By Lawrence Grobel
I was sitting under a patio umbrella playing chess with Al Pacino. I was telling my famous friend that Tom Wortham, the chairman of the English department at UCLA, had made me an offer to teach a class having to do with life skills. “How can you refuse?” Pacino asked.
After giving it more thought, I came to the conclusion that if I offered a class in the Art of the Interview, I would really be covering a lot of survival territory, since it’s my belief that the skills of an interviewer encompass a broad range of talents. You must be able to converse like a talk show host, think like a writer, understand subtext like a psychiatrist, have an ear like a musician, be able to select the best parts like a book editor, and know how to put it together like a playwright.
A week later, I met with Pacino again. I told him I had accepted UCLA’s offer to teach a class limited to 15 students and that I had come up with an idea for him.
“There’s an organization called The Friends of English,” I told him. “They do fundraisers and give scholarships to English graduate students. Why not come and show selections from your personal films Looking for Richard, The Local Stigmatic, and Chinese Coffee and talk about the process of turning plays into films?
“Would you be willing to come to one of the classes and let the students interview you?” “Sure,” he said. “I can walk in unexpectedly. Surprise them. See how they handle it.”
On my first day of class I was pleased to learn that all 15 students not only knew who Pacino was, but they had seen the Godfather films, Scarface, Dog Day Afternoon, Scent of a Woman, and The Devil’s Advocate. They had no idea about his love of the theater, however, which was perfect. There was the excitement and anticipation of the known, and room to learn.
I told them that the following week Pacino would appear at the Fowler Museum auditorium on campus and that I would reserve the front two rows for them. Their assignment was to prepare at least 15 questions they’d like to ask him. We would meet in the classroom for an hour before his appearance and go over their questions.
And that’s what we did. “All right,” I said, “I’m Al Pacino. Ask me your questions.” I went around the room and listened to some of the most convoluted questions I’ve ever heard.
“You appeared in a lot of well-known movies. You played a mafia don and a drug kingpin, a gay bank robber and an honest undercover cop, you’ve been the devil and a people’s lawyer, you’ve played an over-the-top cartoon character and a blind man who could drive a Ferrari and dance the tango. What I want to know is…”
“Cut all of that out,” I interrupted. “He knows what he did, just get to the point. Don’t put him to sleep.”
“What young actor would you like to see play Michael Corleone in a remake of The Godfather?”
“NOOOOOO!” I shouted. “You don’t ask Al Pacino who he’d like to see replace him in the seminal role of his career.”
On it went. I listened to forty or fifty questions, told them why they were too long, too obtuse, too easy to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ too awkwardly worded. And then the door opened and Pacino stuck his head in and said, “Am I in the right place?”
“You sure are,” I said and smiled, as eyes nearly popped out of a half dozen students’ heads. We didn’t have much time before the evening at the Fowler was to begin, so I made no introduction, other than, “Here’s Al. Let’s get started.”
Lawrence Grobel: This is a class where they are learning to ask questions, without having to come up with answers! Every class you ever take, you need to have answers. Not this one.
Pacino: That’s what we say in acting all the time. When we’re working on a play we say, ‘Ask the question.’ You don’t have to answer it, just ask it.
About the Author: Lawrence Grobel has been referred to as the Mozart of interviewers. He authored the bestselling book, The Art of the Interview: Lessons from a Master of the Craft and eight other books. Lawrence has written for The New York Times, Newsday and Writer’s Digest.
April 9th, 2008 at 5:18 am
I do a lot of interviews as a freelance writer. Sometimes, because of time constraints and the dread of transcribing, I’m tempted to shift to email correspondence. But I always find that those longer interviews end up yielding more rich, unique perspectives that never really make it into the written interviews. Just like Pacino’s entry, it’s always great to get people when they have less opportunity to polish their responses.