Pacino's screen persona is hard to pin down. When he plays the bad guy (the bank robber in Dog Day Afternoon, for example), an angel usually manages to seep through. His good guys (Serpico, Michael Corleone in The Godfather, the cop in Cruising) often harbour a dark psyche. Now, Looking for Richard, a documentary he directs and in which he portrays both himself and Shakespeare's treacherous hunchback, Richard III, offers yet another facet of the actor: he is funny.
Few people know that Pacino started out co-writing and performing comedy routines in Greenwich Village. Does he see himself as a funny man? On the way from his home in suburban Westchester County to his Manhattan office, he gives a cryptic response via his mobile phone.
"A skeleton goes into a bar and asks the barman for a beer and a mop." Pause. Long pause. "Get it? Now that's funny, isn't it?" A big laugh at his end of the line.
Looking J0r Richard isn't going to have audiences rolling in the aisles, but it does suggest that Pacino's humour extends some way beyond this type of Christmas-cracker joke. He's a consummate mugger. He mugs, on the New York sidewalks and at the story conference table. He even spoofs Richard's death scene. But then, the famously shy actor has worked on this film for three and a half years, with some of his closest friends, theatre folk he's known for ages. He lets go.
"Look," he says, "I don't think of myself one way or another as funny, but I do have a laugh once in a while. How did I get this far? I'm 56. How the hell did I do it?" Tenacity and talent are the most likely answers, not to mention an eye for the commercial side of the business and lifelong awareness of the need to stretch himself.
Looking for Richard has him breaking new ground as both a performer and a director. It's what you might call a constructive vanity production, with Pacino often in front of the camera and always behind it.
"You're always looking for that thing that's going to bring freshness to yourself," he says. "It's a search." Why search for Richard III, though? Pacino clarifies the king's allure. "Richard is one of the greatest villains ever written. One of the main reasons for that may be that Shakespeare gives him a conscience, makes him aware of what he does. You take Iago: he's more the banality of evil. It's Othello's play.
"With Richard, the play's called Richard.
The character evolves in a more complicated way and is much richer in all of the emotions. So there's a lot more to play there."
About the overlap between himself and the opportunistic, power-mad Richard, he is ambivalent. "A dear friend of mine said it's easier to do parts you're different from. I agree, but there are similarities between all the characters I play and me. I think everything is in everybody. An actor is an emotional athlete."
As director, Pacino gracefully intercuts scenes of himself with rehearsals, readings, and full-costume stagings of one of Shakespeare's most intricate plays. "If I were to do it over again, I might have picked an easier play," he says. "When you take Richard out of the context of the War of the Roses, and pull it out of the Henry VI trilogy, well, it's a play people have difficulty understanding."
If Shakespeare's original is intricate, so too is the film Pacino has made. It contains hundreds of shots (on 16mm and super16mm), and it ranges over a lot of ground. "Looking for Richard came out of my head. It's not one where we sat down and said, `Now, let's do this. I'll direct it; I'll cast these people.' It was always, at its heart, an experiment. It was always something I was just playing with.
"The main virtue in that is that it allows you to be freer in a strange way. You're off the hook. You're just going for the archive. You're not pressured into making a movie that has to communicate. You're trying to figure out what you're trying to say. That's the style and luckily it became something."
Pacino feels he might have gone even further. "I wanted real life and the play to absolutely merge, so that you couldn't even tell them apart any more. For example, you take the guy who plays Hastings, Kevin Conway. You know where he lives, how he speaks on the phone, his agent, where he gets his newspaper, where he has his coffee. You get to know him a little bit, and then, you know, you kill him! Then the audience gets a sense that is more visceral, you know?"
Does he plan to direct films again? "I don't have the ability to tell stories. I'll only do it if I'm touched in such a way that I feel a connection to the material, so that I'll feel pleasure in doing it. I felt that pleasure with this film.
"I look at things through the eye of an actor," he adds later. "I've been making movies for over 25 years now. I'm usually interested in the character I'm playing, not what a director is doing - unless I see him making a mistake. But I enjoy making my own film more than acting. You feel like it's more an extension of yourself, your life. You generally have more fun." Strangely enough, he is telling colleagues on the set of Taylor Hackford's Devil's Advocaie, now shooting in. New York, that he is through with directing.
Fox's publicity notes tell us the technically accomplished Looking for Richard is Pacino's first venture behind the camera, but, when pressed, he admits to some experience. He cut his teeth 10 years ago on a bizarre, unreleased 52-minute film called The Local Stigma tic, which was shot in London. He also stars in the movie as Graham, a Cockney hoodlum who does over old gay men and has a strangely homo erotic relationship with Ray (Paul Guilfoyle), his partner in crime. (Pacino's performance and his accent are impeccable.)
"I didn't direct The Local Stigmatic, but I financed it," Pacino says. "For a couple of years, I made the film with the director and edited it. I learned about film from that vantage point."
He recently told a magazine that the film "got me out of a depression", which resulted from heavy drinking and fear of fame. These days, he says, he is relaxed, less uptight, in part because he has found contentment with his current girlfriend.
"With Richard, I'm hoping that there is an audience out there." He originally intended to play Looking for Richard for students and possibly on television. "I used to do college tours. I would read excerpts of poetry and plays. When I came to Shakespeare, though, I found that there was a reluctance for the students to engage. So I slipped into colloquial language, and it worked. Years later, I flashed on that experience."
THE film has come at the right time.
As William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet has shown, the Bard can be good box-office these days. "Kenneth Branagh was a real boost," says Pacino. "He did Henry V and it exploded. He gave the sense that Shakespeare could be popular."
Pacino makes Richard III comprehensible to all. Renowned actors (Vanessa Redgrave, Alec Baldwin, Winona Ryder, Kevin Spacey, Estalle Parsons) and oddball Oxford scholars deconstruct the language, sum up Richard's motivation and provide a context for the play's myriad names.
"Audiences get lost in Shakespeare, especially the historical plays," Pacino says. "They can't figure out what's going on and why this person is doing this to that person. I thought, if I could just make a path through some of that stuff, it would make it easier for them to experience the scene."
So Pacino engages in affable dialogue with producers, performers and ordinary citizens. "I tried to explode vintage Shakespeare. I also tried to keep it afloat with humour and wit."
A gum-chewing, nicotine-less Pacino turned up in a tux, raw silk shirt and stylish boots - all black - at a party on the yacht Midsummer at last May's Cannes Film Festival, where the film appeared in the official Un Certain Regard section. He was genuinely gushing. "I never dreamed I'd be here. Cannes and Sundance are such perks for me."
The relaxed-chic look was a far cry from Pacino's homeboy air in Looking for Richard: When not in costume, he dresses down, sporting a back-to-front baseball cap (the visor makes a beautiful formal rhyme with the long curve of his face), he is often unshaved, and he has long hair. He wants to reach the average person, much as Richard coveted "winning the people".
Back on the boat, Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Pictures Association of America, sidled up and gladhanded Pacino, who was explaining a plot point to a reporter. The" surprised and embarrassed Pacino tried to make chit-chat with the conversation crasher.
"I'm a first-time director," he said, with, more than a touch of irony. He then described the play he'd adapted.
"Did you write it, too?" Valenti enquired.
Pacino chuckled. "I only wish I wrote, Richard III."
Looking for Richard opens next Friday.