Interview By: Jeff Wilser
JeffWilser@TheCinemaSource.com

In the middle of his press conference, Al Pacino is talking about Shakespeare with the authority of a college professor. Suddenly he stops himself. 'I don't know why I'm talking so fast.' He laughs. 'I'm on some sort of fu*king roll here. What am I doing' Who's cranking me up here' I figure if I talk real fast, something just might come out of my mouth that's relevant or pertinent.'

It does. Pacino is here to give us the dish on The Merchant of Venice, and he admits that the play'often accused of Anti-Semitism'wasn't something that he was initially enthusiastic about. 'I never had any desire to do the Merchant of Venice for a variety of reasons,' he says. 'I couldn't quite see the character. I had no relationship to it. Then I read the script'Michael Radford's script'and I thought that I understood, somehow, where Shylock was coming from.'

'He laid it out both visually, and with his little adjustments in adaptations of the play, I thought that he made a case for Shylock,' he continues. 'I was able to see those human elements of the character. I started to understand the motivation. That was the point for me. I thought, 'I could play this.' Before that, I didn't know how I would approach it. But I saw a character that I could understand and identify with.'

Pacino acknowledges that it's not a simple play with a simple theme. When asked what he perceives to be the play's message, he pauses, and then says 'tolerance.' After a second, longer pause, he says, 'It's a hard one to call. It's a difficult play to relate to. There are aspects that I relate to. And certainly Shylock's condition, his dilemma, his plight'I relate to that. I can only speak from that character. I really can't tell you too much about my feelings for the whole play. I have ambivalent feelings about different aspects of it'some I don't really understand, to be honest with you.'

Preparing for the role of Shylock demanded more than the usual amount of research. 'There's a little more preparation, because I'm dealing with the 15th century, I'm dealing with a whole world that I know nothing about. So I try to get as much information as possible about that world that I'm going to be in. Fortunately I had enough lead-time before I did it. But the most important thing is that [director] Michael Radford charted, for me, the evolution of this character. You do all kinds of things'reading as much about it as you can. . . . You talk to people, and you take the things that are consistently credible. I guess it's called research. It can't hurt you. But you can't act research'you have to act something else. But the research does give you something. Maybe it gives you a certain confidence; I don't know. But it's there for you.'

We tend to associate Shakespearean acting with 'real acting,' but Pacino scoffs at the notion that all great actors have to do Shakespeare. 'There's a lot of great actors out there not doing Shakespeare, and have no desire to.' he says. 'And it's not like I'm going around doing a lot of Shakespeare. There's a bit of a myth here with me and Shakespeare, like I'm piped into Shakespeare or something. I'm not, believe me. Maybe I like him the way other people like him, too. I love him. I love his work. And it's given me a great deal in my life. But I'm not here to present Shakespeare to the world. He doesn't need me, frankly. He doesn't need any of us He's been around a long time, and he's going to do fine.' He laughs. 'I'm not worried about Shakespeare.'

Pacino has a long relationship with Shakespeare, dating back to his days in school. 'As a kid, I was inspired seeing Brando doing Julius Caesar. Then I found that I wanted to do Romeo and Juliet, and I did scenes from that in school. It was just something we did. Something about the language. To me, it transcended my world, it transcended naturalism; it gave me a chance to go a little further emotionally than I wanted to at the time. That's where it first started, in school.'

He admits that learning Shakespeare in school is 'a bit of a bore,' but thoroughly relates to the material through acting. 'We're lucky as actors. As actors, when we get to do a Shakespeare play, because we have to learn it, because we have to really do it, we become involved with it, and we learn it over weeks or months, sometimes. So we start to understand it on that level. You can't sit down and see Hamlet and say you know it, seeing it once. But you can say you have some sense of Hamlet if you've played Hamlet.'

Don't be surprised to see Pacino in some future adaptations of the Bard. 'There's a couple of movies I was offered. King Lear, for one. And I guess it would be the Scottish play . . . MacBeth. So those are two possibilities for me.'

We all know Pacino as the intense dramatist. So here's Pacino's fun factoid of the day: 'I started as a comic. And unfortunately, I try to be funny from time to time, and I fall on my face each time.'

Maybe so, but he's still on his fu*king roll.