Al Pacino Movie Quotes

Late that night, I get back to Grant and Eric’s, and they are watching a movie where Al Pacino is blind. Al Pacino is angry and talks with an unplaceable accent. He is maybe Canadian.

George Lucas based Han Solo on his friend, director Francis Ford Coppola. Before Harrison Ford was chosen to play the role, Kurt Russell, Nick Nolte, Christopher Walken, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, and Bill Murray were considered.

QUICK MENTAL RECAP: KIDNAPPED BY Mafia gang ruled by insane, chain-smoking reject from the sixties—female; discover husband has alias name and FBI badge that he’s been able to keep hidden from me for seventeen years (reminder to self: get a clue!); follow half-baked scheme provided by Brad Pitt look-alike to make a quick getaway through guest bathroom; wind up playing bad game of Twister in bathtub with Elvis Presley wannabe; witness the whacking of FBI husband; hear Elvis Presley wannabe proclaim, regarding husband’s whacker: “That’s No Toes” and follow up with obvious comment, “Dis ain’t good.” Would Al Pacino be caught dead in this movie? Definitely not.

When I turned twenty-one, having hardly started working as an actor, I was asked to do a reading with Elia Kazan, practically the biggest director in the world in both stage and screen, for a new movie he was casting. It was called America, America, and it was going to tell the story of a young Greek man’s journey to the States. They were trying to find a young actor, relatively unknown, probably ethnic looking, to play the lead role. I thought I had a shot at it. I don’t know if I would have excelled at it, but I felt I had a real chance because I fit the description. But I was late and I missed the audition. I went there and they were gone and it was over. They got somebody else.

I had my lunch with Marlon in a modest room in the hospital where we were filming on Fourteenth Street. He was sitting on one hospital bed, I was sitting on the other. He was asking me questions: Where am I from? How long have I been an actor? And he was eating chicken cacciatore with his hands. His hands were full of red sauce. So was his face. And that’s all I could think about the whole time. Whatever his words were, my conscious mind was fixated by the stain-covered sight in front of me. He was talking—gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble—and I was just mesmerized. What was he going to do with the chicken? I hoped he wasn’t going to tell me to throw it in the garbage for him. He disposed of it somehow without getting up. He looked at me in a quizzical way, as if to ask, what are you thinking about? I was wondering, what is he going to do with his hands? Should I get him a napkin? Before I could, he spread both his hands across the white hospital bed and smeared the sheets with red sauce, without even thinking about it, and he kept on talking. And I thought, Is that how movie stars act? You can do anything.

And then Dustin Hoffman just blasted open the door for actors. Dustin was a student of Lee Strasberg’s at the Actors Studio when I started to hear about him. You would pick up on other students discussing him with a strange reverence, like he was a ghost or a wanted criminal. There was such energy around his name you had to see him for yourself, to see if he lived up to his formidable reputation. And then Mike Nichols got hold of him, all of him, for The Graduate. The Graduate was contemporary and of the moment, a commentary on the world we were living in, and it fit him perfectly. It came along at the right time, right when we were ready for it. And its success made Dustin a movie star supreme. I was working up in Boston when The Graduate opened, and I said, this is it, man—it’s over. He’s broken the sound barrier. The excitement for me was in seeing an artist doing something so well, something original, that you recognized had never been done before.

The sexuality of the character I played in Dog Day Afternoon is a complex thing. What I interpreted from the screenplay was that he is a man with a wife and kids who also happens to be in an affair with a person who identifies as a woman, and who today we would understand is transgender. But knowing this about him didn’t excite me or bother me; it didn’t make the role seem any more appealing or risky. Though I may be a kid who started in the South Bronx, I had been living in the Village since my teens. I had friends, roommates, and colleagues who were attracted to different people than I was attracted to, and none of that was ever rebellious or groundbreaking or unusual. It just was. Perhaps at the time of Dog Day Afternoon it was an uncommon thing to have a main character in a Hollywood movie who was gay or queer, and who was treated as heroic or worthy of an audience’s affection—even if he did rob banks. But you have to understand that none of that enters into my consideration. I am an actor portraying a character in a film. I am playing the part because I think I can bring something to the role. As far as I was concerned, Dog Day Afternoon was just cool, a continuation of the work I had been doing my whole life. It was inevitable that an audience would have certain feelings about me because of the choices I made, and the slings and arrows were going to keep coming either way. I try to stay away from things that are controversial, and I find myself in controversies anyway. If people think that I helped to advance a particular issue of representation, that’s fine. If there is credit or blame to go around, I don’t feel entitled to any of it. All I know is, I play a role to find as much humanity as there is that I can portray.

By the time Google was telling Semel $1 billion, $3 billion, and then $6 billion, they had a plan. Now it was time to put that plan into action. It was time to go to the mattresses. At first, they called it Project Godfather. They called it that because, in the movie The Godfather, there’s a montage where, as Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone has his godson baptized in church, his hit men take out all of his family’s enemies at once. That was the plan Decker, Weiner, and Coppel had come up with for Yahoo. They were going to have Yahoo’s M&A team take out the entire search industry—except Google, of course—all at once.

Hitler is still a historical figure, but he’s predominantly a placeholder for cognitive darkness; he’s the entity we use in the same way people once employed the devil. But the devil is no longer a villain in pop culture. The devil is sympathetic. He’s charming. If you’re making a movie about the devil, you cast Al Pacino. In the pop world, the devil is mostly depicted as a fair-minded gambler; if you’re a good enough musician, the devil will give you a golden fiddle and concede his defeat, allowing you to peacefully live the rest of your days in rural Georgia. There really isn’t “another category of radical evil.” That category has a population of one.

And, possessed by the tormented spirit of Ricky Ricardo, Rod Steiger plays an old Cuban don with an accent and gestures that make Al Pacino in Scarface seem subtle.

The guys of Savino’s generation liked what they saw in the movies and wanted to be that. So Lou ain’t trying to be Lefty Ruggiero, he’s trying to be Al Pacino being Lefty Ruggiero. He ain’t trying to be Tommy DeSimone, he’s going for Joe Pesci being Tommy DeSimone, not being Jake Amari but James Gandolfini.