Al Pacino is 82 years old and still trucking. Still working, still giving interviews, still turning in interesting performances. When did I last see him on screen? Probably House of Gucci, where he had to act against Jared Leto doing an over-the-top “mamma mia” Italian accent. Pacino did his best to ground those scenes, to no avail. Anyway, Pacino has been around forever and he recently chatted with Variety about some roles he turned down and why Francis Ford Coppola was disappointed in him. Some highlights:

He was offered the role of Han Solo in “Star Wars.” “Well, I turned down ‘Star Wars.’ When I first came up, I was the new kid on the block, you know what happens when you first become famous. It’s like, ‘Give it to Al.’ They’d give me Queen Elizabeth to play. They gave me a script called ‘Star Wars.’ … They offered me so much money. I don’t understand it. I read it. … So I said I couldn’t do it. I gave Harrison Ford a career.”

Filming the Godfather: Pacino said Francis Ford Coppola asked to meet him one night after filming at a restaurant, where the director was having dinner with his family. “I came in, and he said, ‘You know, I had a lot of faith in you. And you’re failing me,’” Pacino said. “I’m standing there thinking ‘What the f–k, what did I do?’” “Go to Paramount,” Coppola told him. After watching his footage, Pacino understood the problem. In the film’s early scenes, the studio hadn’t realized his internal journey into Michael Corleone. “I wanted to come out of nowhere, and by the end of the film create some kind of enigma,” he said. “His transition is what interested me, and I thought I was unable to save it. After the first day of shooting, Diane Keaton and I got drunk. We thought ‘This is it, our careers are over.’”

What kept him in the film? “The Solozzo scene, where Michael shoots the cop. Coppola pushed that up, because he thought Paramount was about to fire me,” Pacino said. “I do the scene, they liked it, and they kept me in because I shot someone.”

On “Scarface”: “You can’t imagine what it was like to be there,” he said of the heavily armored shoots. “The smoke, everyday you have to put yourself in a trance. One day, we’re shooting, fighting — ‘Say hello to my little friend’ — I shoot thirty rounds, I get hit, the gun goes down, and I’m supposed to be wounded. I go to pick up the gun, and I put my hand on the barrel. My hand stuck to it, and I had to go to the hospital. I was out for two weeks.” (Covered in fake blood in the emergency room, the nurse mistook him for “some scumbag.”) “I was gone,” he described, “but they shot the shit out of it. They shot so much while I was away. Spielberg came down and had a crack at shooting someone. Everyone wanted to do it.”

Advice about how to watch Heat: “Here’s the thing with ‘Heat’: I hope you see it again, audience. I was playing this cop, and I found a way in, but this is a detective who’s kind of wild. I thought he probably chipped cocaine. That will explain to you some of my, uh…the thing is, there was no cocaine sniffing in the film, but I was.”

[From Variety]

I’ve never seen Scarface. I know, I know. I also think Heat is a little bit overrated? It’s a good film, good direction from Michael Mann, good performances by Robert DeNiro and Val Kilmer, but overall – that film is too long and overwrought. As for his performance in The Godfather… he’s so good in that. My God. His stillness, his scenes with Brando. Of course, I’m a huge fan of The Godfather Part II, especially his scenes with Lee Strasberg and John Cazale. It’s insane that Cazale didn’t win the Oscar for Part II. Also: I honestly forgot that Pacino was offered the Han Solo role? What a weird sliding-doors casting for that role.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.