From the Toronto Sun, October 12, 1997
STILL PLAYING DEVIL'S ADVOCATE
By Liz Braun
Quintessential anti-hero of the '70s, Al Pacino marches to his own beat
NEW YORK -- Bad hair, bad fashion, good movies: that would be the '70s.
Whatever else happened in that decade that came after free love and before expensive greed, the '70s, cinematically speaking, belonged to Al Pacino.
Now 30 years into his profession, Pacino -- older, wiser, cuter -- is still making waves. In a career move that takes him from anti-hero to anti-Christ, Pacino currently stars in Devil's Advocate -- opening Friday -- a Rosemary's Baby meets The Firm kind of undertaking that co-stars Keanu Reeves.
Reeves plays a green go-getter, a hick lawyer lured to the modern Babylon (New York, natch) for a lucrative career with a gigantic law firm. Pacino is the Machiavellian head of said Manhattan firm.
Our youthful hero defends scum clients and gets rich and famous and attracts beautiful babes and gains the whole world but nearly suffers the loss of his immortal soul, and so forth. Then Reeves' character discovers who his boss really is: The Prince of Darkness. Satan. The Devil. Lucifer.
Sparks fly, not to mention fire and brimstone.
"What was gratifying was being able to play a character you could do almost anything with," says Pacino with relish. "Anything goes. Our idea was to make him a more tempting devil, to take it to an almost Faustian level."
He pauses before adding, "And then there's the whole idea of the devil."
Pacino hates interviews, but he is relaxed, humorous and characteristically inarticulate today as he promotes Devil's Advocate, winding unfinished sentences together into an old ball of twine for the press. Twice in the film, Pacino's character names Vanity his favorite sin. Asked what his own favorite sin is, he smiles right up to his eyebrows and murmurs, "That's why I didn't want to come here today."
The conversation goes elsewhere for a few minutes before he suddenly blurts, "Omission. Sins of omission," and grins.
The connection between Devil's Advocate and the films of the '70s that made Pacino famous -- The Godfather, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon -- is a thread you might call social consciousness.
Pacino says he took the role in Devil's Advocate, a script he'd already turned down more than once, because director Taylor Hackford took over the project and had something specific to say about the way we live now. Devil's Advocate is a satirical thriller about greed, vanity and the contemporary conscience.
It's not that movies are worse now, cautions Pacino. They're just different. "In the '70s we seemed to be addressing the socio-political issues of the day." Now, he notes, TV and the media in general have filled that gap.
"In Dog Day Afternoon, that's maybe the first time you ever see the media dealing with a real-life situation. Today, something like that is just run of the mill.
"You see it all the time on TV."
As for looking back, Pacino says he recently went to a 25th-anniversary screening of The Godfather -- the first time he'd seen the movie on a big screen. "I went when it opened, but I didn't stay. I was too nervous."
Everyone in the original cast was at the screening. "And I was interested to see the reactions. It's like looking at an old photograph of yourself. You just wonder. You say, `I can't quite relate.' "
Pacino says he prefers to keep looking forward, not to the past. Fame aside, he says he has never lost certain professional insecurities. "I always think, the next thing I do had better, it has got to be, ah -- it just never changed for me."
Being a legend, he says, is hard to compute.
"The work is reality. That other stuff is fantasy."
The eight-time Oscar nominee reluctantly talks about celebrity, prefacing his comments by noting that he figures it's okay to talk about because he's had the experiences.
The example he offers is about a trip to Paris, some years ago, when he was hounded endlessly. The point is, says Pacino, that the next time you work out in advance how to avoid all that.
"When you're in a public-enterprise thing, that's what you have to expect. But it's the persistence that causes you to react."
He doesn't want to dwell on the woes of stardom: that's a tiny, tiny `w,' the actor says. The perqs outweigh the negative stuff. What he most appreciates is something he calls access. "I remember in East Berlin, they knew me at Checkpoint Charlie." His face lights up at the memory. "So that was great."
Only once, says Pacino, did he actually put on a disguise. He glued on a beard to go to a baseball game.
He was noticed anyway, as was his `date,' Beverly D'Angelo. The actor's ploy was revealed all over TV and newspapers. "So that beard is in the museum of mistakes now," he says, laughing. On the subject of ambition, Pacino makes several attempts to explain that while ambition is not a bad thing, just wanting to work is mostly his thing. "My grandfather was a plasterer, and the thing about him, because he raised me, was his love of what he did," says the actor.
"And he went away and did that for eight hours every day, and you felt he really wanted to go back and do that again."
Then he quotes David Mamet, but not without worrying out loud beforehand about quoting someone without his permission. According to Pacino, when Mamet was asked how he could write, write, write his plays and books and movies all the time, Mamet responded, "It beats thinking."
And, "I kind of agree," murmurs Pacino.
THE AL PACINO FILE
ABOUT OSCAR: Pacino won for Best Actor in 1994 for his performance in Scent Of A Woman.
ABOUT HAMLET: The self-confessed Shakespeare fanatic has, oddly, never played the Prince of Denmark. Frankly, he doesn't think he's right for the role. "But I think I should add," says Pacino, "that I've never been asked."
ABOUT DIRECTORS: Pacino -- hard to believe -- has never worked with Martin Scorsese, and would like to.
ABOUT FAMILY: Pacino has an eight-year-old daughter from a past relationship. As women go, many are called but few are chosen.
ABOUT BAD HABITS: At one point, Pacino's nickname was Al Cappuccino because of his coffee habit. He now smokes herbal cigarettes only, and very few, but as for quitting altogether, he says, "I've given up giving up."
