At 67, Robert De Niro is showing signs of mellowing. The two-time Oscar winner has a reputation for being famously uncommunicative with the media — particularly if a reporter’s question is in any way personal.
So at a recent news conference on behalf of his unusual new thriller, Limitless, in which he plays a Wall Street mogul, you’re ready for De Niro to clam up when a reporter boldly wants to know what makes him happy. But De Niro surprises us. He says he wants to think about the question — and that’s a promising sign. He lets seatmate Neil Burger, director of the film opening
March 18, answer another question while he ponders his answer. Then finally De Niro is ready — sort of.
“Oh god!” he exclaims with a smile of apology. “You know — now that you’ve given me time to think about it — I can’t answer that question.”
Please understand that even to say that much is an advance over bygone days when an ill-at-ease De Niro would respond with a terse “no comment.” But today, he’s going out of his way to oblige. Having first said that he can’t say what makes him happy, he forges ahead and tries to answer the question anyway.
“I have a lot of things that make me happy. Some don’t. I have my ups and downs. I have children. I have family. I have a lot of things — so you, you know, one day I’m happy with some parts of it, and other days I’m not. It’s OK. I can’t really complain.” That’s saying a mouthful.
In the past, De Niro’s favourite strategy for dealing with the media was to share a news conference with a talkative director — someone like the notoriously garrulous Martin Scorsese — so he could say as little as possible.
Two factors have probably been at work here. One is his determination to keep his private life private. The other is his own belief that he’s not especially interesting, and that he’s not good at articulating how he practises his craft.
After all, this is a guy who once compared himself unfavourably with Dustin Hoffman.
“I always envy the way he can speak and be smart and funny and so on. I just can’t do that.”
Even so, he’s making a pretty good stab at it today. De Niro may be craggy-faced, his shock of hair may be iron-grey, and that sagging cotton jacket may exude rumpled comfort more than any kind of fashion statement, but the star power remains.
Furthermore, he continues to be surprisingly talkative — to the point of revealing to reporters that he and Scorsese, the director who has done more for De Niro’s career than any other filmmaker, are finally going to make another movie together.
That’s big news indeed. Their names were once irretrievably linked because of Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. But they have not worked together on a major feature since Casino, 16 years ago. Now, that’s going to change: De Niro will work with Scorsese again.
“I’m planning on it, absolutely, yeah. It’s a movie based on a book about a guy who — and I believe the book — has now passed away, but he confessed that he killed Hoffa.”
The book in question is I Heard You Paint Houses, the autobiography of mobster Frank “The Irishman” Sheehan, who claimed that he dispatched notorious teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa with two bullets and also murdered fellow gangster Crazy Joe Gallo.
“I’m going to play that character [Sheehan],” De Niro says. “Joe Pesci’s going to be in it, Al Pacino’s going to be in it, and Marty’s going to direct it. We’re really working toward making it happen. I’d never say it if we didn’t fully have us all committed.”
Meanwhile, with Limitless, which is written by Leslie Dixon, De Niro is reminding us that he doesn’t only play underworld figures. In the movie, he plays financial tycoon Carl Van Loon, a shrewd Wall Street manipulator who finds himself engaged in a battle of wits with Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper), a once feckless guy whose life has been transformed by a top-secret drug called NZT, which gives him the sort of unlimited brain power that allows him to complete a brilliant book in days, and parlay a small financial investment into millions.
As it turns out, there’s a downside to Eddie’s new existence. The drug has some nasty side effects. Furthermore, he’s attracted the attention of some murderous thugs who will do anything to get their hands on his stash. All this is happening at the same time as Eddie is trying to help Van Loon broker a huge corporate merger.
De Niro amiably disagrees with one journalist’s suggestion that this role wasn’t much of a challenge for him.
“You know, it’s not that it’s not challenging. It is. I enjoyed doing it, and I wanted to work with Bradley and Neil. I’d liked one of Neil’s other films, so sometimes — even though it’s not perfect — you do it to work with certain people so you can work with them again later on. You establish a relationship. And to me, it was worth it. Leslie did a very good job; it was good for me and it was well-written, as I say. And I put a lot of work into it.”
So was it more demanding than his recent role in Little Fockers? Some critics have suggested that De Niro was wasting his talent in that movie, but he doesn’t take offence at the question.
“Well, that’s a whole other thing,” he smiles. “That’s a whole other animal, if you will.”
In the case of Limitless, he was happy not to have to carry the movie. “It was like, nine days, or something like that. And that’s OK.”
Van Loon intrigued him. “He’s different from other characters I’ve played. He’s a legitimate businessman — or as legitimate as whatever. I’m sure he’s done things which are not so savory, as he sort of says and intimates.”
Co-star Cooper has worshipped De Niro since he was a kid, and worried about being intimidated on set. But De Niro doesn’t consider the “intimidation” factor to be any big deal when he works with younger actors.
“That goes away in a couple of days, if not sooner,” he says. On the other hand, if another actor does feel intimated, De Niro will not hesitate to take advantage of the situation if it’s to the movie’s advantage.
“Any kind of that stuff you should use,” he says firmly. “Any actor will use such a situation if it helps the interaction with another character.”
Limitless opens March 18.
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