Al Pacino in Looking for Richard. Courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

"I don't think I really need this," Al Pacino muttered as he fiddled around with the microphone in a small screening room on the Fox Studio lot. He was there to introduce a screening of Chinese Coffee, one of three films he has directed that will be included in a new boxed set of his work, The Al Pacino Collection. A far cry from the commercial fare he's been doing of late — like Ocean's Thirteen and Two for the Money — the bare bones productions of stage works that are obviously close to the actor's heart are a welcome reminder of how magnetic a performer Pacino can be.

Pacino actually admitted that he hadn't planned to show these films in public and was going to leave them to his children, but now he'll just have to reserve that area of the vault for his paintings, which he also vowed never to show in public. Interestingly, what led the actor to make the three films in the collection — The Local Stigmatic, Chinese Coffee, and Looking for Richard — was that he wanted to preserve the performances of his stage work on film. "I like to make records of things I do," Pacino told the rapt audience shortly before adding, "I'm closer to a filmmaker than a director."

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Although he may not consider himself to be a "director," the boxed set illuminates Pacino's meticulous soul searching and investigation of his craft as an actor, which in turn produces some riveting filmmaking. The three films in the set represent Pacino's still-vibrant fascination with acting, but the actor also explores his reasons for making the films in free-form conversations with New York University film professor Richard Brown, which serve as prologue and epilogue on each disc. Both on the DVD and in person, Pacino seems surprisingly pained when talking about stepping into the director's chair.

"I enjoy my amateur status," said Pacino, relating a quote he remembered from his friend, the poet Taylor Mead, when he was asked about why he doesn't direct more. He added an anecdote about how he once previewed Looking for Richard to an audience and wanted to stop the film midway through and tell them, "We were only kidding around." So why does he do it? "It's reminds me of when I started out and we did things because we had an interest in them."

In fact, the films in the Pacino set do not feel like the work of a polished director, but the rough edges are what make them so effective. Of the three films in the boxed set, Looking for Richard is easily the most well-known, since it is the only one Pacino released wider than the festival circuit. The film is a quasi-documentary on his staging of Shakespeare's Richard III that investigates the mysteries of performance as much as it tries to reinvent the Bard's tragedy about the short-lived king. Pacino recruited the likes of Kevin Spacey, Winona Ryder, and Alec Baldwin to assist him in the effort. The film has never been released on DVD before, and even though Pacino calls himself a lousy teacher, he considers this in-depth look at acting as a display of "teaching by learning yourself."