how much to emote depending on the role and the production. ‘You have to get to know someone else within yourself. And I guess there are a lot of me’s in me,’ is the way he summarises his approach in Sonny Boy.

In Dog Day Afternoon (1975), he plays a real-life criminal, Sonny Wortzik, who makes a botched attempt to rob the First Brooklyn Savings Bank, in order to pay for his boyfriend’s sex-change operation. The robbery goes wrong from the start and ends up as a circus, with the police and a large crowd surrounding the bank as Sonny – along with his dimwitted sidekick, Sal, played once more by Cazale – tries and fails to keep control of the situation. Pacino brings a quiet tenderness and desperation to the role. When speaking on the phone, first to his boyfriend, played by Chris Sarandon, and then to his wife, played by Susan Peretz, he seems like a vulnerable teenager on the verge of a breakdown who can’t say his ‘R’s. But for much of the movie, he is in full emoting mode, notably in the scene in which he walks out of the bank, baiting the police and getting the crowd to cheer for him by shouting ‘Attica!’ (a reference to a New York prison riot a few years earlier) with an intensity so extreme it becomes comic as well as dramatic.

If Pacino had played every role the way he played Michael Corleone we would have missed much of what makes him so thrilling to watch – his weird fearlessness. In a 2018 interview in the Village Voice, he compared himself to a tenor who needs to push himself to hit the high notes. ‘Even if they are wrong. So sometimes they’re way off. There’s a couple of roles that, you know, the needle screeched on the record.’ Yet when the needle doesn’t screech, no one shouts with as much impact as Pacino. In … And Justice for All (1979), a mostly forgettable legal drama, Pacino delivers such a rousing courtroom speech in the climactic scene that it ‘became part of the culture in a way that the movie itself did not. To this day, people still say “You’re out of order! The whole trial’s out of order!” without knowing that this is where it came from.’ It’s quite something to watch. Pacino uses every inch of his small frame to dominate the courtroom with his righteous fury, jabbing his fingers in the air and kicking his legs like a tantrumming child in a three-piece grey suit as he is led from the courtroom by the cops.

There was a phase in his later career when he did films for the pay cheque and the emoting lost its purpose. He says he always hoped his performance could elevate a mediocre film to a good one, but concedes that he didn’t always succeed. Sonny Boy is funny and self-aware on the craziness of the money that comes with being a film star. What was most remarkable about Pacino playing Shylock in Central Park for nothing was that he was broke at the time, having allowed his spending to spiral out of control, thanks in part to a dodgy accountant. ‘I had fifty million dollars, and then I had nothing.’ At one stage, he was spending $400,000 a year on landscaping for a house he wasn’t actually living in. A low point was Jack and Jill, a 2011 Adam Sandler comedy in which Pacino appears as himself in a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial, doing a rap dance and song that references some of his most iconic scenes, from ‘Attica’ to ‘I know it was you.’ Ever one to give other actors their due, he reports that Sandler is ‘a hell of a guy’.

At heart, Pacino is a ‘theatre guy’ who enjoys spending months finding ‘the character within myself’ and loves being with other actors and responding to what they are doing as well as to the demands of the text. Part of the reason Pacino loved Cazale so much was because he was even more thorough: he ‘would question every line, every word choice’. The happiest phase of Pacino’s professional life, according to Sonny Boy, was not the time he spent making The Godfather or The Godfather Part II but the four years he spent on Looking for Richard, a 1996 passion project about Shakespeare that he financed himself. If you haven’t seen it – and you should – Looking for Richard is a hybrid movie assembled with the help of Frederic Kimball, an actor and writer who was a buddy from Pacino’s days on stage in Boston in the 1970s. Kimball’s IMDB entry (he died in 2008) was as sparse as Pacino’s is full. The film juxtaposes scenes from Richard III – the title role played with scary intensity by Pacino – with rehearsal sessions and documentary sections discussing the meaning of Shakespeare in modern America, with talking heads ranging from Vanessa Redgrave to Stanley Wells and Barbara Everett. It’s an odd mixture, but somehow it works, both as a legible rendition of the play and as a portrait of the craft of translating Shakespeare for modern audiences.

Looking for Richard took Pacino years to finish because he had to squeeze in the filming alongside the roles he was being paid for. After long days acting in Heat opposite De Niro, he would sit by the pool of his rental house in LA going over ‘the construction of the scenes’ in his mind. The extended period it took to shoot Looking for Richard meant that Pacino’s appearance keeps changing, from clean-shaven with long, dishevelled hair to the shorter hair and beard he needed for his role as a Nuyorican criminal trying to go straight in Carlito’s Way. But the film ‘invigorated’ him, Pacino writes. It required some ‘fine dancing’ to bring all the elements together: ‘the wheeling and dealing of casting actors’ who dropped in and out, including Winona Ryder as Lady Anne and Kevin Spacey as the Duke of Buckingham. Michael Mann loaned him some of the Heat crew. Pacino’s highlights reel would show him playing numerous characters who felt a terrifying disconnect – from Tony Montana to Bobby in The Panic in Needle Park – but the Pacino in Looking for Richard, joking and debating with his fellow actors, seems a friendlier and more collaborative character.

Pacino’s​ primary mission in the film was to bring Shakespeare to the American masses and to demonstrate that once you ‘tune up’ your ear, as he puts it in the film, these are ‘not fancy words’. There are vox pops with random people on the streets of New York, including an amiable and chatty man who tells Kimball and Pacino that he likes Shakespeare even though he’s never seen any because it’s not on TV. One young person tells him that Hamlet ‘sucked’ while another tells him that Shakespeare is ‘boring’. ‘As Americans, what is it … that thing? That gets between us and Shakespeare?’ Pacino asks at one point. He has an array of actors elucidate the question, including Kenneth Branagh (who suggests that Shakespeare may be taught in a dull way in schools), John Gielgud (who fears that the reason may be that Americans don’t go to ‘picture galleries’ as much as the English), Derek Jacobi (who thinks that Americans have been made to feel self-conscious and inferior when it comes to Shakespeare) and James Earl Jones who, contrary to Pacino’s thesis, says that he first encountered Shakespeare in the fields of Michigan when his uncle, a ‘black northern guy’, suddenly started narrating Mark Antony’s funeral oration from Julius Caesar.

Why did Looking for Richard mean so much to Pacino? As he writes, he wanted to ‘exorcise’ the criticism levelled at him when he played Richard III on Broadway in the 1970s. One reviewer then wrote that ‘Pacino sets Shakespeare back fifty years in this country.’ The hurt of this remark lingered. ‘I wondered why they didn’t say a hundred years.’ But Looking for Richard didn’t get big audiences; Pacino says ‘it was in the marketing where it all fell apart’ and still feels so angry with the responsible studio exec that he won’t name him (‘If he reads this book, he’ll know who he was’). Many years later, at a party of movie types and celebrities in LA, Pacino was upset to discover that no one had heard of Looking for Richard.

Here’s a film I wrote, directed and starred in, with a cast of great British artists and American actors who filled the screen with their gifts. The Directors Guild of America gave me a Best Director Award for Looking for Richard, and the New York Times named it one of the top ten films of the year. But here at this party, not a soul knew about it.

Some film actors get critical acclaim; others sell a lot of tickets; a rare few have a charisma so indelible that it survives any number of flops and missteps. Pacino has all this and more, and yet he describes the disappointment of Looking for Richard’s reception as something ‘life-affecting’, which ‘completely overshadows all your past success’. That’s quite a statement for someone whose successes at that point included The Godfather trilogy and his two great 1970s films for the director Sidney Lumet – Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon – in which at the peak of his grandiloquence and liquid-eyed handsomeness, he is on screen for almost every shot and never less than electrifying to watch. (His beanies and bucket hats in Serpico are memorably weird – google ‘Al Pacino hats Serpico’.)

There were also his two ultraviolent gangster movies for Brian de Palma: Carlito’s Way (in which he is excellent as Carlito Brigante) and Scarface, the ‘biggest film I ever did’ in money terms. For me, his depiction of the brutal Tony Montana is one of the roles where the needle screeches a little too much, not least in the blood-soaked final scene when Montana is alone in his mansion with nothing but a machine gun, an overdone Cuban accent and a giant pile of drugs for company. He says in the memoir that he could live on the residuals of Scarface for life, adding: ‘I mean, I could, if I lived like a normal person.’ He has also appeared opposite some great actresses, including Ellen Barkin in Sea of Love (1989), a serial killer whodunnit that grossed more than $100 million worldwide, and Michelle Pfeiffer in the schmaltzy but affecting Frankie and Johnny (1991). I wish that Pfeiffer (who was also his co-star in Scarface) had made more films with Pacino. His only other rom-com, Author! Author!, was hampered by an uneven and misogynistic script and a hammy performance by Dyan Cannon as his romantic interest. But Pfeiffer’s cool scepticism is the perfect foil for his posturing, offsetting his needle-screeching moments, even if we have to suspend belief to accept her as a plain and downtrodden waitress. As Johnny, a short order cook, Pacino in bouncy bombastic mode says that his head is ‘as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat’, quoting Romeo and Juliet, and she simply raises an elegant eyebrow.

Critical success, adoration and money did not compensate for Looking for Richard’s failure. As a Pacino fan (who isn’t a fan of his Michael Corleone?), I feel guilty admitting that I didn’t see the movie. I was put off by the poster in which Pacino in a back-to-front baseball cap stands in a New York street next to a billboard showing him as Richard. Without knowing the first thing about it, I imagined the film was a vanity project to capitalise on his screen success. I had it the wrong way round.

After all the girlfriends and the houses and the unwanted glare of both success and failure, Pacino seems still to be remarkably in touch with the version of himself who learned how to deliver Shakespeare in New York. At one point, a friend tells him that he is like ‘an off-off-Broadway movie star’. He says he never learned to express himself in the businesslike world of film. One of his regrets is that he never managed to make a film about Edmund Kean, ‘the legendary British actor of the early 1800s’. The exec to whom he pitched it looked at him as if he were a ‘leper’. But in Sonny Boy, he says he has a new idea that makes him feel the ‘fire’ inside him is still burning: ‘What I want to do is make a film adaptation of King Lear. I have a producer. I have a director. I have a screenwriter, and a script that we’ve been refining for a year. To play the lead, I have me. That should be enough.’