In America most everybody who's Italian is half Italian. Except me. I'm all Italian. I'm mostly Sicilian, and I have a little bit of Neapolitan in me. You get your full dose with me.
I personally think if you're given four months instead of four weeks on a play, with the people who want to work that way, the play will invariably be different and stronger, and much more fulfilling and richer on all counts. There's no doubt in my mind about it.
Whether he's doing great acting or not, you're seeing somebody who is in the tradition of a great actor. What he does with it, that's something else, but he's got it all. The talent, the instrument is there, that's why he has endured.
My dad was in the army. World War II. He got his college education from the army. After World War II he became an insurance salesman. Really, I didn't know my dad very well. He and my mother split up after the war. I was raised by my maternal grandmother and grandfather, and by my mother.
Any project that I find encouraging that isn't attached to a studio, I can go to them, which I definitely would. You have to take an interest in what you do.
There are people whose sense of reality is very strong, who have a sense of honesty. Lee Strasberg is like that, my grandfather was like that. These are the kinds of men I've had close relationships with.
The reasons you have for doing a movie will vary with the way your life is going. There was a time when a made a some movies because I felt I needed to work. And I didn't think about the material as much. But sometimes I've thought about the material a lot and thought I was doing the right thing, and it didn't work out.
I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express 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.