Al Pacino said filming a television series for Amazon Prime Video revived “wonderful” memories of shooting the big-screen epics that made his name.
In Hunters the actor, 79, returns to the streets of Seventies New York as a holocaust survivor hunting down high-ranking Nazis.
Pacino, whose breakthrough came in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy and who is in the running for a second Oscar on Sunday for Netflix’s The Irishman, said the show’s feature-length episodes cohere into a “12-hour film”.
He told an audience at the Curzon cinema in Soho last night: “In today’s world we don’t get the opportunity to rehearse as much as we used to 40 years ago.
“It’s become a privilege and a luxury to rehearse. In the old days when I did films with [Serpico director] Sidney Lumet and Coppola and all … we rehearsed for weeks on a film, so you had a chance to understand your role another way, go further, take more chances.
“These people [the Hunters cast and crew] were all together, we would sit and talk about the scene we were doing and we would spend hours right there. You could see producers going, ‘Oh man’, but we would do it, and we had that feeling and it was wonderful.
“We were together for five months. It’s a 12-hour film we made.”
He added: “I love the freedom of it. I love the fact that this film is so eccentric, so eclectic … the unpredictability of it.
“It reminds me of the old days.”
Hunters is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video from February 21.
