Al Pacino always burns up the screen, but he's not always a fan of when things really get hot.

In his recent memoir Sonny Boy, Pacino reflected on the experience of shooting a sex scene with Ellen Barkin for the 1989 neo-noir Sea of Love. "I'm not usually one to perform graphic lovemaking scenes," he writes, "and I don't think many other actors like to do them either. It can become sort of borderline porn."

"Though I had played romantic leads in other movies," Pacino explains, Sea of Love "became renowned for a long, slow sex scene where Ellen Barkin holds me against a wall and gives me a bit of a pat-down before our two characters start going at it." Though Pacino remembers that "the scene was brilliantly choreographed" by director Harold Becker, it was less-than-brilliant experience to shoot.

Universal/courtesy Everett

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Pacino continued, "I realize it is futile for me to complain that we're no longer in an age of movies like A Place in the Sun, where Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift could have an entire audience swooning in their seats without ever showing their naked bodies."

Pacino frequently reminisces about the studio-era films he grew up idolizing, and personally describes Taylor as a "fast friend" and Clift as having "beauty" and a "soul." But he understood that by the time of his ascendancy in the early 1970s, the days of the "Lubitsch touch" style of sensual suggestion were long gone.

Sea of Love chronicles a New York City homicide detective's (Pacino) search for the cold-blooded killer of two men who placed ads in the "lonely hearts" column of a local paper. Barkin plays a prime suspect who also becomes Pacino's lover, leading to a dangerously erotic game of cat and mouse.

The film came at a time in Pacino's career when he had been "out of commission for four years." It became a huge success, earning over $100 million on a $19 million budget and garnering Pacino the most positive notices from critics he'd seen since 1983's Scarface. In Pacino's words, the film took him "from having no money to being back in the chips."

Pacino remembered that "Ellen Barkin blew the screen apart, sensually and artistically. What a performance," he wrote. "I was luck to be a part of it."

Universal/courtesy Everett

The acting legend has been sharing several anecdotes and stories from his memoir. In an interview with Conan O'Brien, Pacino also fondly remembered one Godfather scene for an unexpected reason: "My ankle was hurt, somehow it slipped... The car had one of those side things that you could jump on and then jump in. So I was just looking up at the sky and I said, 'Thank you, God.' This was my thought. I actually said, 'Thank you, God. You're gonna get me out of this film.' That's how much I wanted to leave it."

Pacino's memoir, Sonny Boy, is available now.