From The Toronto Sun, December 3, 1995

The Good, the Bad and the Brilliant

By Bruce Kirkland

NEW YORK - Al Pacino rarely completes either a thought or a sentence but he never shuts up.

Robert De Niro never completes a sentence but he rarely starts one, so you hardly notice.

Director Michael Mann, the man with enough foresight and iron will to cast these two mega-weight actors together in the new thriller Heat, talks in grammatically correct sentences, even whole paragraphs, but never says anything of substance, at least not to the media.

So you have to be slightly mad, like the Hatter in Alice's wonky Wonderland, to put these three ciphers together in a press conference to promote a movie. But here they are assembled at a conference table on a podium in a ballroom at the Essex House hotel in the heart of Manhattan. It's a sunny Sunday afternoon. Reporters are in a good mood. They admire Heat. They admire the performances of Pacino and De Niro. They admire Mann's script and direction.

So the trio at the podium is collectively in a good mood, judging by the smiles and jovial asides and self-deprecating flashes of wit. Well, at least from Pacino, who jokes about his inclination to ramble when answering questions.

"Not to be long-winded here," he chortles at one point, "because I feel, every time I talk here, I go on forever ... It's a new thing with me. I start talking and I don't stop!" Pause ... grin ... punch line: "But, anyway, I played the mayor of New York, so ..." Big laughs all around. De Niro crinkles up his eyes and grins like a child. His pal Pacino made funny. Pacino is playing the New York mayor in another new movie, City Hall, scheduled for release after Heat emerges in mid-December.

De Niro himself has an impish sense of humor. But that's something he just doesn't share with the media, along with everything else he doesn't share with ink-stained wretches. But, in the course of the 45-minute press conference, he does make one stab at a joke, before retreating quickly.

He is asked if the big coffeeshop scene between he and Pacino - a scene that may become celebrated in the annals of Hollywood movie history as an example of two masters at work with each other - has any personal kick for him. That's because the two characters they play talk about their obsessions with their work, Pacino as a cop, De Niro as a crook. The conversation sounds like two actors confessing that they sacrifice their personal lives for their obsessions.

"That's something to be done as a skit on Saturday Night Live - two actors talking," De Niro deadpans before he does his crinkly-eye thing again. Just don't expect to ever see De Niro and Pacino actually doing a SNL skit together. It was hard enough for Mann to even get them in the same major motion picture, something each actor takes seriously and long wanted to do.

Pacino and De Niro are both in their early 50s. They have known each other, as New York actors consumed with a passion for their craft, for 26 years. They casually call each other, send off notes of congratulation at work well done and meet on occasion. They know each other's children and each other's complicated and unconventional family lives: De Niro and his former girlfriend, Toukie Smith, recently arranged for a surrogate mother to give birth to twin boys; they were born Oct. 20 and both parents will share duties, although they continue to live apart; Pacino also has young children but no longer is involved with their mother.

Meanwhile, the two stars have talked about working together again for years after both got nominated for Oscars for The Godfather: Part II. Footnote: De Niro won as best supporting actor; Pacino lost as a best actor nominee, continuing to lose until his fortunes reversed on Scent Of A Woman, his first Oscar win in eight nominations. De Niro has won two out of the six times he has been nominated. More importantly, perhaps, both are acclaimed by other actors as geniuses, although neither would ever say it about himself.

"Over the years, we've been close to working together," says Pacino, "and then ..." Then nothing.

"We run into each other ..." >offers De Niro as the sentence trails off into another silence.

In the early days, before Oscar nominations and fame and riches, Pacino and De Niro were rivals, often up for the same roles in productions such as Panic In Needle Park, a role Pacino won, making his film debut. But there was never any bitterness in the rivalry, not any that either man fesses up to. Actually, they admired each other's work from the beginning, says Pacino. "We met each other on 14th St., between B and C," laughs Pacino. "I said hello - because I had seen Robert in The Wedding Party (De Niro's film debut in 1969) that Brian De Palma had made and I was very impressed by him."

Pacino remembers both of them were up for roles in The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, although that didn't pan out. They once planned to shoot The Pope Of Greenwich Village together, with De Niro directing, but that didn't work out either and De Niro's directorial debut waited until the 1990s with A Bronx Tale.

Heat was a miracle because both men were available, loved the material and were excited to work together even though the coffeeshop scene is their only direct contact with dialogue. A big shoot 'em up climax at the end is all action. "I especially enjoyed it because Bob put me at ease," Pacino says of the coffeeshop work. Usually actors establish rapportthrough experience together. "I never worked with Bob so it was surprising that I had it with him, never having worked with him." But he figures the personal connections had already made their relationship strong and freed them up to work easily together.

One thing both men share, although only Pacino will talk about it, is that acting has made them better people: "Now I find that being a movie actor is so much a part of ... it's connected somehow to an education for me since I never went to school. I never graduated high school. Not that Bob did. But I found that, through this medium, I was able to educate myself in a way." De Niro nods approval. It's business as usual: One talks, the other doesn't.