Interview: Al Pacino on playing Dr Death and working on the small screen

Al Pacino talks to JOE about why not meeting Jack Kevorkian before playing him in a new HBO special may have been a mistake and about the pace of TV filming.

Al Pacino makes a rare foray into the world of TV to play Jack Kevorkian, a doctor who became famous for helping terminally ill people kill themselves in the US. The TV film was made for HBO in the States, the channel behind The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, and gets a first Irish airing for Sky customers on Sunday at 9pm.

In 1990, a slight but determined Michigan doctor named Jack Kevorkian performed his first assisted suicide, using a homemade machine called a "Mercitron" to allow an Alzheimer’s victim named Janet Adkins to self-administer a lethal dose of potassium chloride.

The event set off a national media frenzy, and triggered a decade-long war of wills between Kevorkian and county prosecutors, who were as committed to shutting down "Dr. Death" as Kevorkian was in continuing his practice.

As well as starring Pacino, You Don't Know Jack is directed by fellow Oscar-winner Barry Levinson and co-stars the likes of John Goodman and Susan Sarandon.

Our man in LA sat down on set with the legendary actor to hear his views on making the film and doing it specifically for the small screen.

JOE: Given this cast, given the director, given the pedigree of the project, does it feel any different at all knowing that it's an HBO film? Or at this point is there no line to see?

Al Pacino: Well, it's television. It's HBO, and so HBO is television. And television is... you have to do a lot in a short period of time so that's the difference, the only difference. Otherwise, it's the same.

JOE: I wanted to ask about the title. It seems to suggest this is sort of a satirical treatment.  Does anybody have any thoughts on whether this is a proper title for a movie about Dr. Death?

Al Pacino: Well, I don't think a lot of people can really say that they know Jack Kevorkian, especially when you get to know him or you get to get his read on things and get to know more about him.

Of course, if you're doing a movie about him, you're apt to go further into it to find out.  And really you don't know jack.  When you see the image that was portrayed of Jack Kevorkian during his time, you get a sense of someone quite different than the personality that I got to know.

Not that I got to know him personally, mind you, but just the research I did and the work I did, in order to get closer to who I could sort of interpret. I think the title is apt because you don't know this guy. And, hopefully, in the movie you still don't.

JOE: Did you meet up with Dr. Kevorkian?

Al Pacino: I didn't meet Jack before or during filming. Sometimes, for some reason I don't take access to that, and sometimes I do. And I felt with Jack that the script was so complete in its portrait. I mean, it felt as though there was room, and I had so much research.

With the media the way it is, there's so many things you could see and study and you can read his books and get close to him in that fashion. And I wanted to feel this instinctively.

The director Barry Levinson met him and got a great deal out of it, and there were times when I wish I would have. But in the end, I felt close to him in another kind of way.

There are characters you make contact with and it works, and there's some characters you just back away from contacting.  I don't know why.

I'll give you examples: with Frank Serpico [the policeman who Pacino played in the 1973 film Serpico], I studied and went with Serpico everywhere. I got to know him, to go back into the past.  Anyone who saw that movie, it was him that I got to know.

But with Dog Day Afternoon I didn't feel like I wanted to know that guy for this role and my interpretation.  Now, I may have made a mistake. I don't know. I still to this day think I did. And with this project?...Who knows.

I probably made a mistake here too. If you have the opportunity to meet someone as an actor, it's just great fodder for you. It's wonderful source stuff that we die for. And so that I didn't take access to it, you know, is a question, and I don't know why I didn't.

I hope I will meet Jack in the future [after this interview, he went on to meet Kevorkian at the New York premiere of the film].

JOE: Is a positive part of doing a TV movie that it doesn't take as long as making a feature film?

Al Pacino: Well, there are pros and cons. There's something about going fast that catches you up, and sometimes it creates a certain spontaneity. You're going fast with highly tuned people who are there and are with it, and they're not going so fast that they're negligent. It's just the nature of the beast.

You have to do it, because it's ultimately all about how much money there is to do these things and put them on.

But at the same time, there were so many scenes in this. At one point we did 16 scenes in two days. To me, that's a lot of stuff in two days. But at the same time it was exciting because that lent a kind of energy to the thing.

Also you're in the hands of Barry Levinson, a consummate filmmaker. And they usw a lot of cameras at one time, which is also helpful. So if I had it to do over again, I would say, yeah, sure, I would do it. There are more positive than anything else.

You do get very tired sometimes when you're sitting around for hours on a movie set, so sort of you get depleted. With TV, that doesn't happen.

Jordan Riefe

You Don't Know Jack, Sky Atlantic, Sunday 6 February, 9pm