HOWZAT

And did the kick-ass legend blub too?

“I did,” he nods. “I did.”

Maybe he’s also happy because his picture is a winner. Far from the brooding, taciturn slave to his craft we presume to know, there were times on set when De Niro couldn’t deliver his lines for laughing at a humour as black as the dye his character slaps in his silvering temples. It wasn’t when the dog gets shot in the head and the camera lens is splattered with blood; no, he agrees with a shake of his head, though that was funny. It wasn’t even when Ben (De Niro) pushes an annoying screenwriter into a mutual friend’s open grave. No, it was the Disney reference that got to him. “The line about Mickey Mouse dousing himself with petrol and setting himself on fire. I was hysterical. I could never say that line straight. It cracked me up every time.”

No wonder he hates Hollywood, the capital of insincerity. De Niro doesn’t just choose to live in his home town, he embodies New York as Gotham’s non-caped crusader, its ambassador and beneficent patron, now more than ever, with his Tribeca development, and the film festival that he launched after 9/11.

“LA,” he says dismissively, “is a company town. In New York there are seasons, there are people on the streets, you can walk around. I can have a life there. People aren’t looking at me all the time.” Of course they are: Art Linson says that when the friends eat out, waitresses look at Bobby while they are taking Art’s order, and De Niro laughs in acknowledgment, or because he has heard the line so often before.

Shot in 30 days, the picture is a chilling account of life (and professional death) in Tinseltown, a place ruled by weekend box-office performances and preview-audience responses. What De Niro brings to the madness and malice isn’t, for once, a storming or spoofy rage, but the audience’s sympathy. Even though Ben has chosen this life and consumed its spoils, you still want to offer him a Valium and a darkened room.

“This is very smart and funny, but it’s a human story,” says De Niro, in his slow, unmistakable New York accent. The unstoppable, seamless, emphatic deliverer of dialogue is impeded in real life with endless “ers” and little coughs and throat-clearings. “It’s funny, but we all know it.”

The presence today of the upbeat raconteur Linson is essentially an exercise in hand-holding. Occasionally he interrupts the bigger cheese on his left, but De Niro never minds or tries to reclaim his place in the conversation. His co-actors may wait on movie sets terrified, reportedly instructed not to speak until he does, or even catch his eye, but to me he seems more shy than intimidating. In his grand, lacklustre suite at the Dorchester he just sits and looks at you, sometimes quite intently, and never says anything dumb or clever. In the past he has bemoaned his inarticulacy, wishing he was like Dustin Hoffman, who can crack jokes and communicate eloquently, but make no mistake, De Niro knows exactly what impact he is having on his movie audience and those lucky or intrepid enough to be in his ambit.

The clothes he has chosen for this rare outing to meet the press are telling: washed and worn polo shirt, nondescript dark trousers and a softly tailored, possibly Armani but lived-in jacket, the clothes of a middle-aged teacher or writer — comforting, unthreatening, soft. We know that De Niro is most particular about his wardrobe; as Al Capone in The Untouchables (1987) he famously ordered sets of silk underwear like the preening hoodlum wore for that authentic swish. For today’s performance he has chosen the garb of the invisible.

The irony of De Niro’s role as the harassed Ben is that he has never been bullied by Hollywood, never been at the mercy of studio heads; he is protected by talent, stature, popularity; in Art Linson’s words, “they can’t do without Bob… the rest of us they see differently”. Linson, who produced De Niro’s movies Heat, This Boy’s Life and The Untouchables, laughs that despite his two outings as a director with

A Bronx Tale (1993) and The Good Shepherd (2006), De Niro has “no idea” of the pressures involved in producing films. Indeed, can he know anything of failure and public humiliation?

De Niro shrugs and mentions something about having a life, implying that his domestic arena is not as garlanded as his professional one. How could it be? Life has certainly happened to the star in between red carpets: he refuses to discuss his personal life, but there have been the myriad complications of love and sex, a fatal attraction to towering black goddesses whose elite ranks Naomi Campbell joined for a spell in 1990, women he never saw fit to finesse into movie stars as some of them expected. Then there have been money-munching settlements: paternity, divorce, alimony and the financing of children — he has a stepdaughter and a 31-year-old son with his first wife, Diahnne Abbott; 13-year-old twin boys with his former girlfriend Toukie Smith, and a 10-year-old son, Elliott, with his wife, the former air hostess Grace Hightower.

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