I always had this thing, when I was younger especially, I didn't want to do movies that much. I found they took a lot out of you and they were exhausting for me in a lot of ways.
It used to worry me what people said about me. I'm learning not to worry as much. Sometimes you feel critics are wrong all the time, but I don 't take objection to it, because that's the way it goes. They can be wrong, they can be right. They can be cruel, they can be kind.
Acting is hard work. At times, it's very energizing and enervating. It's childish. It's also responsible. It's illuminating, enriching, joyful, drab. It's bizarre, diabolical. It's exciting.
That's where humour 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.
There is only one way of surviving all the early heartbreaks in this business. You must have a sense of humor. And I think it also helps if you are a dreamer. I had my dreams all right. And that is something no one can ever take away. They cost nothing, and they can be as real as you like to make them. You own your dreams and they are priceless. I've been a lavatory attendant, a theatre usher, a panhandler, all for real. Now, as an actor, I can be a journalist today and a brain surgeon tomorrow. That's the stuff my dreams are made of.
I never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.
I can see [ talent or curiosity for acting] in my oldest daughter [Julia Marie Pacino]. I don't know how long she'll run away from it, but it's there in her.
When I was younger, there was the sex thing. That's par for the course.When you're a movie star, it went with it. It's a kind of rite of passage, socially.
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.
I went back to the stage because it was my way of dealing with the success I had, my way of coping. It was a way of escaping the responsibilty of what was happening.