Robert De Niro
"I don't mind being a bastard," says Robert De Niro, "just as long as I am an interesting bastard." A crude personal summary, perhaps, but an accurate one. De Niro is one of the greatest actors of modern cinema. The power he brinqs to such roles as Travis Binkie in TAxi DRIVER or Vito Corleone in THE GODFATHER PART II, reveals a performer of rare talent and even rarer versatility. On screen he is always interesting, but the characters he piays are rarely likable.
EARLY CAREER
De Niro was born in New York to a family of artists. The young De Niro was
regarded as a shy boy, who preferred reading books to making friends, but
he managed to overcome his shyness at the age of ten f or his first stage
role, as the codardly lion in the school play THE WIZARD OF OZ. By the fime
he was 16 he was earning money as an actor,,,. in a touring performance of
Chekhov's play THE BEAR. For the next.ten years, until Bri-an De Palma gave
him his first film role, De Niro con-tinued to develop on stage, mostiy through
lunchtime ,theater shows and on off- Broadway stages. like many successful
actors of his era, De Niro studied the chief proponents of method acting,
and it is as a method actor that De Niro would later establish h'is reputation.
AMERICAN ICON
Throughoút his film career De Niro has shown an ex-traordinary talent
to trans-form himself and "be-come" the different charac-ters he
plays. The most strikingl example of this was his portrayal of the middie-aged
boxer Jake La Motta in Martin Scorseses RAGING BULL.
De Niro's eariy films re-vealed some of his talent, but for many critics De
Niros breakthrough perfor-mance came in 1973 when Scorsese cast him in MEAN
STREETS, beginning a life-long collaboration that has spawned a total of eight
films, includine TAxi DRIVER, RAGING BUIL and GOODFELLAS. A year later, Francis
Ford Coppola's THE GODFATHER PART Il turned the 31-year-old De Niro into a
superstar. Despite his huge success on screen, however, De Niro has remained
very secretive about his private life. And yet he remains an object of public
fascination.
Over the last few years he has been concentratine on his own company, TriBeCa
Films, in an attempt to make it the center of New Yorks growing film industry.
And in connection with this, it has been said that he has become less selective
in his recent film roles simply because he is trying to raise capital to finance
his own ventures. Certainly some Of De Niros films have been less than magnificent.
Nevertheless, there have still been triumphs, including Cop LAND, with Sylvestér
Stallone, and ANALYZE THIS, with Billy Crystal. Even in his weaker performances,
De Niro stands head and shoulders above most other actors of his generation.
the Other Side of the Lens
1993 the actor Robert De Niro made his rdirectorial debut with ABRONX TALE, a colourful ltalían-American story based on a plajv by the actor, Chazi Palminteri. He're De Níro meets the press:
Robert De Niro: lt was hard, it's nof like being a... the trade-offl is a
director can direct someone and stand there, say, in a nice warm coat while
the actor is freezing in 20°weather and acting up a storm and sioshing
around in the mud or whatever, and then the director iust asks him to do it
again, you know, "That's very qood, but couid you just like, you know,
just do one more? The actor can take a couple of days off here and t ere and
have a littie break, whereas a director, even on the weekends has to be, say,
working on the editing -I was, at least... and the first to be there, you're
the last to leave, other than the crew that's there before everybody...leaves
after everybody, but you have to be there every day, and you have to be there
every day for pre-production shooting, post-production edit'ing, ali that,
so it's a big, a much longer, consistent process.
At thís point of the intervieni we asked Robert De Níro why he chose the part of the bus driver Lorenzo, rather than the local mafía boss, Sonny:
I did Lorenzo because I thouqht that it was... I had promised Chazz [Palminteri - ed.] that I would... that I would let rìhim do the part of Sonny, so the only other part I could do wóuld be Lorenzo and i wasn't sure if I was going to do it, but then i started thinkinq that maybe I shouid _do it, it'Il help the movie get off and also it would be a good part for me to do because you'd think of me as doing Sonnys part.
Robert De Níro goes on to explain why he had waíted so lo'ng to direct a film:
I wanted to do something, but I sort of would come in and out of wantinq to do it, or maybe finding a book, or this or that or a play, seeing a play, "Let me do this or Jet me try this or see if i can qet t going as a screenplay" 'cause, ultimatele, i felt I wanted to write my own thing and that takes another type of concentration, which i really wasn't able to do. But then I started realizing, as the years went by that l'd better do something. So then, when I heard about the play and I saw it, I didn't make a decision on that until like, a year after 1 saw it. I saw similarities in GOODFELLAs and MEAN STREETS.
There was, of course, a lot of obvious things, for me, say,"Well, why would you want to do that" but I felt that Chazz had done something so specific, that he had done, and it was about his world, his experiences that nobody could take that away from him. I felt I coúld do somethinq with this. And i always-had the idea, if I evér did a movie like this, that I would concentrate on the casting. 1 mean, to me, casting is 80 and 90 percent of it. If you don't have the right people, it'll work as a story, but it won't have that extra special thing that I feel is essential. The thing with the castinq director, I told her fr6m the beginning, lon!ger than a year befóre we started shooting, I said "it's going to be a different type óf situation and that, you know, we can cali tfie agents and we can go see plays, and, you know, do it the traditional way. But the main thing is you qot to hit the streets-and-really find real people and give me choices 'cause I wanna fill these characters. These are great characters and you cannot find... can't have just like, an actor doing it and faking an accent", iust stuff like that - I don't want that. I want it to be real."
mail to became a perfect Taxi Driver