Al Pacino passed on taking a trip to a galaxy far far away.
During a talk Wednesday at The 92nd Street Y, New York, the Oscar winner recalled being offered the role of Han Solo in “Star Wars.”
“Well, I turned down ‘Star Wars.’ When I first came up, I was the new kid on the block, you know what happens when you first become famous. It’s like, ‘Give it to Al.’ They’d give me Queen Elizabeth to play,” Pacino said. “They gave me a script called ‘Star Wars.’ … They offered me so much money. I don’t understand it. I read it. … So I said I couldn’t do it. I gave Harrison Ford a career.”
Pacino also said he recently rewatched “The Godfather” after not seeing it for 25 years.
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While shooting the mafia classic, Pacino said Francis Ford Coppola asked to meet him one night after filming at a restaurant, where the director was having dinner with his family. “I came in, and he said, ‘You know, I had a lot of faith in you. And you’re failing me,’” Pacino said. “I’m standing there thinking ‘What the fuck, what did I do?’”
“Go to Paramount,” Coppola told him.
After watching his footage, Pacino understood the problem. In the film’s early scenes, the studio hadn’t realized his internal journey into Michael Corleone. “I wanted to come out of nowhere, and by the end of the film create some kind of enigma,” he said. “His transition is what interested me, and I thought I was unable to save it. After the first day of shooting, Diane Keaton and I got drunk. We thought ‘This is it, our careers are over.’”
What kept him in the film? “The Solozzo scene, where Michael shoots the cop. Coppola pushed that up, because he thought Paramount was about to fire me,” Pacino said. “I do the scene, they liked it, and they kept me in because I shot someone.”
That story, Pacino revealed, will open his upcoming memoir, which he reportedly sold to Penguin Press last year. He also said that only about “half” of “The Offer,” the Paramount series about the making of “The Godfather,” was true.
On “Scarface” — his most “gratifying” film, he said — Pacino recalled one of his many injuries.
“You can’t imagine what it was like to be there,” he said of the heavily armored shoots. “The smoke, everyday you have to put yourself in a trance. One day, we’re shooting, fighting — ‘Say hello to my little friend’ — I shoot thirty rounds, I get hit, the gun goes down, and I’m supposed to be wounded. I go to pick up the gun, and I put my hand on the barrel. My hand stuck to it, and I had to go to the hospital. I was out for two weeks.” (Covered in fake blood in the emergency room, the nurse mistook him for “some scumbag.”)
“I was gone,” he described, “but they shot the shit out of it. They shot so much while I was away. Spielberg came down and had a crack at shooting someone. Everyone wanted to do it.”
On “Heat,” he offered some candid advice to the Pacino fan: “Here’s the thing with ‘Heat’: I hope you see it again, audience. I was playing this cop, and I found a way in, but this is a detective who’s kind of wild. I thought he probably chipped cocaine. That will explain to you some of my, uh…,” he said, laughing. “The thing is, there was no cocaine sniffing in the film, but I was.”
All in all, Pacino said his best acting advice came from Lee Strasberg, the legendary founder of the Acting Studio.
“Do you know what he called acting talent?” Pacino asked the audience. “He said, ‘Talent is like a cement block that you walk on on the sidewalk, and there’s a green blade of grass peeking up through the cracks. Ever see that? That’s talent.’”
What’s next? Pacino said he will soon turn his focus to “King Lear.”
While the Michael Redford-directed film adaptation was originally announced in 2018, Pacino said that he and writer Bernard Rose “are coming to a place when we have a script” and will likely start shooting next year.
