The interesting thing about this is I don’t know what my vision [ in Salome the play and Salomaybe] is yet about.
AL PACINOThere are a lot of roles in Shakespeare, basically. If I feel that the script is a movie, I would be interested in doing any role of Shakespeare’s.
More Al Pacino Quotes
-
-
I hope the perception is that I’m an actor, I never intended to be a movie star.
AL PACINO -
I’m naturally shy but I’ve done this [movie Salomaybe] so much and you get better at it than you would think.
AL PACINO -
I haven’t encouraged [Julia Marie Pacino] or discouraged her. I let her go her own way.
AL PACINO -
I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.
AL PACINO -
I’m not a violent person, never was, but I have this temperament that I’ve always displayed.
AL PACINO -
Everything changes with age. The parts change with age, your feelings about them change, roles that I would’ve wanted to play 10 years ago, I don’t want to play now.
AL PACINO -
When you’re reading some of the great plays, when you do what I call “taking up with a writer,” something happens.
AL PACINO -
Early on in my career, I remember running – fleeing – to the theater as a way of coping with all the meshugaas that was going on for me.
AL PACINO -
I never saw myself as a director. It’s certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.
AL PACINO -
Women have always had equal importance onstage, and working with them must have altered my sensibilities.
AL PACINO -
There is only one way of surviving all the early heartbreaks in this business. You must have a sense of humor. And I think it also helps if you are a dreamer. I had my dreams all right. And that is something no one can ever take away.
AL PACINO -
Sometimes the only way you can get an audience is at an audition.
AL PACINO -
“To be or not to be is” [by William Shakespeare] beyond anything I can comprehend.
AL PACINO -
It was a compromise. There was a sense that I could write my own memoirs, and Larry [Grobel] would help me down the line, or maybe not, maybe he was too close to me.
AL PACINO -
[Marlon] Brando’s a giant on every level. When he acts it’s as if he landed from another planet. A planet where they produce great actors.
AL PACINO -
I destroy the painting as soon as I can see what it is. When I can make out something in it,
AL PACINO -
I wanted to be a baseball player, naturally, but I wasn’t good enough.
AL PACINO -
I didn’t go for the needle at all. I never cared for drugs, because I saw what they did to most people. I thought that was the end of the road.
AL PACINO -
Or try out what I learned and see how it worked with an audience, because where are you gonna get an audience?
AL PACINO -
If you get all tangled up, just tango on.
AL PACINO -
Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions.
AL PACINO -
I’m sensing something and I’m going along with it. It reminds me of a painting, the way Jackson Pollack painted – Jackson Pollack, the great, great artist.
AL PACINO -
My movies are always being played on television, I’m very well known and all that stuff.
AL PACINO -
There are many things my father taught me here in this room. He taught me: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.
AL PACINO -
I don’t need bodyguards. I’m from the South Bronx.
AL PACINO -
My grandfather was a provider. Work, any kind of work, was the joy of his life.
AL PACINO