I don't regret anything. I feel like I've made what I would call mistakes. I picked the wrong movie, or I didn't pursue a character, but everything you do is part of you and you get something from it.
[Julie Marie Pacino]is a great ballplayer, which I wanted to be. She did make four films by the time she was 14 but we're not going to talk about that.
[Oscar Wilde's Salome screenplay] is not autobiographical in a sense where you go to my house and see my kids and stuff like that, but that's why I guess it's semi-autobiographical.
I have a life and do a lot of things, and so far my work has been my life. If I was a painter no one would question me about my age. I'm an artist, I hate saying that.
I would say I am more concerned with the plays I'm going to do than the movies. I'm more comfortable in a play. In film, there's always a certain sense of control, of holding back. The stage is different ; there's more to act. There are more demands put on you, more experiences to go through.
I'm much more a European Italian than I am an American Italian, and I've always felt that that style of acting comedy is in me. I put comedy as much as I can into all my movies, if I can help it.
Forget the career, do the work. If you feel what you are doing is on line and you're going someplace and you have a vision and you stay with it, eventually things will happen.
There was once a great actor named George C. Scott. He was on stage in the Delacourt Theater in Central Park, where they do Shakespeare every summer, and he was playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. At one point he took the robes he was wearing and just started flipping them up in the air, out of nowhere. And later, an actor said to him, "What was that, George, what were you doing?" And he said, "They were sleeping." You're always trying to catch them.
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. And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie.
A lot of actors choose parts by the scripts, but I don't trust reading the scripts that much. I try to get some friends together and read a script aloud. Sometimes I read scripts and record them and play them back to see if there's a movie. It's very evocative; it's like a first cut because you hear 'She walked to the door,' and you visualize all these things. 'She opens the door' . . . because you read the stage directions, too.