After watching the first cut, he sat there not saying anything for a few moments, then stood up and announced the crew had more work to do and walked out.

The most personal revealing moments, however, were when Pacino was shown puzzling through the process. Pacino, the filmmaker, travels to Dublin, London, Paris and New York as he pieces together Wilde’s life story, interviewing such figures as Gore Vidal Wilde’s grandson, Merliln Holland and Wilde aficionado and fellow Irishman Bono.īono also agreed to allow the filmmakers to use for free his 12-year-old song “Salome,” which plays as the credits roll. He also pops up wearing a headdress and leading a camel through the desert in a “Salome” staging with a completely different cast. Pacino, the actor, appears as “Herod” in both the play reading performances staged at the Wadsworth Theater, with the actors wearing modern clothes, and in the film version, which he said he intends to edit in its own right. Because I interject myself as a kind of goofy guy, or someone who is trying to deal with the process. “I think there was this idea of creating something that would reveal things about myself, also. “Wilde Salome” is in the tradition of his 1996 film “Looking for Richard,” a documentary that Pacino said he directed in an attempt to make Shakespeare more accessible to Americans.īut Pacino said “Wilde Salome” is more personal. The director acknowledged that his ambition left him unsure how to pull the project together - and he let it percolate for long periods. It’s a much more ambitious and complicated gesture of cinema,” Pacino said.

Pacino’s “Wilde Salome” defies easy definition, weaving together a documentary on Wilde’s life, footage of a reading of the play in Los Angeles and a film version of the play. The resulting film is a tour-de-force tribute to Oscar Wilde and “Salome,” the 1891 play that he originally wrote in French to tell the story of Herod’s obsession for his wife’s daughter, culminating with Salome’s vengeful demand for the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter. “I was always thinking of ‘Salome,’ and I was taking dance lessons, and everything I could do to try to approach it,” she told a news conference in Venice.

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