From New York (AP), November 6, 1996

PACINO GOES LOOKING FOR RICHARD, FINDS THINKGS GO IN THREES

By Louis B. Hobson

-- Al Pacino is enjoying being part of a trinity of reasons why Richard III is a happening guy.

In the past year, Ian McKellan's film of the 15th-century monarch as a 20th-century fascist was well-received -- critically, though not at the box office. And a 1912 adaptation of William Shakespeare's drama -- believed to be the oldest U.S.-made feature still in existence -- was exhumed from the cellar of a retired Portland, Ore., film projectionist.

"Things happen in threes. That's what they say," Pacino says, rasping out a laugh.

Yes, it's good to be the king, and reason No. 3 is Pacino's documentary, Looking for Richard, which juxtaposes the telling of the Bard's story of betrayal, murder and lust for power, with actors struggling in their craft, academics grappling with the play's history and ideas, and audiences trying to understand it all.

Pacino, the film's director-star-co-writer, sees the Richard rush as total coincidence. "In a way, I always will be grateful to Ian's doing it because I think it got me to finally put it together," said Pacino, who's making his directing debut.

He's also interested in seeing the 84-year-old movie, "because the situations and the story carry with them a great power, of course, but it's the combination of that and the words that brings home the drama."

He likens it to separating music from lyrics and demonstrates that you can simply say "I love you" or sing it out.

"So when they take the music away, you have to find an equinox, and part of it is the way it's interpreted and the style and all that -- if that means something to you. I certainly don't understand what I just said."

Pacino, 56, can sound circuitous and turbid, like the material he's trying to demystify in this movie. And he knows it. He says at one point:

"I'm sorry for my long-winded answers. I always go around to see if I can finally come up with and give you an answer to your question."

The eight-time Academy Award nominee, who won the 1992 best-actor Oscar for Scent of a Woman, thinks of his production "as a kind of a flyer for the play."

And one way he makes it more appealing is by bringing in the star power of Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, Winona Ryder, Aidan Quinn, Estelle Parsons and other big names.

Once people unfamiliar with the play see his movie, he hopes they get "a sense of this play, and this character ... that they could make reference to it when somebody mentions Shakespeare."

And he hopes maybe they'll read it or see it performed.

While he's been called an "unlikely Mr. Chips" by one critic, Pacino wants his movie to get people to connect to the play "in a way that they might not have if they had just picked it off the shelf and read it, or saw a play of it, or a movie of it."

This project became a passion after someone asked him about four years ago whether he would play Richard III in a movie. He then began wondering how he could do it differently or better since it had been done years ago by Laurence Olivier, Pacino says.

Then he flashed back to when he would go to schools in the mid-1970s and read from plays and poetry and have a discussion, recalling: "Every time I brought Shakespeare in, the audience was a bit reluctant. They were a bit removed; they didn't want to hear Shakespeare. So I would take a particular passage from a play and I would talk about it first in a kind of language that they could relate to, then I would get into the play, then I would gradually go into Shakespeare."

People would finally take to it, he said, "because they had been given a kind of preamble.

"So that thought was in my mind, and then I said, 'How could I possibly do that in a movie?' I thought, well, why don't I try this: I could do the actual story of a guy trying to do Richard, then the story of the very issue of Shakespeare, then see if I could do Richard. So I criss-crossed those three tracks."