The man who would be king

“It has plagued me,” Pacino tells me when I meet him at his house in Beverly Hills, a large mansion hidden from the street by carefully groomed shrubbery and trees. In the sitting room, CNN plays on a large plasma TV. Above the fireplace is a poem written by Pacino to his 13-year-old daughter, Olivia. Next door there’s a room with some gym equipment and a portrait of Pacino, of whom there is no sign, until, from upstairs, there sounds a loud yelp, followed by a faintly recognisable “Oooooh”. Pacino has just stepped on his daughter’s dog.

“My children are all over the place,” he says, leading me to the large white deck out front, where a chess set sits by one of the windows. The house is a rental. He has been here about 10 years now. “I’ve always expected to go home to New York, and I’m still expecting to go,” he says. He is wearing a black V-neck T-shirt and gym pants, a leather necklace and bracelet, his goatee trim and dark, his hair tousled and bed-headish. Talking, he runs his hand through it, as if to check it’s still there, or untangle it.

He doesn’t seem crazy — or anything like the kohl-eyed wild man who drags his production of Salomé through hell, high water and bad reviews in his behind-the-scenes doc, a fascinating collision of Wilde’s Salomé and ­Pacino’s celebrity, in which nobody quite emerges the winner. Pacino is seen arguing with his producers over whether it should be two films or one (“F*** ’em”). He frays the nerves of his editor with hundreds of miles of footage. “Al doesn’t know what he’s doing,” confides one of his collaborators, who retitled the project Salomaybe.

It’s by far the more compelling performance — not Pacino as Herod, but Pacino as Pacino, brooding and wild-eyed, the emperor calling his own bluff, wondering aloud if he can make the centre hold, or if he is just high on his own powers of bamboozlement.

“You know what it is, you get a little moody, and you just take the mood and enlarge it, because you know the cameras are rolling,” he says. “You know it may be good for the film. But I’m glad you felt it, because there was some stuff going on. To be honest, I didn’t know where I was going. I thought ‘Why am I doing this?’ many times. I still do. I could feel the ‘Why?’ as I watched it. I could feel ‘What’s Al on about? What is he doing?’ I know what I was trying to do. I think I was trying to bring an obsession to light. There’s something about it, that it just takes you over, because it’s about that thing, that passion, that unrequited passion that drives us sometimes and destroys us. I love that. It just ruins your life.”

Talking about the play, Pacino still seems to be turning it over in his head, trying to make sense of his entanglement with it. There’s more than a touch of the late Brando to the project. Great stars, as they near retirement, need great obsessions to keep them occupied; and obsession, certainly, is the theme of Wilde’s play, written in the wake of his ruinous affair with Bosie, whose emotional tumult Wilde transposes to the biblical story of Salomé, who begs her step­father, King Herod, to bring her the head of John the Baptist so she may kiss it. We destroy the things we love. Still, it’s hard for audiences to connect with this obscure biblical allegory, in lyric verse, which Pacino has been mounting productions of, on and off Broadway, since 1992, after first seeing it performed in London in 1989, with Steven Berkoff in the role of Herod.

Pacino as the watchful Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part II (1974) (Moviestore Collection/Rex)

“Like so many things, something catches you,” he says. “When I saw Paul Muni do ­Scarface, I said, ‘I have to do that.’ When I saw Berkoff do Salomé, I thought as I was watching it, ‘I really want to meet the writer of this piece.’ I thought I was in sync some way, he was speaking to me. After it was over, I thought, ‘Well, no chance of that.’ I was so touched by it. I thought, ‘This person has a ­prophetic soul.’ ”

Pacino seems to have connected with the ostracised Wilde as much as with his play. In many ways, the highlight of the film is his beautifully rueful reading of De Profundis while on a train to ­Dublin. The epicurean, divorced from the physical world — Pacino has played this before, in Scent of a Woman. He gets all of Wilde’s regret and lusciousness and loss.

“I never saw myself as a teacher,” he says, as, from upstairs, his teenagers can be heard arguing. “But here I am in my 75th year, and there may be certain things I’m trying to impart, I guess. The dearest people in my life are teachers. They’ve saved my life, from my eighth-grade teacher, Blanche, onwards. She came up to the tenement house where I lived with my grandmother, sat in the kitchen and told her, ‘Your grandson should do this with his life.’ I mean, my grandmother didn’t know what she was talking about, and neither did I, but there was some spillover, it had an effect. I loved this woman.”

There is still, at 74, a great deal of the boyishness to Pacino that marked out his great performances from the 1970s — the raw, soulful lost boy Sonny Wortzik, ­holding up a bank to pay for his wife’s sex-change operation in Dog Day Afternoon, or Michael Corleone, so wary, watchful and reluctant to step into his father’s shoes in The Godfather films. He spent much of the production either thinking he was going to get fired or pacing the streets of New York, from 90th and Broadway, where he lived, down to the Village and back, trying to ­figure out how to play it. “I did it every day. Running through it in my mind. There was a lot on my mind in that part.”

That he should excel in roles of Oedipal ascendency is no accident. Pacino’s own father disappeared when he was a child; he was raised by his grandparents and his mother, who died when he was 22. The actor who brought Michael Corleone and Frank Serpico and Sonny Wortzik into the world was a pugnacious street kid with an air of unpredictability and a gift for provocation who sometimes slept rough, until he came under the wing of a series of older mentor figures; from Lee Strasberg, who took him in at the Actors Studio soon after his mother died, to the producer Martin Bregman, who made five films with Pacino, from The Panic in ­Needle Park in 1971 to Sea of Love in 1989 — “Again, [he was] someone who was older, more or less wiser. Part of [my attraction to] teachers is the father image that I never had. After a while, this is no longer a ­coincidence. I mean, the closest people in my life, right down to my psychiatrist.

“I was finding a place. From the age of 26 to whatever, I was shot out of a cannon, from the theatre, then the celebrity and the pictures. It was a lot for anyone. I think the era… It was an era, wasn’t it? They call them ‘those 1970s movies’. I just happened to be there. I have no recollection of it, and I’m glad, really, because what I was on and what I was doing in that period, I just don’t know, except that it was that rollercoaster. I was, from time to time, a bit lost, and then I’d come back to the Bronx and try things. I did readings. I puddled about.”

That’s when his amateur film-making habit began, too, partly as a way to stabilise himself, away from the hurly-burly of Hollywood, and partly to keep the engine ticking over. He has shot several such films over the years — The Local Stigmatic, ­Chinese Coffee, Babylonia — most of them records of theatrical productions, “quasi home movies”, many of them ending up in a drawer somewhere, which could ­easily have been the fate of Wilde Salomé, too, he says.

He’s a little worried about what people are going to make of the project. “It is what it is,” he says. “Now the hard work comes, and that’s showing it. As long as you know the spirit in which I did these movies. I never thought that it would go this far and, all due respect, I was pushed by a few people who said, ‘I think they should see this. I think that’s important, that you should at least give it a chance.’ I’ve had a break from films for about four years, and that’s when it took me over. And then I was broke, and I went back. At least, that’s what I said. That’s the excuse I used to go back to making movies.”

One suspects that one of the reasons the project ballooned was that Pacino simply had too much time on his hands. He and his publicist are at pains for me to know about his film projects coming out this autumn — David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn, which collected great reviews in Venice for Pacino’s portrayal of a Texas locksmith; and an adaptation of the Philip Roth novel The Humbling, with the director Barry Levinson, in which he plays a once-great stage actor who seizes up during a production of As You Like It and retreats behind the shutters of his Connecticut mansion. All variations, then, on the theme of the noble hermit — the lion-in-winter still capable of the old roar. I’m tempted to quote a line of his from The Godfather: Part III — “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” — but I figure he gets enough of that from traffic wardens.

Does he still go to the movies, I ask. Just the other day, he was taken by his kids to see Guardians of the Galaxy, he says. “It was good. It was inventive. It was funny. It didn’t take itself seriously, and it was beautifully executed. I was really impressed. You know, I just love to go to the movie theatre, because I’m sitting there, and I know that light’s going to go out and that screen’s going to come on and you’re going to be taken somewhere. I love that. Who doesn’t? Who doesn’t?”

Salomé and Wilde Salomé will screen as a double bill on September 21, followed by a Q&A with Al Pacino and Jessica Chastain broadcast live from the BFI to cinemas around the UK. For participating cinemas and tickets, go to cinestage.co.uk/salome