In his new film, The Good Shepherd, in a small but terrific cameo, De Niro plays a double leg amputee. It comes as a great relief, on meeting him, that the dear chap is doddering about on his own two pins — though it could be further evidence critics might present to prove that the old growler isn’t taking his craft quite as seriously as he used to.
Is it his purported ability to “become” other people that petrifies everyone so — with those around him unsure as to how much of Jake La Motta, Travis Bickle or mad Max Cady might yet be coursing through his thespian arteries? Perhaps it’s just that he always looks so monumentally cheesed off: the awkward mien, that downturned mouth, the fearsome mole and, no kidding, the blackest eyes you’ve ever seen.
De Niro’s discomfort has been central to his media dealings. If, famously, he spoke a mere eight words of English in The Godfather: Part II, then the odd press conference has yielded little more. With no role to hide behind, the actor is notorious for staring at the carpet, fumbling painfully for some monosyllabic answer while onlookers grin inanely. In one of his few significant magazine interviews of the past decade (in American Esquire), so unforthcoming was he that the journalist tiptoed away early, leaving a morose De Niro alone with his thoughts.
There are signs he might be loosening up. At 63, two years short of a bus pass and with a successful battle against prostate cancer behind him, De Niro, it is said, is slipping into his dotage like it’s a nice warm bath. In 2004, the old softie even renewed his marriage vows to his second wife, Grace Hightower, putting to bed a rather turbulent love life. And there are the films. Not for your 21st-century multiplex-goer the burning presence of his 1970s heyday, but the pantomime baddie of Analyze This/That, Meet the Parents/Fockers, a voice in Shark Tale, the bloke from Extras.
“He prefers it if you call him Bob,” whispers a PR woman as I am ushered in for a rare one-on-one. Whether this is a fostering of informality or an instruction is not exactly clear. Outside the Manhattan hotel window, way below, the sirens wail, the yellow cabs honk, steam billows from around the manholes. All that’s needed is Bernard Herrmann’s discordant brass. But it is otherwise unremarkable. You simply go in, shake hands and, soon, the Greatest Actor of his Generation (it should come with a ™ sign) is ushering you to a sofa. Dressed in a brown suit, his grey hair tousled, he appears in good health, if a little deflated — quite literally, for, slumping uncomfortably in an armchair, shoulders hunched, he looks as if he could do with a bit of air pumping into him. It’s easy to forget that he is 27 years on from the hard-bodied middleweight of the early Jake La Motta, 16 from the sinewy jailbird Cady.
I wonder, in the first instance, whether it gets tiresome, all those awestruck people with the fixed, silly expressions? “I don’t know especially, er, I . . . I don’t know,” he goes. Uh-oh. The eyes dart. They look down. They look up. The voice is gruff, pure Gotham. “Yeah [a shrug], I guess so, yeah.” One gets the impression interviews aren’t his favourite thing? “Well, it’s . . . sometimes it’s okay — whatever,” he says, shrugging again, a little more conspiratorially. “I think sometimes I’d rather just let the movie explain itself.”
De Niro’s latest is The Good Shepherd, a film he can’t really duck (“No, I can’t,” he concurs), for he not only appears in it, but directs it. A dense, lush epic about the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, it stars Matt Damon as Edward Wilson, a factionalised version of the CIA chief James Angleton — a Clark Kent-ish bureaucrat who transformed the agency from a cabal of pre-second world war dilettantes into a team of hard-nosed cold warriors, the shapers of American foreign policy. Significantly, it is De Niro’s first time behind the camera since his directing debut, A Bronx Tale, in 1993 — a film that seemed to promise a profitable alternative career. “Well, I was working on this for about seven, eight years, and I was also acting in movies,” he purrs. No point in beating about the bush. “And I never had anything that interested me that much.”
The great American/Soviet standoff was the era he grew up in, he explains. “I was interested in intelligence. I thought, well, it would be great if I could do a story about this world.” The end result, a $100m epic, with Angelina Jolie on board and character-actor stalwarts populating every nook and cranny (Michael Gambon, William Hurt, Alec Baldwin, old mucker Joe Pesci, even our own dear John Sessions, a long, long way from Jackanory), marks a return to the sort of heavyweight project De Niro is most associated with, but has not worked on since, what: Heat (1995)? Ronin (1998)? (Don’t mention The Score.)
Strange, now, how nobody would touch the project for so long. “I didn’t know if the movie would ever get made,” he says. “I was having to hold it together myself, putting my money in.” The screenplay, by Eric Roth (Munich, The Insider), had been hailed for a decade as one of Hollywood’s “best unproduced scripts”. But along comes 9/11, and the CIA, beloved bad guys of Oliver Stone, shadowy architects of the new world order, are now the new boy scouts, heroic guarantors of US liberty. Even an old pinko such as De Niro defends some of the agency’s more unsavoury tactics, shown in the film in all their glory. “It happened, and that’s what it is,” he says. “I’d call myself a patriot.”
You still can’t fault De Niro for detail. He tooled around Afghanistan and Pakistan, speaking with field operatives; he hung out with former adversaries from behind the iron curtain. “We were in Moscow, in a KGB sporting-club sauna, with a bunch of KGB generals,” says Milton Bearden, the film’s veteran CIA adviser. “I looked at Bob and said, ‘I think you know as much about this stuff as I do.’ ” With its codes of honour, secrecy and enthusiastic wasting of stool pigeons, the CIA comes over, curiously, like the mob (“Never rat on a friend; always keep your mouth shut,” as De Niro’s Jimmy Conway put it in GoodFellas). “You know, there’s a load of similarities,” De Niro agrees. The director of The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola, executive-produces.
As ever with De Niro, you just can’t escape the whole Italian-American thing, something exploited mercilessly over the years, which he parodied, quite mischievously, in Analyze This/That. But it, too, is part of the mythology. Though he was indeed close to his paternal grandfather, who hailed from Ferrazzano, De Niro is largely of Irish descent, enough to prevent him from becoming a “made man” — as it did Jimmy Conway. Born to the artists Robert De Niro Sr and Virginia Admiral, Junior grew up in the bohemian confines of Greenwich Village. Despite a brief foray into gang life, where the pale, thin youth was known as “Bobby Milk”, his intentions were always artistic. “I wanted to act,” he says. “I’d see people in movies and stuff . . . When I got into it more seriously, it was a different thing. Then I wanted to do something with it. Then it got more complex and more interesting.”
He studied Stanislavsky and the method under Stella Adler, did some theatre work and low-budget movies, and got his first rave notices aged 30, as the dying baseball player in 1973’s Bang the Drum Slowly. Meanwhile, his old buddy Martin Scorsese had been developing as a director. When he cast De Niro as the wayward hood Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, released that same year, it marked a union — Taxi Driver; New York, New York; Raging Bull; The King of Comedy; GoodFellas; Cape Fear; Casino — that would seal De Niro as a screen icon.
