Al Pacino Talks Career at ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ 50th Anniversary Showing

Al Pacino spent time with some old friends, attending a 50th anniversary screening of “Dog Day Afternoon” at the American Cinematheque‘s Aero Theatre — those friends being the other collaborators he misses from making the classic bank-robbery-gone-wrong drama a half-century ago.

The avuncular Pacino also made a lot of new friends at the Aero, with Tuesday’s capacity crowd reveling not just in his tales of making “Dog Day Afternoon” but assorted takes on other aspects of his career.

“Let’s just say it’s always a 50-year anniversary, you know,” Pacino said with a chuckle. “I mean, I did ‘The Godfather’ — it was 50 years; people celebrated — and I did ‘The Godfather Part II,’ which you got another, but I’m due on this one.”

The 84-year-old acting giant was pinned down on what he now considers the favorite role of his career (spoiler: it’s not one of the three he mentioned when posed with the same question last year). And he offered a teasing take on a part that is yet to be seen, his leading role in a recently wrapped “King Lear” adaptation.

There were some mixed feelings in seeing “Dog Day” afresh, he told the audience in Santa Monica. “A lot of those people who I was playing with, my fellow acting partners, a lot of them are gone. And when you see it on a massive screen, it’s sort of great,” Pacino said, within moments of the end credits rolling. “Sidney (Lumet) was such a great director, and so I marvel at the things he did and all the performances, especially the girls and the people in the bank, and of course John Casale. The woman who played my mother is Judith Malina, who started off-Broadway, and she was such a great theater director and actress and such an inspiration for me. Seeing her again is… it’s very moving seeing your old friends. I’m feeling very good about it — and I’m feeling very sad about it, I must say. It’s a sad film in some ways, you know?”

While most of the discussion stayed on “Dog Day,” Pacino was asked a few more general questions by the audience.

“Most fun role? I think ‘Dick Tracy,’” he avowed, offering a shout-out to that film’s director and star, Warren Beatty, without further elaboration.

Not sated by that answer, another attendee asked him to name a favorite role. And, perhaps not surprisingly, he not only picked something other than “Dick Tracy,” but he also — somewhat more surprisingly — did not pick one of the three films he’d named when he was presented with this same question in 2024. At that time, he’d chosen “Serpico” and the far lesser-known “The Local Stigmatic” and “Looking for Richard.” At the Cinematheque, though, he went with a more populist choice.

After initially demurring with “I couldn’t say,” he quickly turned around and did offer a favorite. “Straight out, I just say nothing touches ‘Scarface,’” Pacino offered. “And really the reason I feel that way is, I remember passing a movie house in Los Angeles, the Tiffany (in West Hollywood) — It’s not there anymore — where they played all the old films, and they played (the 1931 version of) ‘Scarface.’ I saw it with my friends and I went in because I’d heard about Howard Hawks’ Scarface, Paul Muni, who was in his time one of the greatest actors alive. I said, ‘I gotta do this film, this performance is inspiring me so much.’  So I called (his frequent producer, Martin Bregman) and I said, ‘I think we’ve got a shot with Scarface.’ ‘Scarface?’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen it.’ I said, ‘Take a look.’ So,” he added in explaining this as his favorite, he said, “probably that’s why: I feel responsible for it, you know? I felt personally that I caught that one.”

He soon added that a role he wrapped up filming in October could turn out to be one of his favorites, too: “Lear Rex,” directed by Bernard Rose. “That’s Shakespeare — I’m in the process of editing a film of ‘King Lear,’ in which I played Lear, and I’m still alive,” he joked. “Working with Peter Dinkage and Jessica Chastain, anything happens. … We (Rose and himself) started to write the adaptation, and we’re still doing it even after the film is shot. But it was fun to do it. It took us a year, year and a half. Now we’ve finished actually shooting it, so now we’re playing around with the editing and stuff, which should take another four or five years,” he joked. “I think Bernard’s in the audience… I could hear someone say, ‘He means it. He means it.’ I don’t mean it,” he assured his collaborators. “I really don’t.”

Pacino was not up for answering every “best” question. When the call went out for a good final question, someone asked Pacino to name his “most challenging role.” After the moderator quipped, “I said good question,” the actor joked: “I guess these lectures, that’s sort of challenging.” Eventually he allowed that about half the roles he’d played were things he considered to be a challenge — “Dog Day” certainly among them.

But then he jocularly brought up one of his least challenging roles: a self-spoofing cameo in the 2011 Adam Sandler film “Jack and Jill.” “People think I did the Dunkin Donuts commercial!” he laughed. “They thought I actually did it (in real life, just) in the Adam Sandler film. I’m not getting any residuals for it or anything. But they play it all the time, and it’s people’s favorite film of mine!”

The Aero audience was especially primed for Pacino’s visit; the “Dog Day” screening had sold out immediately upon going on sale, but had been postponed twice to allow for the actor’s appearance before finally landing on this date. Notable attendees ranged from Jeff Goldblum, who quietly snuck in and out the back with the other Cinematheque members, to Jenny Lumet, the daughter of the film’s director, who was a pre-teen girl when the film was being shot in 1974.

“I miss my dad,” Jenny said, standing up during the Q&A. “And there weren’t that many people who knew the sound of his voice, but I heard him ad-libbing as an actor in this film. I said, ‘I know that voice.’ You wouldn’t know, I don’t think, but he was an actor first.”

“Sidney, he was a really good actor!” Pacino agreed.

“Can I come and just give you a hug?” she asked. “Because I want to feel my dad for a second. Is that OK?” 

“What does she want to do?” Pacino confirmed with the moderator. “Oh, I love to hug, babe. Come on!”

After that on-stage PDA, Pacino quipped, “Anybody else want a hug?” Before anyone else could agree, he told the story of doing a children’s theater production called “The Adventures of High Jump” in 1962, “and I say to the audience, ‘and I said, ‘Well, look guys, I’m missing my girlfriend, so I gotta get back home; I wonder what she’s thinking. But hey, look, we live down so-and-so, and so when you get a chance, come down and visit us.’ And somebody yelled, ‘I’m coming now!,’” followed by a movement by the kids in the audience to make good on that. (Perhaps it was with that ancient panic in mind that Pacino said “So am I done?” and made a quick bolt out the side exit once the Aero Q&A was over.)

The actor talked about how much of a near-miss his participation in “Dog Day Afternoon” was, particularly with (as legend has it) Dustin Hoffman being approached to step in when Pacino said he wasn’t going to do it.

“This has got a real story” behind it, he promised. “I turned down ‘Dog Day Afternoon,’ believe it or not. I remember I was going through a lot of things at the time, because I was adjusting to this world that I came into when I did films, the first films in my life.” He cited the crime aspect as his reason for wanting to pass, after doing the “Godfather” films. “I said, ‘I’m not gonna do it. I don’t want to do this anymore — hang around with guns and stuff like robbing banks. I’m not up for it. I did enough of that.’ … And they had someone else that was gonna do it, and that was fine by me.

“But Marty Bregman called me and said, “Al, Are you sober?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I am… right now.’ So he said, ‘Look, Al, please.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not gonna rob banks, Mr. B. I just don’t have it in me.’ And he said, ‘Do it for me. Read the script again, please.’ ‘For you,’ I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it for you.’ And then I opened the script, and I started reading this thing and I thought, What? I said, I have to do this film! Frank Pierson, he won the Oscar for it.

“As always, with Sidney,” who also directed Pacino in “Serpico,” “it’s a just a blast to work with him because he rehearses. We don’t have that much these days, but he rehearsed it for three weeks with all of us. And the way he constructs the bank robbery and where he tells you to go… He would say, ‘I’m a director. So I direct’ – and he’d point his finger: ‘You go here, you go there, and then you go there.’ And I just did what he said; we all did… We just felt while we were doing it that we were actually in a bank robbery. That’s how well he knows geography… It was a pleasure to be with him. I loved him. I loved him.”

But Pacino didn’t exactly just do what Lumet said while making “Dog Day.” The essential characterization, he said, was his own. And he got just close enough to Method acting to be intimidating on set, he acknowledged.

“I remember we rehearsed it over three weeks,” he recalled, but then, by the time he got to the set for filming, some of that prep went out the window as “I did another kind of work, which is bringing a role like this into myself.” Even though the robbery portrayed was taken from real life and virtually all the characters based on real ones, “I didn’t research. Usually, when I’m playing someone who is real out there and alive and well and whatever, I talk to ’em. Like, I spent a lot of time with (the real Frank) Serpico. But with this, for some reason, I found this character and it came to me. I don’t know how these things come to you sometimes. … I started the movie and I didn’t think I was in a character, so I went home, and I drank half a gallon of white wine —which I’m not really fond of white wine, but it kept me up all night — and I found this character with the script myself. … And eventually I came in, and I was wacko ,and everybody thought I was having a nervous breakdown in the bank. My fellow actors and Sidney thought I was gone over: What are we gonna do with him?

“We had to do some reshoots, and I went back a few months later to do just the lines I’d said that didn’t come out, where there was no sound. I could not do it. The character flew out of me, you know, and I didn’t have him anymore, so it was very difficult for me to talk like him or be like him again.”

Pacino told the stories of a couple of legendary improvisations on the film. “The more open a director like Lumet is, the more those things are gonna happen, because he leaves the frame open for it from time to time. I was going out to talk to the crowd once again. We were shooting it and I was on my way with that handkerchief to open the door, and Burtt Harris, the assistant director to Sidney, pulled me aside and he says, ‘Al, come here … Say “Attica.”’ I said, what? ‘Just say, Attica, go ahead,’ and he gave me the old pat. And I went out there and of course, sure enough, I started on the police and pretty soon I just blurted out, ‘Remember Attica? Attica?’ And the extras went nuts. … It had just happened, when they went to Rikers and a lot of people died. It was horrific and it was in the news constantly. And that got them going. And it kind of went down the ages. Now, 50 years later, we’re still running around saying ‘Attica’!… So my point is, things happen and it’s good to leave things open for it to happen. Especially in this kind of film, which is realistic.”

Pacino also talked about improvising one of the film’s most acclaimed scenes with Chris Sarandon, who never appears in the same frame with Pacino yet shared an unforgettable phone call sequence. Sarandon played one of Pacino’s two concurrent wives — in this case, a gay one, before same-sex marriage was legal — who is brought in to try to help alleviate the tense situation, although only a sad farewell results. Pacino and Sarandon “were around each other for a long time, and so the relationship was there through the work, through rehearsing, but we just improvised it. Lumet took three of the tapes of the improvisations we did, and he cut and pasted the scene that (ended up) in the movie.”

An attendee asked about the topicality of the film, with its highly-unusual-for-1975 use of a bisexual lead character who is in love with a trans woman, reflecting the reality of the true-life scenario that was adapted for the screen.

“I’m a youngster, so I could be wrong,” Pacino joked, “but I feel today we are used to it and we understand it more than we did back then, but still, it seems to communicate and deal with the things we’re dealing with. Watching it I did think — correct me if I’m wrong — that it was a little less shocking than it was back 50 years ago to hear these things. Back then, it was unusual. And that’s part of the film too, you know? And it’s fun to see that we’ve come a long way. We really have.

“And then I went out and did ‘Cruising,’” he added, mentioning another role in a groundbreaking film with gay themes. “I was into something!”

“You have to come back for that!” said the questioner. Pacino didn’t make any promises there, but that one is only five years away on his semicentennial calendar.