Probst: You say it’s scary to do "Arturo Ui".

Pacino: To do anything is scary for me. To do a movie, to do a play. When you take a chance you’re as good as the chances you take, so it’s a chance to fall. And also it’s a little frightening to go into yourself and commit yourself, take the responsibility of it, take hold of the reins and say, I’m somebody and I’ve got this to say and I’ve got that to say, here it is. The most exciting thing about it—and I just found this out recently—is that opportunity to change, to go through an experience and come out of it different. I like working in the theater at night because it makes my day. It’s a focal point. I read more, I see more people, I have a better time….Of course I die when I have to go there at night, but still and all, in the end…I want it to end, I want the run to be over, but every time it is, I miss it, and I go back to it. It makes for a live—change and routine. You know you’ve someplace to go to, where you’re going to take a chance, walk upon the wire.

Probst: Is that what you call going on stage—a walk upon the wire?

Pacino: I like to call it that. The imaginary wire. But it’s just as devastating, a hundred-foot drop there. When you’re going for the stakes, when you set those stakes for yourself—you’ve got to be a little crazy to do it.

Probst: You’re always competing with yourself?

Pacino: You’re always going to be compared to the last thing you did. I say you’re as good as the best thing you’ve done. I try to use that philosophy.

Bregman: (business manager) : Being an actor is a passive role. You’re waiting for a play to start, film to start. The state of being is a very destructive state because it’s living in a vacuum all the time. Existing on stage or film or in your work is a very positive, almost aggressive thing. You’re creating something. But waiting for that work to start is living in a void. Waiting is a very passive and frightening role, and that’s why most actors, when they finish a project, become depressed. The depression is normal. There is suddenly the prospect of huge inactivity, even though you’ re exhausted, it’s stopping a force.

Pacino: Especially when you’re on the stage. A new kind of thing is going on and then suddenly it’s over. Now, how can life, everyday life compare to that? That can make for depression too.

Probst: Is theater a separate life?

Pacino: I believe that the goal for everybody is to have work be an integral part of his life. They asked Brecht one time about the actress. Is she happy she’s working? And he said, "She’s working, she’s happy." It is a difficult position to be in when you don’t have to work. When you’re financially secure there’s a tendency to say, Why the fuck should I go out there and open myself up like this and go through all the other pains when I don’t need to do it? When you’re doing it for money. When you HAVE to do it. You get a chance to do parts, maybe, that you wouldn’t do normally. And you might find a vehicle of expression that you didn’t know was in yourself. There are parts around that I haven’t done that might unleash a part of me. One of the reasons that I want to do Hamlet—which I will do—is I know that after I’ve done Hamlet, whatever happens with it, whether it succeeds or fails, I will find out something about myself. That’s the appeal to me, to learn something about myself and express myself, be creative. That’s the excitement for me now. Sometimes you say, Jesus, I don’t want to learn about myself, I’m getting along, and you force yourself to work.

Probst: Are you happier being an actor playing somebody else’s life than your own?

Pacino: Yes, of course. Because it’s my life. It’s a chance to express my life, my views, my way of looking at things. That’s where it’s value is. It’s my contribution.

Probst: Your life is not "Arturo Ui, your life is not "Hamlet", is it?

Pacino: There’s a desire to be in that world and to go through those experiences artistically. Let me give you an example. If you want to grieve, you have to step out of yourself and let it out. If you hold on to it’s there, it’s inside you, and that’s what it is with acting. You step out of yourself in order to grieve, to be tragic. It’s like losing yourself in your objectivity. I don’t just mean tragedy—comedy is the same thing.

Probst: You step out of yourself to become yourself?

Pacino: Yes. What does Michelangelo say…God free me of myself so I can please you. That’s exactly it. It’s confusing. But this again is personal. I like to get caught up in a world and make it imaginative and alive. I need to do it. When I first realized I wanted to do this and that nothing mattered after that, I was twenty-two and I was doing the Strindberg play(The Creditors). I knew I had talent, I knew I was born with it. I was in school plays and I was going around saying I was an actor. It’s the only thing I can do, it comes natural. But I never quite understood it. I’m from the South Bronx, you know, I didn’t know anything about the Strindberg world. I felt that I had the license to speak and that I was Everyman and that I was timeless and that I was universal. I felt this great sense of saying, I can talk, I can speak, I’ve got something to say. I knew that I would do nothing else but that. And it didn’t matter anymore that I became successful or got a job. This can sustain me. It sounds very wowie, but I tell you the truth, I became conscious of the fact that I was an artist. And I knew it then, way back then. That’s very young, I think. That’s why I love to do Shakespeare because I love to talk and say and feel all those things—make things happen. I don’t do much of that in my personal life. I’ve been very reserved in my living. I’m just beginning to understand that now and trying to live. I’ve done a lot of living through my work, but that’s another story. When you start to make your work your life, too, then it becomes integrated and you’ re able to be as alive when you’re not physically working. You become interchangeable. I sometimes wish that there were no opening nights, that you just rehearsed, and people came, and it just happened.

Probst: If your work is completely absorbing and challenging, you don’t need a personal life. You may need one now.

Pacino: I had a personal life. I wasn’t giving myself to that because I kept saying, Well, I’ll give myself to the work. And I realize that’s foolish. You can give yourself to your life.

Probst: Can you do both?

Pacino: Sure you can.

Probst: Why didn’t you?

Pacino: I wasn’t aware that I wasn’t, for a lot of reasons. The thing I was afraid of was, well, if I was able to do it in my personal life, I won’t want to act anymore and I was going to lose my talent. But you don’t. You just understand it more. It took me a long time to realize that. I still have the need, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it. I still have the need. It ’s my craft. It’s what I’ve spent twenty years doing. I’m not going to give it up yet. Probst: You found that by acting somebody else’s life you found your own life?

Pacino: There is only one life, that’s yours. Once I was doing Richard 111 and the director came up to me and said, "You know, Richard is this and Richard is that and Richard does this and Richard does—" I said, "Wait a minute. I got the answer. Get Richard to play it. And that’s it. You know so much about Richard, maybe you should play it. There is no Richard. I’m Richard." There’s a real difference between character acting and caricature acting. The character actor says what you’re looking for is the who-am-I. In acting terms they talk about it all the time. They say, Who am I? You’ve seen a lot of my work. There’s a difference between Serpico and Michael Corleone, and they’re the same…it’s me, it’s me. I love doing Richard. There’s a character. There is a scene in Richard 111 where Richard’s mother is haranguing him with all these curses, calling him a toad and stuff. The queen, Queen Elizabeth, is on him toward the end of the play, and Richard is really going into it. He’s starting to kill everybody and taking over and getting higher and higher. Charlie Laughton (Pacino’s acting teacher) loved the work, but he pointed out that one scene and he said, "Al—knowing me so well—"Al, if you would just listen to what they’re saying to you, something will happen." He knew that I wasn’ t listening, I didn’t want to hear those curses at me, especially coming from my mother and women. And I knew what he said. I came that night and I came to that scene, and I just listened. I heard them and my face changed…a twitch came into my face and my whole face changed, the right side of my face, just from listening, having faith t listen. You have to have the faith to listen. You got to hear it first. It has to happen to you.

Probst: Who is Alfred Pacino?

Pacino: I’m just beginning to recognize that there is one.

Probst: That there is an Al Pacino?

Pacino: There has to be.

Probst: Where did it all begin?

Pacino: When I was very little, about three, I was given to my paternal grandparents—and do you know that two of my aunts are mutes? At three years old, I was brought up by this aunt and my grandmother, my paternal grandmother, Grandma Pacino, who’s dead now. This was very traumatic, being taken away from your mother when you’re that young. This is something I’ve blocked off, I don’t remember it. A mute took care of me, so that explains a lot of the mimic kind of thing. You’re around deaf-and-dumb people long enough, you begin to express yourself this way. I wasn’t allowed out of the house until I was seven because we lived in the back and my maternal grandmother couldn’t watch me and my mother worked. The only exposure I got to the outside world was the movies my mother would take me to. The next day I’d enact all the parts alone in my house.

Probst: Your father now lives in California?

Pacino: I haven’t seen much of him in my life. I don’t know him well.

Probst: How much of Al Pacino have we seen?

Pacino: I think there’s a whole area of myself that hasn’t been seen. A real vehicle for expression for me is comedy—I would love to do that. And I think the time will come when I will do it. It’s a strange thing. Here I am at a very high point in my career. I can do most anything. Things come along, and I look at them—they’re good films with good directors—and yet I feel that’s six months of my life. I can’t give myself to something unless it presents some kind of challenge or stimulation. I can read a script and it can be really very good, but I wouldn’t want to do it. I’ve been as discerning as I can be in the picking of films. At this point it seems to be one of the few things I’ve been consistent at. And as far as violent parts go, I think there’s violence in every part.

Probst: Comedy?

Pacino: Sure. A man slips on a roller skate and falls down and everybody laughs. That’s violent.

Probst: We want something to take us out of ourselves?

Pacino: There’s that part of entertainment that takes us out of ourselves, but then there’s also something else. Why I get scared sometimes when I go to the theater. Why THE LIVING THEATER go to me the way it did. I love that theater. They did things that changed my life…you know that little fear when you go in and the lights start to go down? What it is is a chance that you’re going to come out of the theater different from when you went in.

Probst: Do you consider yourself a Method actor?

Pacino: I really don’t know what that is. I remember doing scenes in the Actor’s Studio, and then when anybody would talk I would count numbers so I wouldn’t hear it. Good actors are made and great actors are born. Either you’ve got something to say or you don’t. And you try to get to the point where you can say something as an artist. I’ve seen actors who’ve studied The Method who have become better from it, and I’ve seen others who’ve been worse. The Method is based on what great actors did—that’s what Stanislavsky based the Method on.

Probst: Do you take direction?

Pacino: Nobody can tell me how to do it. When Charlie says to me, Listen to what she says(referring to Richard III), that makes sense because it’s not saying how to do it. I understand that kind of talk. But what to do, and the rules to do it in, no, no. I can’t explain to you how I do what I do. I can’t explain it.

Probst: There’s a change that comes over you in Godfather 1 and Godfather 11, you’re not the same person. You become more a monster.

Pacino: I’m more alienated.

Probst: Did those scenes bother you, the restaurant scene in Godfather 1, where you kill two men?

Pacino: Drove me crazy. Drove me crazy. Godfather 11 put me in the hospital. It was doing this character, the loneliness of him. I couldn’t be that guy and have a good time. I wanted to have stuff inside. We were working twenty weeks on that film. I was living with that weight all the time, and it was suffocating, it was hurting. In film it’s much more difficult—especially Michael Corleone. It’s a film performance, it’s a character done on film. You don’t do that on the stage. And in the theater there’s a chance to step outside of it, become artistic, objective, and not take it out on your hide. The more experienced you become, the more aware you become, you start taking less and less out on your own experience, I think. Jimmy Dean did it to a great extent. He was very young and it hurt him.

Probst: Why was Godfather 11 so oppressive?

Pacino: I became physically exhausted and got bronchial pneumonia. It was frightening. This had to do with a combination of nervous exhaustion and my own need to get away, to pull out. I’m not very fond of doing films—it’s wear and tear on me. I have a very strong musical sense in me. In a movie, there’s not a chance for that rhythm to build. I really feel that I was meant to compose music—in a different environment I might have done it. It’ s still my first love, music is, by far. I know more about music than I know about what’s happening in the theater. That’s why I love Shakespeare, because I can get into a rhythm of the words and the whole rhythm of the thing. That’s why I fear doing things in translation, because words are notes to me and I play them. This is an area of myself nobody knows about. Michael Corleone didn’t have many words. If I’ve got something to say that the poet wrote, it can take me away. Most of the time I don’t personalize at all. I don’t try to say my own…I let them take me. I love words, I love saying them. I don’t know why, I don’t know. They say I’m a very good looper—you know, in films when you have to go and loop(lip-sync) your voice—they say I’m one of the best. Sometimes I’ ll just go and ride on the music of words. You have to do a take—and it stops. That’s severed somehow, that’s aborted. It’s also aborted and difficult when you’re doing plays in translation. I found it difficult with Brecht. In a lot of Godfather 11, believe it or not, because it was hard to get the source, it was hard to get the thing rolling. I’d find myself in my dressing room with my ear to the speaker, listening to Stravinsky or something, so that I'd hear music in my head when I’d be talking. I’d have something to relate to. Because you don’t have the rhythm of a play to relate to, you need to draw on things.

Probst: How do you draw on music? Music is abstract, almost mathematical, it seems to me.

Pacino: It is, of course. But that’s when you’re composing it, playing it. But when you’re listening to it, it has a very emotional effect on me. It can change my state of being. I did a simple scene in the boathouse when I tell Tom Hagan about what’s going on and what he has to do. It was a six-minute scene of exposition. Michael is talking about what’s going to happen. I mean, impossible stuff. How do you make it active? How do you act in it? Well, I knew that I was stuck with that. I’m not somebody who just goes up there and mouths things. And I found I didn’t have that much time to research, to work to find these things—so I used music.

Probst: I don’t know what you mean when you say, I used music.

Pacino: Music would put me in a state. It would work on my subconscious, subliminal state. And I would come in with that state, so that was going on inside me, whatever that was….Then I would talk, and that would be ringing in my ears. Michael had a lot of stuff going on in the back of his head and I didn’t know what it was. So I found something to commensurate with it. You get it now?

Probst: I understand it.

Pacino: So I used that when I could.

Probst: In Godfather 1, you have said you felt unwanted, that Francis Ford Coppola…

Pacino: Yah, he wanted me.

Probst: …but the other people thought you were a mistake, and therefore you felt very alien. Did you get sick in Godfather1?

Pacino: I hurt my ankle. They were thinking of firing me the first week, mainly because they wanted me to be very strong in the beginning and I knew the only way that that part would happen, I knew that the excitement of that role, the way it could come off, is in translation—unlike Godfather 11. In Godfather 1, suddenly, as an audience, you say, Where did he come from? That’s what I wanted to do. And I wanted to create an enigma, somebody you didn’t quite know. And I did it. I’m most proud of Godfather 11, because that’s the most difficult character I ever had to do. I had nowhere to go, nothing to grab, except to sustain it for three and a half hours. When I saw it, afterward, in rough cut—I only see my films once…I have no need to see it anymore—there’s nothing I can do about it, it’s over—I was pleased because I thought that I had done something artistic in this performance. I felt that. I wanted to create that kind of loneliness and that alienation and that abstraction that I felt. It had a meaning. There was an identity there.

Probst: Did you want the audience to dislike you?

Pacino: I knew that was going to be a problem, but no, I didn’t. I don’t mean to compare my performance to a Beethoven quartet, I don’t mean to, but I think it’s the kind of performance that you have to really look at and see. You don’t just sit around and listen to a Beethoven quartet and just say, Hey that was terrific. You have to give yourself to it. That’s why sometimes the performance is not quite seen, it’s a little unclear, it’s not quite understood. People have said to me that they feel in time it will be. People have said to me that they feel in time it will be. People have said that they feel it’s a sort of revolutionary performance. I would talk this way if somebody else did it. I hate to be falsely modest. And it’s not about me, really. I feel there was a revolutionary sense in Godfather 11.

Probst: In what way was it revolutionary?

Pacino: It sounds presumptuous of me to say it’s revolutionary. What I meant is, it was revolutionary for me. I didn’t try to opt for any kind of sympathy or understanding that was gratuitous of the character. I didn’t impinge on it. I wanted people to like Michael but like him in the sense that I wanted them to see him, to understand him and his dilemma, without asking him to identify with him. That’s what I was after. It’s a difficult thing to do…and I think I did it. I’m most proud of that.

Probst: What was Michael’s dilemma—the losing and the winning?

Pacino: Yes, that balance of losing and winning, his struggle to be a person he couldn’t be. He became a non-person. When you start that lie, that pretense, no matter how noble your intentions…he didn’t know who he was anymore. When he was younger, he didn’t want to be a part of the gang. This is fiction but I’m talking about a character I created. I mean Mario Puzo created the character and I took it another step. It’s the same guy who was in Godfather 1. Michael didn’t know where he was way back in the ‘40’s when he was going to school and moving away from "the family", in one sense, but also moving away from his destiny. In Godfather 11, his problems are manifest more and more. There’s such a dichotomy in this guy, he’s so ambivalent. Strange thing about Michael and Ui. Artruro Ui, who is the Hitler figure, is an unpredictable guy but he’s unpredictable because he’s not bright, he’s mediocre. Michael, on the other hand, is unpredictable but he’s very intelligent. This dichotomy finally leads to his madness. He is lost at the end of this film. He’s a beaten man. He is a desperately sad person. That’s what comes across and it isn’t commercial. I was very proud that people look to me and in time, I hope, will take to it more.

Probst: Part 11 is your movie. Part 1 you’re sharing with a lot of people.

Pacino: That has something to do with it. If you notice at the end of Part 1 there’s a kind of bounce to Michael. There’s that ever subtle joy of what he’s doing, that newness and that kind of taking it on, but when we pick him up in 11, he’s been doing it for five years, and that’s gone. And that’s what I went for.

Probst: What do you now feel about Serpico?

Pacino: Serpico was a launching pad for me. This was the first time I became interested in film as a medium. I was more on the inside. I found out how you cut a scene, what you can do when you write a scene, what it’s like to work together with people like Sidney Lumet and Marty Bregman and Dede Allen. I try to apply it now to everything I do. Godfather 11 wasn’t that situation at all. But the next movie I did, Dog Day Afternoon, did have that collaboration, and it’s a very exciting way to work. You don’t feel you’re just going up in front of a camera and saying your lines with a certain sincerity and naturalness. You’re working with the total…Ultimately, it’s the director’s vision and that I respect.

Probst: In the collaborative effort, what did you bring to the character?

Pacino: I got to know Frank Serpico very well. I talked to him, went out with him, lived with him. This is a great advantage for any actor. With me, things rub off subliminally and stay. That made the characterization stronger. I had a source to draw from. Sometimes in the theater, your source is the material and that can be great stuff. But in films, the material isn’t always as strong as it is in great plays. They haven’t had the time to work it. It’s a different form. So that if you can find a source to go to…Frank Serpico was a source.

Probst: Of the characters you’ve done on film, do you have a favorite?

Pacino: I think my favorite characterization has been Michael Corleone. It was the most difficult for me to do. It was the most challenging.

Probst: What about very intimate scenes?

Pacino: In all of Shakespeare’s plays, nobody’s taken their clothes off and nobody’s even kissing. Romeo and Juliet, they don’t kiss.

Probst: They die together. That’s more intimate than just kissing.

Pacino: It’s too easy. Anybody can do it. I don’t moralize on it now. Believe me, I think it’s fine. As for nudity, I was doing a shower scene in a prison in "Panic in Needle Park", with about eight guys. The script girl is sitting there, and I say, "Is she going to stand there while we take our pants off?" Nobody said anything. She didn’t have to sit there, but she sat there and we all took our pants down and it was nothing. Absolutely nothing. But, what bothers me sometimes is when it isn’t an integral part of the story, when it doesn’t lead…then I shy away from it. I find it becomes indulgent and unnecessary. I have seen scenes in film that implied sexuality…the impending something I always find more exciting than the act itself. I have rarely seen a scene in film when the act itself really helped the story. I don’t know whether I would do it myself or not. I once said I would do a nude scene if everyone on the set, also everybody in the audience, was nude. Then maybe I would understand. And yet, if it’s necessary, then it’s necessary.

Probst: If you were persuaded that it was a necessary part of the film, to be in bed, nude, making love, you would do it or not?

Pacino: No. That is something I do privately. If there is a scene, for instance, a dramatic pivotal scene, the pleasure you should have is artistic. But I have not come across anything yet that has not been gratuitous. I saw a film and in the middle, I saw these two people fucking…literally…I think. I don’t know how they got away with it but it was rated R, it wasn’t rated X. It was completely unconnected with the story. I am not offended, it is just that is boring…very boring.

Probst: Is the pleasure only artistic, don’t you also work for money?

Pacino: I do moving jobs for money, I was a messenger for money, and I worked as an usher for money, but I never acted for money. One time I was starving, one time my whole life….I borrowed fifteen dollars to take the bus to Boston because there was a part for me to do—Theater Company of Boston, as a matter of fact—and I was sleeping on a friend’s floor. I was eating rice. I had a little paper bag with my belongings in it. I had no place to stay and no money for food, and no money for a room. They offered me fifty dollars a week, which was a huge sum of money, to play this small part in "The Caucasian Chalk Circle", and I wouldn’t do it—I made believe that something waiting for me in New York. And David Wheeler(the director) looked at me and said, "But there’s other things—next plays and stuff like that." "Yah, I got something." I didn’t want to say to him, "I don’t act small parts." Who are you to say that? But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t stand around and watch other people act. I never could. What was there for me to learn? I don’t learn from watching others. I only learn from doing it myself. From the experience and from life. So I asked for the fifteen bucks back and I took the bus back home. My friend said, "Oh, what are you doing back here? Christ." I said, "Well, it didn’t ’ work out." That’s a true story.

Probst: You decided you were going to be an actor, an artist and nothing else?

Pacino: I knew that’s what I was meant to do.

Probst: Where did it come from?

Pacino: The source was the Strindberg play and the source was the fact that I found that I was in a world. I had a world there. I was speaking almost like for the first time in my life. I had a voice. I felt that nothing comes close to this, nothing. And I’ll tell you, I’ve rarely felt that again. I had it then. Maybe a couple of times, here and there, I’ve felt that sense of being able to speak, but not often.

Probst: But you are absolutely confident that it’s inside you?

Pacino: Well, it’s God-given, yes. I have a talent. I have the instrument to do it. It’s quite evident. I doubt myself the way everybody else does. I have no confidence. The think I loved about doing Hummel(The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel) was this kid was inept at everything but he had this great hope. He had hope and I loved him for it. I loved to show that desire. I think with me it’s different than other people. It wasn’t so much a wanting—it was having to . There’s a difference.

Probst: Having to be an actor?

Pacino: And also having to be successful. Big thing.

Probst: In your own eyes, how successful are you?

Pacino: You always feel as though you’re a fraud. When you’re bad you feel like a fraud, and when you’re good you feel like a fraud. It’s very common.

Probst: Who are you fraudulent to?

Pacino: I’m not showing the real me.

Probst: You’ve never shown the real Pacino?

Pacino: You want to live with me, you’ll see him. The thing I love, like when I sit at a piano and I begin to play—and I’ve never had formal training—after about twenty minutes I lose myself. I only wish that that kind of thing could happen in my work, my acting. Sometimes it does. That’ s what I go for, that’s the freedom I was talking about before.

Probst: How difficult is success?

Pacino: We are a success-oriented society and I wanted to be successful. But the work itself freed me from success…even before I became successful, it liberated me, and that was wonderful. And that’s when I became successful. Sometimes I feel that I’m the most unlucky person in the world, and I would trade it all in one minute, but sometimes I feel really lucky and very happy. It’s like a pendulum.

Probst: Do you recognize yourself?

Pacino: That’s the frightening thing about it. You are a symbol. Somebody was telling me about somebody, recently, who said, "Al Pacino, I would go to bed with him and I’d live with him, I’d do this and this and this." I said, "No, not Al Pacino. No. The symbol. What Al Pacino represents." It alienates you. You start pulling away and you start becoming what they call you, a superstar. A star, Away. Away from everything else, untouchable, unreachable. Who can live that way? You go through that. After a while you break through that stuff….And then, of course, there’s the other, where girls wait for me at night. Probst: If a woman calls you up and says, I want to go to bed with you, what do you do?

Pacino: I just hang up. It’s that simple.

Probst: Why?

Pacino: Because it is unnatural for someone to want to go to bed with you who’s never met you. These people are people with problems. They need help. Sure, I go to bed with women but I have to have a relationship with them first.

Probst: Is that one of the problems of being a superstar?

Pacino: It’s very difficult to understand the position if you’re not in it. My closest friends, people I’ve known for fifteen, twenty years, don’t really understand it. Unless you live it, unless you experience it, it’s very hard. It’s uncomfortable when someone comes up to you and takes your glass and says, "I’m gonna keep this glass because you touched it."

Probst: What does it do to you?

Pacino: There are times when you want to go to a restaurant and sit down or you want to be alone. Lee Strasbergtold me—and it’s very true—he said, "You simply have to adjust," Girls ring the bell, phone calls, I have to change my number a lot. I can sit down and beat my breast about it or I can just say it’s part of what’s going on. But if I go any place I’m approached, and that can be trying after a while if you don’t feel like being approached. I am somewhat of a people-voyeur. I love to sit and watch things happening. I like to step outside and watch. That now becomes increasingly difficult for me to do. I was in the bathroom the other day taking a pee, and the guy next to me says, "Hey man, what’s this? Michael Corleone taking a piss? I said, "No". He said, "You mean to tell me you’re not Al Pacino?" I said, "Yes, I am and that’s who’s taking a piss!" I was walking around thinking I was special, isolated, and unique, and then I found out I indeed am special, and so is everybody else. I realize then that THAT is the basis of communication. It'’ the code. Our own uniqueness is what we have in common. I can sit here and say that I am not the only one that goes through this, that person goes through it too, then suddenly I am not alone.

Probst: Is it easier for you to deal with failure than with success?

Pacino: No. There’s two kinds of failure. One is the real failure, and that’s finding out. The other failure is not giving. I don’t mean to be so profound, but I believe it.

Probst: Are there many kinds of success?

Pacino: Yes, of course. There’s the monetary success.

Probst: What do you do with all your money?

Pacino: I have a lot of money. I don’t know what to do with it at this point. I don’t know. It would be different had I a family, a wife and children to support. Now it provides me with a certain privacy that I need. I’m not in the moneymaking business, so that I don’t try to get my money to make money. I try to keep it as simple as possible. I try to find out about my money, what it means, how it’s invested. It’s all very complicated. It took me years to just begin to take on the responsibility of having money. I give it away, here and there. I am a poor kid from the South Bronx and there’s certain things with money that I just don’t understand and I will never understand. I always felt I had money even when I didn’t have it. I always had a dollar in my pocket. I knew I could get that Chianti wine if I wanted it, and a knish. Just the other day I looked at a loaf of bread and realized how much money it is. Cigarettes are very expensive. I realized I haven’t looked at a pack of cigarettes in a couple of years. I don’t know how much a container of milk costs. I don’t care. But when you had to know how much it cost because you didn’t have the money…that was a different story.

Probst: We were talking about the kind of success that buys privacy.

Pacino: I need privacy as much as anybody else needs it. I like to walk down the street without people coming up to me and talking to me.

Probst: What do they call you?

Pacino: Al. They call me Al. And they’re very respectful, very good, they ’re very nice. Once in a while it get out of hand, but most of the time people say hello.

Probst: What happens when it gets out of hand?

Pacino: Physically pawing and that kind of thing. But most of the time people are very cool, especially in New York. New Yorkers are great that way. They say hello to me, I say hello to them.

Probst: Did you ever think of moving to Hollywood?

Pacino: No. New York’s my home. Hollywoods’ Hollywood. It’s another world. I’m not part of that culture. What I call a subculture.

Probst: It’s important to be in a place where you’re a part of the culture?

Pacino: There’s a way of life there and there’s a rhythm of life there that I don’t know about. But I know it’s different than the rhythm of life I have. It’s not the same. I never had any desire to live there.

Probst: Rhythm and change go through your conversations. Is that the way you attack a role or your own life?

Pacino: It seems that way. It seems that way. I get into rhythms; I don’t make plans. Things happen—spur-of-the-moment things. I’m starting to want to plan more. I say, Well I go to the Y Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’ll go see so-and-so on Friday. And of course, to me, going to the theater to work at night is everything. It really gives me freedom. It gives chaos to all this freedom. Organized freedom.

Probst: It’s almost planned anarchy.

Pacino: Planned anarchy, I like that. Eugene O’Neill said he was a philosophical anarchist. I am, too. I have seen nothing else work.

Probst: You’re almost almost thirty-five now. You want more landing spots than before, more places that are a safe harbor to come into?

Pacino: I would imagine it changes as you get a little older. And there was a time when I used to drink, and let that take ne wherever I went. You know, I’d give myself to that. Of course, it never really got in the way of the work. When I was working, that was okay. Then when I wasn’t working—it was starting to affect the work. And then I stopped.

Probst: How’d you stop?

Pacino: I said, What’s more important to me?

Probst: Can you really be that intellectual about it and say, What’s more important to me? And stop drinking?

Pacino: No. But you can try. I was suddenly conscious that I was drinking. I still drink like anybody does but I watch it. There was a time there when I found I didn’t want to work, I’d rather to that.

Probst: After Godfather 1 or before?

Pacino: Before, after, I never drank when I worked. That’s another good thing about the theater. I don’t work and drink.

Probst: You’re a workaholic.

Pacino: Work keeps me straight. It keeps me involved. It keeps me alive. But more and more now, I’m becoming interested in other things.

Pbobst: Such as what?

Pacino: In the real sense, this is the first time I’m really a bachelor, this last year and a half. Most of my adult life I’ve lived with another woman. I shared apartments with women. So it was sort of like being married. And I was usually just with one woman, that’s how I liked it. It’ s different now. And I like it. For now, I like being alone.

Probst: Isn’t it lonely?

Pacino: It gets lonely. Sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s a novelty to me and I like it. The loneliness has to do with other things. Not just being alone. The fact that I get lonely has to do with something I’m holding on to. The other day I was saying to someone, I would give it all up, as long as they didn’t take my work from me. I would give up fame and most of my fortune. Not all.

Probst: Why would you give it up?

Pacino: Because one grows tired of certain inconsistencies, certain alienations, isolations. You want to feel a part of something. I do have friends I am close to….but, just a few. If I had a home, a family I felt a part of…that would supply me, I guess, with enough whatever it is that makes one go on, and it would make it easier for me to balance the success. Let me tell you something about power that I feel—the power one feels when one is with love, when one loves oneself and somebody else and is loved, the power of being loved. Loving is a power. If you have that you really don’t need much else in worldly powers. The fact that somebody would give their life for you and that you would give your life for them…that is incredible. I don’t want to get too comfortable in success, but I am getting a bit used to it. The "Indian Wants the Bronx" was the most jolting success I ever had, because I came out from complete obscurity. People would hear, there’s a guy downtown doing this thing, we don’t know what his name is…we don’t know where he came from. I sort of popped up in New York. That adjustment was an exrraordinary one. And I was with Jill(Clayburgh) at the time. I was with her for five years. She had a strenght, and we worked it out together. She was there for me, before this even started. My close friend, Charlie Laughton, has been with me right down the line and has helped me.

Probst: What is it like to be Al Pacino?

Pacino: Annoying.

Probst: Why is it annoying?

Pacino: Well, for one thing I’m doing this interview….It’s annoying. What’s it like? Sometimes it’s a lot of fun. Like anything else, sometimes it’s joyful. One of the reasons I’ve steered clear of interviews in past years is that I always felt that when the light is shining in your face sometimes, everybody’s paying attention to you, everything ‘s about you, life is about you, there’s a tendency to lose sight of what’s there. You can’t see with that flashness, so that when you turn it around sometimes and you take a look around you…there’s life and there’s you. I think what annoys me sometimes is that it’s fucking lights in my face, blinding me, and that’s what annoys me. But, when it’s not there, it can be fun.