January 26 2003

'Recruit' star Al Pacino glows when he recalls the excitement of '70s cinema."I haven't slept in two days," says Al Pacino, sprinkling brown sugar on his oatmeal, "and I haven't had my breakfast yet. I guess you could say my sense of time is all messed up."

In fact, it's noon and Pacino is here at the St. Regis Hotel to answer questions about his life, his work and his new CIA thriller, "The Recruit," which opens Friday.

One gets the impression from talking to the 62-year-old star that he is inclined to hit the ground running, assuming he actually hits the ground at all. It's exhausting just thinking about all the work he is currently involved in.

As well as starring in "The Recruit" and "People I Know," a film generating buzz at the Sundance Film Festival, Pacino has finished a part as a mob boss in the upcoming Jennifer Lopez/Ben Affleck comedy "Gigli"; taken on the role of Roy Cohn in Mike Nichols' miniseries adaptation of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," and been rehearsing the role of Oedipus for the stage.

He has also found time to be with Anton and Olivia, his 2-year-old twins with his longtime girlfriend, actress Beverly D'Angelo.

"His energy is incredible," says Daniel Algrant, director of "People I Know," which traces one traumatic night in the life of a New York City publicity agent played by Pacino. "Al is in nearly every frame of every scene of the movie, which meant a lot of hard work and long hours for the guy. But he was never less than 100% during the entire production." Co-starring Tea Leoni, Ryan O'Neal and Kim Basinger, the film opens in the spring.

"The Recruit" is the latest in a series of roles that feature Pacino as a morally questionable mentor and role model — in this case to a pair of romantically linked young secret agents-in-training played by Colin Farrell and Bridget Moynahan. Pacino's Oscar-winning turn as the suicidal, blind ex-Army officer in "Scent of a Woman" (1992) started this trend in his career, which reached a climax of sorts when he played Mafia hood "Lefty" Ruggiero opposite Johnny Depp's undercover FBI agent in "Donnie Brasco" (1997).

"Ah, yes," says Pacino, laughing, "the mentor thing. Maybe in my next film I'll be the one getting mentored, but by someone really young — that's the way it should go, the other way around. Maybe they could get Drew Barrymore to mentor me. You got her number?"

RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME

Pacino may be joking, but it's not that far-fetched a notion, especially when one considers how his roles, like the actor himself, have a tendency to defy probability. It's also true that, by fluke or design, he seems to have always been in the right place at the right time, and many of his roles have found their way into the psychic sediment of successive generations of filmgoers. It's certainly reasonable to suggest that, had it not been for Michael and the other members of the Corleone family, there'd be no Tony Soprano.

Pacino agrees that "The Sopranos" is a kind of "Godfather, Part 4." He remains impressed by the impact the "Godfather" series continues to have on audiences.

"Wow," he says, with a measure of awe. "It was 30 years ago. What was the world about then? What were we thinking about? I don't know.

"I guess I was sort of lucky enough to be a part of something that was going on, an explosion, whatever the hell you want to call it, but it seemed to be what we wanted, what was being asked of us," he says of the '70s. In that decade, among other films, Pacino starred in "Scarecrow," "Serpico" and "Dog Day Afternoon," as well as the first two "Godfather" films.

"Scorsese, Coppola, DePalma, Spielberg were all coming out and the entire film industry was different than it was before, different than it is now," he continues. "And then things changed again, and in the middle of that change came 'Scarface' [1983], which, I feel, impacted the most of any movie I made, including 'The Godfather,' because it really reflected a certain aspect of our lives — the drug culture, the avarice of the '80s, the set of values that gave Brian [DePalma] and Oliver [Stone] the impetus to make their pictures."

He pauses for a moment and adds, "And ['Scarface'] had something of a wink to it — it's overused, but 'Brechtian' is the only word I can think of for it, meaning it wasn't quite what you see. It was tongue in cheek. I think at the time a lot of that was missed by the audience, but it's endured over the years — it's even become a kind of a thing."

Pacino was one of a handful of great actors who emerged in the '70s clearly inspired by the work of Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean and Paul Newman. These '50s stars had been devoted to the Stanislavsky Method, a set of acting disciplines developed by Russian theater directors in the early 20th century.

James Lipton, Dean of the School of Dramatic Arts at Manhattan's New School and host of the Bravo series "Inside the Actor's Studio," notes that, until the Method emerged, "American theater was a pale imitation of English theater, very mannered and stylized, and the characters had virtually no internal life. What [the Russians] did was startling and revolutionary, and it came to represent the first great rupture of a long-dormant volcano. Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Robert Duvall, Robert De Niro, Ellen Burstyn, were the generation that followed Brando and the others.

"Today we have Edward Norton, John C. Reilly, Renee Zellweger, and one of the most remarkable actors of the last 20 years, Philip Seymour Hoffman. What they all have in common is integrity and a complete lack of self-consciousness that makes every performance original and new. The highest compliment that one can pay these actors is to say they are entirely unpredictable, not only from role to role, but from moment to moment. And, of course, that's what makes Pacino the great actor he is."

MIXING IT UP

When asked about his choice of material, and what continues to excite him, Pacino replies, "Most of the time you're out there trying to make a dollar out of 99 cents, but the thing is the effort. You go for it. Sometimes you say 'Wow!' and you grow excited by a project's possibilities. Sometimes you catch the light, or you catch the wave, and you can go, and sometimes you don't. What I try to do, and have done over the last 30 years, is to mix it up a little bit.

"I enjoy it when a picture is popular," he adds. "I see something and I say, 'Well, this could be something that would entertain,' and I look at it from that point of view. Point is, sometimes you kid yourself, and sometimes you don't, but you always put your heart into your work — that's the thing. Every part you play, you put it in. There's gold in them there hills. There is. There's gold out there."