Christopher Nolan Once Shared Al Pacino Put Him Through Hoops for ‘Insomnia’
Actor Al Pacino worked alongside Memento director Christopher Nolan for the first time in the 2002 thriller Insomnia. But Pacino initially made it a bit difficult for the director to bring him on board.
What Christopher Nolan felt about casting Al Pacino in ‘Insomnia’
Nolan once asserted that he didn’t start out developing Insomnia for Pacino. The 2002 feature saw Pacino playing a veteran police detective investigating a novelist played by Robin Williams. Nolan wanted Insomnia to be commentary on the common cop genre of film. Apart from his acting skills, Pacino made a career out of playing police officers in movies like Heat and others. Pacino being such a familiar face in crime thrillers made him the perfect candidate to do Insomnia.
“Somebody with audience association, someone with a familiarity to the audience to give them a kind of built-in sympathy and built in appeal so that you can start the story and take it somewhere rather unexpected,” Nolan once told Screenwriters Utopia. “So Pacino absolutely fit that because he has played these great cop figures in the past and my idea, of the different direction take the story and to play up on the iconic cop figure of so many studio movies. Al in addition to just being one of the finest actors who ever lived is someone who has this great star appeal that I felt the character demanded to draw the audience in to this very dark situation.”
But according to Nolan, Pacino wanted to make sure the film would be worth his time before signing on.
“[Pacino] really puts you through so many hoops, wanting to know what you’re going to do with the film before he commits,” Nolan said in a 2009 interview with Contact Music. “He’s learned over the years that as an actor you have to be able to completely trust the people you’re making a film with.”
Al Pacino corrected Christopher Nolan’s own stage direction
Working with Pacino was also an eye-opening experience for a younger Christopher Nolan. Nolan saw firsthand what the Oscar winner was able to bring to the table. Sometimes Pacino was able to sneak in performance cues right under Nolan’s nose.
“He has an incredible understanding of his craft and of how a film is put together. He would literally say to me, ‘You won’t see what I’ve done until you project it, until you’ve seen what the camera photographed.’ And he was always right when he said that. More often than not, he was giving me everything I envisioned and offering me plenty more on top of that,” Nolan recalled
Years later, Nolan would recall this moment with Pacino while promoting his most recent movie Oppenheimer. He saw with the film’s star Cillian Murphy what he saw with Pacino years ago.
“I had gone up to Pacino after a series of takes and given him a note on what I wanted,” Nolan said in an interview with Los Angeles Times. “He told me, ‘I’ve already done that. You can’t see it to the eye, but I’ve done it on the dailies.’ I looked for it and I was like, ‘Oh, my God,’ because there it was. Great film actors can do that, and that’s what I had with Cillian.”
Al Pacino felt he caused a rift between himself and Christopher Nolan
Nolan has a habit of working with actors on more than one occasion. He’s collaborated with the likes of Cillian Murphy, Michael Cain, and Christian Bale on a number of films. Pacino was eager to work with the filmmaker again like so many other actors have. But they haven’t worked on a project since Insomnia. According to The Telegraph, Pacino had a theory as to why this was.
“He hasn’t offered me a film in a while, you know why? I’ll tell you why,” Pacino joked. “He asked me to be in this movie and I didn’t do it.”
