Robert De Niro stands 12 paces away, preparing to deliver a scene on his latest film, Godsend. He looks fed up to the back teeth. Eyes dance aggressively and hands are clenched and un-clenched several times. I get a tap on the shoulder. “You have been observed,” says one of the film crew, rather edgily. You don’t say. The temperature might be -10C outside, as we’re in the heart of a Canadian winter, but the atmosphere feels a damn sight colder in here. For De Niro, veteran of 70 films, this is a first: a journalist watching him in action.
He looks as if he would sooner see grapefruit-sized hailstones falling, like a pestilence, from the leaden sky where he is filming, a couple of hours’ drive from Toronto. He scowls some more and shakes his head before responding to the call of “Rolling — and action”. So how did this happen? Why is a grizzled De Niro cornered in a house in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by 2ft of snow, with no place to hide? It’s all down to the British director Nick Hamm. If we were at a different time in history, Hamm would be a devil-may-care cavalier. He is a former longtime lover of Catherine Zeta-Jones, is now married to a beautiful scriptwriter, with three sons under the age of seven, and deals with his star actors as he deals with everyone: buoyant and welcoming. He was resident director with the Royal Shakespeare Company for five years and kicked off his film career by winning a Bafta for best short film (The Harmfulness of Tobacco) in 1992. Since then, he has delivered plenty, including two quality films on a shoestring: the romantic comedy Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence, which launched the film career of Joseph Fiennes, and the thriller The Hole, which did the same for Keira Knightley. He has enjoyed enough success to be about as secure, at 45, as any man can be in this insecure, nail-nibbling business — secure enough to invite me along, and hang the consequences.
Godsend is his first big-budget number, about the highly controversial and topical subject of human cloning. He has hired Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos to play a couple who have lost their young son in a car accident and agree to be the subject of a secret cloning experiment to bring him back. But the casting of De Niro, playing a doctor who makes the secret offer and seemingly executes it perfectly, puts the film into another category. It is, like it or not, a De Niro picture.
I had heard all about the on-set workings of De Niro, who is known, rather incongruously, as “Bobby”. He has, despite impressions to the contrary, a sense of humour. He can be playful. He’s not standoffish. Well, this is how it works. When De Niro walks onto the set, there is a respectful silence. All eyes are on him. He shuffles about, a grumpy little figure in an overcoat. He finally remarks: “It’s even colder out there today.” There is instant loud and long laughter. And that’s about it for the rest of the day as regards banter.
But he has achieved, at 60, what many would regard as impossible. He is recognised as one of the great screen actors of his time — and he has been at the top now for 30 years, since being directed by Martin Scorsese in the 1973 film Mean Streets — without uttering a word on his personal life or feelings. I was being reminded as such, with the regularity of a speaking clock, by the poor sap who had to deal with publicity on the film set: “Bobby does not answer personal questions.”
Yet on Godsend, it seems relevant. He has twin sons, Aaron and Julian, born in October 1995, who were conceived in the laboratory. An egg from his former lover, Toukie Smith, from whom he split in 1991, was fertilised by sperm from him, by prior arrangement, then implanted into an unnamed surrogate mother. He then went on to marry Smith’s close friend Grace Hightower in 1997, and has shared the upbringing of his twin sons with Smith in what is described, at best, as a “difficult” arrangement. He already had a son, Raphael, now 26, from his first marriage, to Diahnne Abbott, whom he divorced in 1988. So what on earth was all that about? To bring this up on a film set, when De Niro is in full flow, would be unwise. The veteran film critic and television presenter Barry Norman once recalled that his only meeting with De Niro was the single worst interviewing experience of his life. It went so badly, he thought that at any moment it might turn physical. At least I have interviewed De Niro on two previous occasions, near his home in the TriBeCa area of Manhattan and at the Venice film festival. So far as a relationship with a journalist is concerned, this is as good as it gets.
“I was interested in the subject matter the moment I received the script,” he says. “It is the future. If human cloning is possible, then some people are going to take that option. I did a lot of research.” Did he see any similarities between his own situation and the script? “Not offhand, but I could certainly understand the feelings of these parents.” Was his choice of films ever influenced by anything in his personal life? “Not really, but the story makes sense to me.” How long does he take to make a judgment on whether each film is right for him? “I make decisions that are right at the time.”
As ever, it’s like playing conversational table tennis. Lob one over, it comes straight back. There is a feeling that, in a perverse way, he quite enjoys it. The blue eyes glint away, and he’s like a player who knows he has the best poker hand. His voice is never raised, there is an occasional sigh and pursing of lips, and there is a guarded approach to anything that may spill over to his personal life.
Yet the truth is that life has spilt over into De Niro’s choice of movies. He has strung together the oddest collection in recent years, choosing with almost kneejerk rapidity. The reason, I am told, is that his outgoings for shared children and alimony are enormous, and finances need to be replenished constantly. He shares custody with his second wife, Hightower (from whom he is now divorced), of their six-year-old son, Elliott. In a 2001 court case, De Niro accused her of being an unsuitable mother, citing a physical attack during a holiday in Florida. Hightower, in turn, claimed that the star’s drug use made him an unfit father. A New York judge ruled that De Niro should seek psychiatric help.
The on-screen result is that he desperately needs a big hit. His previous one was four years ago, the comedy Meet the Parents. His most recent work of note was arguably the 1997 film Wag the Dog, with Dustin Hoffman. Since then, he has been in 13 films, before taking on Godsend. Critics have lambasted him for it. His performance in 2002’s City by the Sea was described as “watching a Swiss watchsmith working on a faulty Timex”. His 2001 offering, 15 Minutes, was dubbed “sourly stupid”. There have also been the knockabout Analyze This (1999) and Analyze That (2002). It all seems a long way from the kind of blistering performances he was delivering in 1995 in Heat and Casino, a reminder of his eminence and power. ()
He dismisses the criticism. “The media is like a big dinosaur with a tail that swings back and forth,” he says. “It indiscriminately knocks things over, and it knocks the good with the bad. That is part of the freedom of the press. So what are you going to do?” He also insists that the way he chooses a movie has not changed. “Can I do something with the script?” he says. “Will I like working with the director? Has he done good work in the past? The selection is really straightforward.”
Hamm was apparently left in no doubt as to how the system worked. As an experienced director, he normally does the choosing. Not this time. “There was one very tense weekend during which I had to go to New York and meet Mr De Niro for the first time,” he relates. “If he likes me, I’m in. If he doesn’t, there’s no movie. I met him for coffee in one of his restaurants for about an hour. He then asked to see my previous movies, so I had those sent to him. I had the go-ahead a few hours later.”
So, De Niro calls the shots, and he uses his reputation like a shield. “I like to keep some people at a distance,” he tells me. “And maybe people treat me with a bit too much reverence. It goes away after a while, of course. It cannot sustain itself for too long if you’re working with people. You think it’s possible to work with someone like Billy Crystal without laughter? It’s not. It was the same with Robin Williams. These guys just start up from nowhere and begin kidding around between takes. I like having fun on a film set, but some people think I always take it deadly seriously. I had some great times with Ken Branagh on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), particularly when my char-acter of the Creature had to roll around on the floor. We used gallons of K-Y jelly and I could hardly focus. We just fell about laughing. ” ()
De Niro lets out a thin smile at the recollection. “I just wish I had the talent to talk, like they do, away from the film set. Look at Dustin Hoffman. I always envy the way he can speak and be smart and funny and so on. I just can’t do that.” He does give the vaguest impression that he would probably like to reveal more about his 40-year film career, going back to an uncredited and nonspeaking role as a diner in the 1965 film Three Rooms in Manhattan. But he insists that he simply can’t remember much detail. “People have asked me, ‘How did you feel when you did this or that scene?’, and I have difficulty in recalling the scene, let alone how I felt about it,” he says. “I remember one guy asking me what I was thinking about in a sad scene in Sleepers (1996), in which I played a priest. I told him, ‘Maybe I was wondering what time lunch would be.’ I just did not have the first idea.”
No actor has changed his shape and appearance so often, or researched more diligently. He famously put on 60lb to play the boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (1980), which won him a best-actor Oscar. He spent a month in Sicily before playing Vito Corleone in The Godfather: Part II (1974), which won him his first Oscar for best supporting actor. He trained for eight months to get his body fat down to just 3% for his role as the multi- tattooed Max Cady in Cape Fear (1991). This marked his last Oscar nomination for best actor.
Yet away from acting, stripped of the weight, the costumes, the tattoos, the differing hairstyles, beards and variety of accents, De Niro succeeds in maintaining much of his life like the Godsend film set: ice cold. “Things,” he says, with a knowing wink, “are never quite what they seem.”
Godsend is released on July 2
