But he almost never got the job. The sort of Hollywood executive who thought Astaire could ‘only dance a little' and Bogart was ‘not tough' argued that Pacino, at 5ft 7ins in height, was too short and -- astonishingly -- too Italian for Michael Corleone. He never considered Pacino's passion or director Francis Coppola's support for his star. Now, with ‘Godfather' mastermind Coppola this summer planning another chapter he may be involved again:'Francis is the visionary. If he has a definite idea of doing another one, I know that I would be interested.' Pacino had never seen the original 1972 ‘Godfather' on the big screen until a 25th anniversary party in San Francisco (‘I went , but I didn't stay. I was too nervous. It's like looking at an old photograph of yourself. You just wonder. You say: “I can't quite relate.”). It brought back memories of a young actor so overwhelmed that he was expecting to be fired: ‘I thought the role was impossible to do. I didn't know how I was going to go from being a nonentity to this guy who runs the whole show. Where was that? I remember staying really close to the story in my mind and heart and feeling that somehow I would chart out this character. I spent a lot of time doing that, and I spent a lot of time praying. Literally, I went and sat in churches and prayed.' He lights another Honey Rose and leans back deep into a stuffed leather armchair in a hotel suite across from New York 's Central Park . He's dressed in standard Manhattan artistic chic, black shirt, black pants, black leather overcoat. Only a casually knotted red tie indicates me might like to get noticed. His big numbers are coming up. This year marks three decades as a movie star and the Millennium sees him turn sixty on April 25. At this landmark time he is reflective and, for him, almost talkative. In his last movie, ‘The Devil's Advocate', he played Satan who repeated his favourite sin was vanity. But that is not for the slightly built star who considers his sinful preferences gazing over his reading glasses: ‘Omission. Sins of omission.' Grinning he relishes the memory of playing Old Nick: ‘What was gratifying was being able to play a character you could do almost anything with. Anything goes. Our idea was to make him a more tempting devil, to take it to an almost Faustian level." The connection between ‘Devil's Advocate' and the films of the 1970s other than ‘Godfather' that made Pacino famous -- ‘Serpico', ‘Dog Day Afternoon' -- is a thread of social consciousness. Pacino says he took Devil role because it was a satirical thriller about greed, vanity and the contemporary conscience. ‘Movies are not bad now -- they're different,' he says talking like the rather hip film school professor he could be. ‘In the '70s we seemed to be addressing the sociopolitical issues of the day. Now TV and the media in general have filled that gap. “Dog Day Afternoon” was maybe the first time you ever saw the media dealing with a real-life situation. ‘Today, something like that is just run of the mill. You see it all the time on TV."
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