Cine Bonus Track Documentary
SUMMARY
Documentary about Al's life and career.
CAST / CREW
Al Pacino
QUOTES FROM THE FILM
Big thanks to Suzanne Brouillard for transcribing the quotes from this documentary!
AL PACINO
On movie-making….
"I found that through this medium, I was able to educate myself, in a way. And I think it helped my life."
"I knew early on I was an actor. I mean I was doing it all the time. I was in the school plays, that kind of thing. But I didn’t know that I was going to seriously go into it. I never made that conscience decision until I was in my early twenties. Because it was then that I realized it was what I really wanted to do because of the attraction to the things I was going to do, like the wonderful worlds of the writers. Once that happened to me, I found that this whole idea of success or "making it" didn’t matter as much. What mattered was the involvement in engaging myself in this kind of activity."
"Picasso is an inspiration to me. And there’s one segment in a documentary on Picasso where he paints a picture, a sketch, and he puts this kind of glass in front of the camera and you’re on the other side - you can see him, what he’s doing behind the glass as he’s drawing. And he’s sketching this thing - looks like a flower and it turns into a woman’s private parts and it turns into a woman. He sketches right before your eyes. And then he takes the sketch and he moves it to the side and stands next to it. Now it’s magical. It’s magical. We’ve just seen him create this picture, and yet at the same time it doesn’t matter because he’s standing next to it, it exists on it’s own. And in a sense that was the inspiration for this movie. To actually see it happening in front of you, the mechanism and then it happened and move away from that into performance."
On choosing films….
"I would just wait for what I thought was the right situation all around - the script and everything else. And then I got to a point where I thought I won’t work much and when I do I’ll pick the wrong thing. So I figured let me just see if I can just put it into the character I’m playing. So I don’t think as much about the entire movie – maybe I should think about it more. But I think more about the character I’m going to be playing in a movie."
"I have an advantage. Actors have an advantage. And here’s our advantage: we get to do the play. Which means we don’t just read it once. We don’t just see it once. We get to know it. We have to. We have to learn the part. So that’s why we usually love it so much. Because we explore it, we go into it, we find out what it is and we see the wealth in there, the riches in there, because we have this first-hand look."
"The position that I’m in now with the movie and being well known, a lot of people are ready to talk to me and willing to talk to me. So you take advantage of the access. You take advantage of meeting some of these cops. It always serves you. You can’t lose. When you talk to these people, even if you’re just playing parts of them, you’re going to get something. I recommend it to all actors. It’s completely there for you, IF it’s there for you. To take advantage of it, because you never know what you’re going to get."
On "Looking For Richard"……..
"I was looking to see if I could get people to drop their guard on Shakespeare and say, let themselves into it. And that’s been the effort. And the best way I have found to approach that is to come at the scene in odd angles, with different perspectives, different reads on it - with the hope that the audience will come along for the ride."
TRIVIA
(thanks François for this info)
It was a French production by canal+ and capa production and aired on french TV channel Canal + during the release of Taylor Hackford's The Devil's Advocate in France (1997). (Canal + is like HBO for american viewers)
DVD INFO
LINKS |
www.canalplus.fr/ (official site of Canal+) |