Simon Hattenstone

I’m beginning to feel like the cop he plays in “Insomnia” who loses his mind through lack of sleep and too much conscience. My pupils are getting bigger and bigger, and less and less discriminating. All I’m seeing is the guns; all I’m hearing is his screaming. His voice seems to get louder and louder in his later films. As Michael Corleone in “The Godfather Part II,” the movie that really made him, you could barely hear his voice. Pacino, so young and grave, did the “Method” — he didn’t act so much as inhabit his characters. He expressed himself in the tiniest gestures. He showed ambiguity with consummate economy, saying one thing with his voice and something completely different with his eyes.

In “The Merchant of Venice,” which just premiered in London and opens Dec. 29 in the U.S., he plays Shylock, yet another man emptied of hope and defeated by life. His Shylock could be another Carlito or Corleone: a monster, but possibly the most moral man in Shakespeare’s Venice; a man who keeps his word, or, as his Tony Montana says in “Scarface”: “All I have in this world is my balls, and my word, and I don’t break ‘em for no one, ‘jou understand?”

After quitting the movies in despair for four years in the late 1980s (after the epic flop “Revolution”), Pacino has had an incredibly successful ’90s and noughties. People often complain that he is hammy, a parody of his former self, but he is huge box office. In the 1990s he won his first Oscar (after six nominations) for the soppy “Scent of a Woman,” and scored huge critical successes with Michael Mann’s “Heat,” “The Insider” and “Donnie Brascoe.” A Channel 4 poll last year named him the No. 1 movie star of all time.

I’m not looking forward to meeting Pacino. I suppose he scares me. The press officer tells me I should have seen the men lining up for “The Merchant of Venice” premiere — hard nuts with “Scarface” posters who worship Pacino. He says he’d never seen such a crowd. Another press officer brings in a cappuccino for Pacino before he arrives, then replaces it a couple of minutes later because it might have got cold. I am told to prioritize my questions — Mr. Pacino does not answer in sound bites. Too right. He is famous for mumbling his way through interviews — talking with tremendous gravitas about the visiting muse and those who need to act as opposed to those who like to act.

He schlumps into the room, almost as broad as he is wide, belly sagging, face weathered but perfectly intact. He is dressed totally in black — jacket, sweatshirt, trousers, socks, shoes, ring, squiggly pendant round his neck. Al Pacino looks like a gorgeous dosser. He flew into London from L.A. Thursday, and hasn’t caught up with his sleep. (Actually, he says he hasn’t slept decently since making “Insomnia.”) The “Merchant” means a lot to him. Pacino loves his Shakespeare. Having directed the documentary “Looking for Richard” (a lovely, funny film that tries to make sense of Shakespeare and his stage version of “Richard III”), this is his first straight Shakespeare movie.

I ask him if he thinks of Shylock as a hero or a villain. He ums and ahs, and tells me, Well, this guy has suffered such loss and taken so much shit from so many people — and then he apologizes for being inarticulate. “I get all sluggish when I talk about it.” Straight answer, I say — you’ve got two seconds, hero or villain.

“Because I see good and bad in all of us, I can’t answer that question. I have to say a good-bad man.” He’ll probably read this quote one day and change his mind, and decide Shylock is a bad-good man. He says he often reads things he has said, and thinks he didn’t quite mean that — it’s not that the words have been distorted, it’s simply that he didn’t quite articulate what he meant.

As he struggles to make up his mind, I ask him about another character — useless bank robber Sonny Wortzik in “Dog Day Afternoon”: hero or villain? He laughs. “You know I’m not going to answer in two seconds. I love the way you say that. What’s going to happen to me? Am I going to fall into a pot of water?” Sonny is another villain who stands by his word — until the police kill him. “He seems like a hero to me.” OK, then, what about “Scarface’s” Tony Montana, recently voted “biggest movie badass” of all time in Maxim magazine? (“He murders, survives a chainsaw attack, whacks his boss, snorts coke like he’s breathing air and kills his best friend,” the magazine eulogized.) Pacino thinks. “Well, it depends on what side of the street you are walking on,” he says. Two seconds, I say. He grins. “You know I’m going to say ‘hero.’ Anybody who says ‘go shove it’ when somebody’s got a chain saw that is about to take your head off — I think pretty much that is a hero in anybody’s language.”

The new cappuccino arrives. He doesn’t drink these days, or take drugs, or smoke. But he does coffee big time. Friends call him Al Cappuccino.

“For you?” the waiter says.

“I believe it is for me,” Pacino says.

“Nice to see you,” the waiter says.

“Nice to see you,” Pacino says. He’s incredibly polite. I’ve stopped feeling scared.

I tell him how depressing I found it watching his movies en masse. He says I’m not the first person to have said that. “Does the pessimism of the films reflect his worldview?” “Wellllll,” he says, Pacino style. “In the end you’re just playing a role.” He says he is just like a cellist or painter, but he is painting pictures or making music with his body.

The stories are legion of how he got lost in his roles — how when he was playing a lawyer and a friend told him he was having conveyancing problems, he asked to see his contract; how he fell with his eyes open, just as a blind man would, when playing Lt. Col. Frank Slade in “Scent of a Woman”; how he did shifts in a cafe, tossing pancakes, to prepare himself for “Frankie and Johnny.”

But what about when you were playing those psychos, I ask. Surely if you were Method-acting a monster, you became a monster? No, you’ve got it wrong, he says quietly; they are not monsters. “One doesn’t see it as a monster. You don’t look at it like that. It’s passion and emotions, and it’s in all of us.” You have to look for the human in all the characters you play, he says.

Did you become a nightmare to be around? “Well, I was … I was affected by it.” He stammers. “You know we’re, we’re … you have to ask somebody else.” He pauses. Actually, he says, he thinks what saved him when making “Scarface” was his girlfriend. “I’ll tell you something,” he says. He puts down his coffee as if he’s about to tell me his greatest secret. “And this is a fact. When I was doing ‘Scarface,’ I remember being in love at that time. One of the few times in my life. And I was so glad it was at that time. I would come home and she would tell me about her life that day and all her problems and I remember saying to her, Look, you really got me through this picture because I would shed everything when I came home.”

Does he like guns? “I’m not crazy about the guns. I got to tell ya, that’s not my thing.” Has he ever owned one? “Never! I’ve never cared for guns. In fact, when I did “Scent of a Woman” I had to learn how to assemble one.”

Is he as hard in real life as he is in movies? He looks at me as if I’m bonkers. “I couldn’t possibly be. I couldn’t possibly be.”

You know, he says, he never planned any of this. Having told me what isn’t him (guns and violence), he tells me what is him: theater, Shakespeare and comedy. “Did you know I started out as a stand-up comic?” He looks embarrassed. “People don’t believe me when I tell them.” He performed in revues in New York’s Greenwich Village, doing physical comedy, and that’s what he really loved. “That’s how I saw myself, in comedy, and I didn’t know I would do this with my life. I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do.” If you look back to say, “Dog Day Afternoon,” he says, you can see the physical comedian in him. “That’s where humor lives for me. In the body. The Steve Martin kind of stuff or Jim Carrey, that’s what I like. I’ve always felt that’s what I would like to do.”

In some more recent roles, such as “Scent of a Woman” and “The Devil’s Advocate,” he has hammed it up to great effect. His critics suggest that he hass also hammed it up in his serious roles. He looks a little hurt when I mention it. “You can’t call Shylock hammy,” he protests. No, I say, but there are certain films … “Yes, certain roles you go too far,” he concedes. ” Some-times-you-go-too-far ,” he says, syllable by syllable. “But part of what you hope to do is not censor yourself, and then find a way to pull back, and sometimes you don’t censor yourself and you get caught off-guard.”

He says it’s the director’s job to rein him in, and they don’t always bother. “Sometimes it seems that directors just say, ‘Give me more Pacino, more Pacino,’” I say. “Yeaaaaaah,” he roars. “That has happened, yes.” At his best, directors such as Sidney Lumet seem to ask him for less rather than more. “Sidney is a great director, one of the greatest I have known. And one thing Sidney does do is rehearse you. You have three weeks’ rehearsal, like you’re doing a play. And in the rehearsal these things are sorted out. And the more rehearsal I have, the more likely I am to find the right levels. I think Michael Radford did that to me in “The Merchant.” If I was concerned about anything it was that it was so low-key.”

Back in the 1970s, when Method acting took him over, he took to drink. He found filmmaking and life exhausting. After “The Godfather,” he had become so famous so quickly, and he couldn’t cope. When did he realize he had a problem? “When it replaced work. Drinking became more attractive than working.” He snorts back his snot, unselfconsciously, and continues. “I like what Norman Mailer said about alcohol: ‘Drink has killed a lot of my brain cells and I think I would have been a better writer without it, but it would be one less way to relax.’”

“Sfffhhhhhchhhhh.” He snorts again. Drink allowed him to be quiet, at ease with himself, I say. “That’s right! That’s right! We know the best feeling in the world is the one between the second and third martini. That was my deal. I just enjoyed who I became when I was drinking, so that was something hard to break. I became much quieter, and funny. I must say, that kind of thing came out.” In the past, he has called himself a depressive with a sense of humor. And when he was sober? “Well, I was looking for a drink.” Perhaps the problem with fame was that the roles were so iconic and his fans thought they knew who he was and that person was so alien to him. “Yeah! Yep! Yeah!” At times he talk-shouts with such animation, his hands gesturing all over the show.

“I really like it better in the world when I can see things clearly and I can remember things, and I feel like I’m a part of things and I’m more tuned in to what’s going on, and not backing away from stuff.” He hasn’t drunk alcohol for 20-plus years. “I can’t say I’ve been sober though. I don’t like that word. What does it mean? ‘Sober! He’s very sober,’” he says to himself with contempt.

He’s right, sober is an inappropriate word for him. At 64, he’s still known as a man who operates better at night than in the day. He has had numerous famous girlfriends (Debra Winger, Diane Keaton) and numerous unfamous girlfriends, and he has never married. He has a daughter of 15, and 4-year-old twins with a different mother, Beverly D’Angelo, from whom he is separated. I ask him if he is seeing anybody at the moment. “I’m single and I don’t particularly like it. I’m certainly the kind of person who prefers … it … it …” He struggles for his words. “It’s good to have someone in your life that you’re going through this thing with. It’s good. That’s a thing in life that I aspire to.” He asks me if I’m still with the mother of my children. Yes, I say. “Well, that’s good, good for everybody. Particularly good for the children if you are in synch.” He comes to a stop. “You understand after a while why people stay together because of children. I never knew that.” He sounds so innocent, so regretful.

Well, perhaps we could put in a little personal ad at the bottom of the piece, I say, trying to cheer him up. He bursts out laughing and says only if I really despise him would I do that.

Pacino says he finds everything so much easier these days — life, movies, being himself. In the early days, he almost lost his soul to his work. Yes, he says, he is still attracted to those complex baddie-goodies and goody-baddies, but he hasn’t got a clue why. “When I try to explain anything I always end up trying to be right usually, but not truthful necessarily. Trying to give the right answer or what I think is the right answer. It’s a human instinct. You try to be as clever as you can be. You’re trying to come off like you really know what the hell’s going on, when you don’t!” You’re pretty gentle at heart, aren’t you, I say, a bit of a pussy? He equivocates. “There are times when I have a temperament. Yes, my temperament is there … but I hope I’m gentle. Yes, I think I am.”

I ask him if his hair is really that color. I had always assumed it was dyed. “Yeah, here take a look at it. I had to dye it for ‘Insomnia.’” I ruffle my hands through it and find the odd silver streak, but the rest is pure brown. “I got this from my father.” His chest hair is gray. What is the pendant on your chest? “A friend gave me this. It’s copper. It helps your immune system. It seems to have helped me. Maybe it’s psychological.”

Winter’s setting in; the afternoon’s getting dark and eerie. I ask him what he dreamed about the previous night. (I don’t tell him why, but a colleague dreamed that she had slept with him.) He looks surprised. “How did you know I had this strange dream? Well, that is for me to know, and you to find out. I’ll give you the number of my therapist.”

Have you really got one?

“I knew you’d say that. Yes, it’s good to have someone to talk to; it’s helped me a great deal in my life.” I ask him if he manages to talk to his therapist in full sentences. He laughs. “No, I don’t, but he likes it that way. The problem with me is, I guess, the way I express myself, you have to be with me 50 years before you can get a sense of what I’m talking about.”

Has it taken him that long to understand himself? “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, it has.”

Tutu serves on the Guantánamo Human Rights Commission, which was set up with the aim of ending all forms of internment without trial. He describes the play as “stark” and “devastating” and says it reminded him of his time heading up South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Tutu talks about the people held without charge and without trial, bent over double with bags over their heads. He talks about the sexual abuse and rape allegations and asks, How can a country call itself a democracy if it only acts democratically when it chooses to do so?

“It is inhumane and it is a blot on the West, which claims such high standards of justice and fair play. The justification that the administration has given here is that we are at war. Now if you’re at war, those that you capture and the enemy must be prisoners of war. But these are not prisoners of war, they are a new category — enemy combatants, meaning they don’t fall under the auspices of any conventions which seek to protect the rights of prisoners of war.”

The fact that this is not a regular war, he says, does not mean the West can lower its standards of justice. “For me, the shattering thing is discovering how there is a sense of deja vu because this was exactly the kind of argument that the South African apartheid government used to make. We asked, Why do you detain people without trial? Why do you ban people? Why do you put people under house arrest without the benefit of due process? And they would say: security of the state.

“You see, they have decided ahead of time that these are terrorists. The whole point of democracy is the recognition that there are rights which you cannot cancel out even when someone is a prisoner. The treatment meted out to these people is torture. And if they had to appear before our Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we’d have said that the administration is guilty of gross violation of human rights.”

“Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” premiered at the Tricycle theater in London in May and transferred to the West End. It opened off-Broadway in August to a standing ovation.

How did Tutu fit in with the rest of the cast? Had he done any acting as a child. “No.” He pauses. “I suppose when you are a public speaker, there is a bit of acting, isn’t there?”

Anyone who has seen Tutu talk in public will realize what a natural performer he is — his hands and eyes flying all over the place, his voice impassioned and resonant, a tiny ball of love. Three years ago, I saw him dancing at the Royal Festival Hall. There were dozens of entertainers on stage, yet you couldn’t help but focus on Tutu, pink cassock bobbing up and down, dancing like a Muppet.

One of the things that has most shocked him about Guantánamo is the apathy and acceptance of much of the American public. “It is frightening. Americans are almost shrugging their shoulders. Some seem to have bought into the argument that in order to defend yourselves, you have to use methods such as these, but that is why you have conventions. In times of war, there are rules of war. You can’t say no holds barred because then there is no civilization — it is just a chaos, everybody for themselves.

“It is a deep shame, and the fact that there is hardly any outcry, any sense of outrage at all, despite the evidence of what does, in fact, take place in secret ” He trails off. “Oh dear, isn’t it just awful?”

Did he ever think, back in the apartheid days of South Africa, that he’d be accusing the U.S. of such violations of human rights? “No. I’m deeply saddened,” he says quietly.

He suddenly lifts his voice and spirits. “It is important that one says there are those who are appalled — the people, for instance, who come to see the play — and it is important to say, when you talk about the war in Iraq, there are thousands who did come out last February to demonstrate that they were against the war. So we must not tar them all with the same brush. There are those who are appalled by so many features of the policies of this U.S. administration, and are trying to make their voice heard. But it is not easy.”

How did he go down in the role of Lord Steyn? The archbishop launches into that great, irrepressible hyena laugh. “Well, I myself had considerable butterflies in the pit of my tummy, but there’s hardly any acting, really. The actors just come in and sit down and speak. And people were very nice.

“When I walked on stage on Saturday, they thought they should give me a standing ovation. And at the end they didn’t throw any tomatoes. They thought: That poor guy, let’s give him another standing ovation. They are nice to old, decrepit men.”

“I don’t believe he committed suicide,” he says. “I don’t think he would tell his wife, ‘Oh, I’m going for a walk in the park.’ I mean if you want to commit suicide, he’d just go in the bathroom and slit his wrists or go in the garage and blow his brains out, you know. Somebody wanted him dead.”

Has Lee always been a conspiracy theorist? He looks round the room, with a conspiratorial grin, and starts talking extremely loudly as if to double bluff any potential eavesdroppers. “Well I mean I was talking to friends … Hahahaha! Just joking. But it’s as plain as day he did not commit suicide.” Which, of course, takes us on to weapons of mass destruction, and the Tony Blair-George Bush relationship, and another conspiracy. “A lot of people are scratching their heads — like what does Bush have on Blair and what does Blair have on Bush. Well ” Silence.

“She Hate Me” is not only a satire on the greed of companies such as Tyco, Enron and Adelphia, it is also a satire on Bushism itself: The opening credits show $3 bills with Bush’s face on them and a fake political advertisement against affirmative action. “I think the election coming up is gonna be the most important election in the history of the United States of America, cos God save us all ” He trails off in despair. “God save the world if Bush is reelected. Heaven help us. Wooooh!”

To say the new movie is about corporate corruption and Bushism barely begins to tell the story. “She Hate Me” is, in effect, two films: a political thriller and a sex comedy. The jobless and broke protagonist Jack Armstrong accepts a financial offer from his former fiancée, now a lesbian, to impregnate her and her girlfriend. From there, he goes on to father 19 children with lesbians. “She Hate Me” is messy, sprawling, ridiculous and entertaining. It’s a strange mix of the liberal (accepting of lesbians mums) and reactionary (ultimately, none of the lesbians can resist Armstrong’s priapic charm). It’s both sexually explicit and childlike — soft porn brought to you by Walt Disney.

Not surprisingly, Lee has now been attacked by lesbian groups for “She Hate Me” — after all, this is a movie in which one guy ends up doing the do with 19 gorgeous lipstick lesbians, and finally settles down to domestic life with a couple of them.

So Spike, I say, isn’t this the ultimate male-fantasy film? He looks at me, all wide-eyed innocence. “It is not a male fantasy. I say that for this reason. It might be a male fantasy to sleep with two lesbians; it’s definitely not a male fantasy to marry two lesbians. So that’s where the fantasy ended,” he laughs, happily digging himself into ever deeper trouble. “We knew going in that it would be impossible to make a film that all lesbians are going to love. But the lesbian population is not monolithic. You’re going to get people who are open to the film; then you are going to get your hard-liners who feel that any self-respecting lesbian can’t be a lesbian if there is a penis in the equation.”

Perhaps it’s not so much the penis, I say, it’s the thing attached to it. “Well, you may have to do your own poll to supplement this article.”

The criticism of the film is perfectly valid — it is an outlandish portrait of lesbians for the lads. But it’s also missing the point somewhat. “She Hate Me” is a comedy, not a political treatise. Yet, as in the past, Lee is expected to represent “the black experience,” or “the lesbian experience.” When he talks about homosexuality he does so with a great deal more insight than shown in the movie.

I ask him whether he could have made this film 10 years ago. “No, because I don’t think I was evolved as far as homosexuality.” In what way? “Well you just evolve, you grow. If you’d asked me 15 years ago, ‘Spike, do you think men should be able to marry each other? Do you think women should be able to marry each other?’ I would say I don’t know. Today I say I’m cool with it.”

But isn’t there still a massive problem with homophobia in the African-American community? “Well, it’s not just black men, but I will say that black men are probably more homophobic than other groups of people. I mean, there is a big stigma in the African-American community for homosexuals. Big, big, big, big, big.”

Is that changing? “No. There’s a new phenomenon in America that’s called ‘on the down low.’ This is men who have unprotected sex with other men, then have unprotected sex with their wives and girlfriends, and their wives and girlfriends don’t know they are engaging in unprotected sex with men. That’s why African-American women are the group most at risk of contracting HIV. These men don’t think they’re gay. My reasoning is that the stigma of being a homosexual is so great in the African-American community that these men have convinced themselves they are straight. And they are homophobic too. Anything effeminate, they’ll be the first one to call anybody a faggot or a punk, and they will swear on a stack of Bibles and look Jesus in the eye and say they are not gay. And that’s a very serious problem.”

Lee emerged in the mid-1980s with “She’s Gotta Have It,” a tender, sexy black-and-white no-budget movie about one girl and her boyfriends. There followed a series of brilliant films including “Jungle Fever,” “Clockers” and, most notably, “Do the Right Thing.” He also managed to make a mainstream movie about the militant Malcolm X, a poignant drama out of the Million Man March (“Get on the Bus”) and the devastating documentary, “4 Little Girls,” about the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Ala.

“Do the Right Thing” portrayed the simmering racial conflict of late 1980s New York, and in doing so defined a generation. Incredibly, Lee was accused of acting irresponsibly and inciting people to riot when the character Mookie, played by Lee himself, threw a dustbin through the window of the pizzeria where he worked. And this in a Hollywood where epic gratuitous violence is a staple.

But in a way perhaps it wasn’t so incredible. After all, Lee has been accused of a number of things through his career, many of them contradictory or simply daft: of being a racist and black separatist (for making films about black people), of not being working class, of coming from a privileged background, of being a lefty, of being a capitalist with a clothing and advertising company. At times, there seems to be one set of rules for filmmakers and another for Spike Lee. He nods. “Well. sometimes they do seem to put up higher standards for me that don’t apply to other filmmakers.” Does it still happen? “Not to the same degree, but it’s still there.”

Perhaps Lee’s politics caused such confusion for British people because they didn’t fit into neat left-right pockets. Anyway, he says, he never advocated economic separatism. “That was ballocks,” he says relishing the word but rounding it off too sweetly. No, I say, it’s an “o” and you have to give it a harder, flatter sound at the end. He giggles. “Bollox,” he says. Well done, I say.

“Well, here’s the thing: I never saw a division between being politically active and making money. In the U.S. we live under the capitalistic system and I do think there’s a way to make an honest living without being responsible for people’s ill will or death. I mean, ‘How dare you do a commercial, how dare you do a film like “Do the Right Thing” and then do a commercial, I mean ’” And he tumbles to a stop, lost for words. He leans into the microphone and almost burps the word “bollocks” into it. Now he’s got the giggles. “Ballux,” he says again. “I only use bollocks when I’m over here.”

I ask Lee if he has changed politically over the years. “I think I’ve become more astute, more aware. I’m trying to stop doing knee-jerk reactionary stuff and trying to study a little bit more and deliberate more before I open my mouth.”

Can he give an example of his knee-jerkism? “Before I had children I said I would never take my kids to see a Disney movie, and that’s one of the most ignorant statements I’ve ever made because if you have children you’d definitely take them — you have no other choice.”

Which leads us back to his favorite topics: movies and conspiracies. He talks about the filmmakers he loves most — Kurosawa, Fellini, Coppola, Scorsese, Stone, early Truffaut and Godard. Ah, Jean Seberg, I say, wasn’t she wonderful in “A Bout de Souffle,” and how tragic that she killed herself. He gives me a look and shakes his head. “Jean Seberg, she hung out with the Black Panthers, you know. I think the FBI had something to do with her death because she was a Black Panther sympathizer.”