１００９：Robert De Niro Approach

２００９年のデ二―ロのインタビューを見たので記録しておく。コンサルも徹底した調査という気概が必要だ。名優の語る英語もいいもんですね。主題のような造語まで使われるほどの徹底ぶりは凄い。

Robert De Niro interview: 'Everybody's Fine' star shares what he's learned in 40 years on film


NEW YORK — He’s talking to me?

Robert De Niro is sitting on a couch, CNN mumbling on the hotel TV in the background, doing the one thing the famously press-shy star almost never does: answering questions about himself.

"It’s easier now," he says of the interview grind and gives a trademark wince-and-shrug. "You know, time goes on."

Time does, indeed – it was 12 years ago that I last spoke to De Niro, right before "Wag the Dog." And things do seem to have gotten easier for the 66-year-old actor.

In fact, he seems happy to talk today, although his legendarily long pauses and nonverbal responses are still in evidence (What’s journalism hell? Interviewing De Niro — for radio).

Then again, today he has something to talk about.

Although the last decade has had a few career highlights for him — sharing on-screen time with Marlon Brando in "The Score," directing "The Good Shepherd" — it’s also been a lot of comedies, a couple of horror films. There hasn’t been too much, frankly, worth discussing.

"Everybody’s Fine" is different.

A reworking of the 1990 Italian film, the comedy-drama — which opens Friday — is the story of a recently widowed retiree who realizes that it was his wife who bound the family together. So he gets on a Greyhound and hits the road — in hopes of reconnecting with his four, far-flung children.

"I related to Frank, obviously, and drew on my own experiences," says De Niro, in a casual-dad uniform of polo shirt and blue blazer. "You draw on whatever’s relevant to the part you’re playing; it makes it more personal. And there was a lot here. I have five children, two grandchildren."

Definitive roles

He also had a new problem to figure out — rarer to find, these days, after so many roles. This time he had to play a held-down, buttoned-up character, and find a way to communicate this decent-but-dull dad’s distance from his equally noncommunicative children.

"That was more of a challenge," he says. "Those parts, they are more difficult because you have to have the feeling, the intensity — but you’re holding it in, you have to keep it contained. It’s easier, a part where you can express it, because the performance is aided by the bigness of it. Like the Italian parts, which can be very big."


It was those "Italian parts," as De Niro calls them — the young Don Corleone in "The Godfather, Part II" (which he performed in Sicilian), the combative Jake LaMotta of "Raging Bull" (for which he gained a staggering 70 pounds) — that won him his two Oscars and his status as America’s leading film actor.

But there have been other roles along the way. The doomed ballplayer in "Bang the Drum Slowly" and the furious father in "This Boy’s Life." The terrifying Capone in "The Untouchables" and the stalwart soldier of "The Deer Hunter." The surprising comical foils of "Meet the Fockers," "Midnight Run" and "Analyze This."

And, of course, the lifelong collaboration with Scorsese — "Mean Streets," "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," "New York, New York," "The King of Comedy," "Goodfellas," "Cape Fear." "Casino." And although there’s been a long hiatus, De Niro says they’re not done yet.

"We’re working on a couple of things," he says. "One of them, it’s from an idea we first had 20 years ago. So, you know, that’s how long it takes sometimes to get things right, to find a time to do it."

Like Scorsese, De Niro grew up in New York’s downtown. His parents, who separated early, were serious (if not particularly well-compensated) artists; their son was a pale kid – "Bobby Milk," in the hood — with a little too much time on his hands and a little too much mischief in his heart.

"I was raised pretty easily," he admits. "My grandfather was more strict, more old-school Italian."

But eventually De Niro — who remembers his first acting job as the Cowardly Lion in a school play — began to spend less time on the street corner and more time on the stage.

"I started taking it seriously, I guess when I was a teenager," he says. "I started studying, going to acting class and stuff — there never was anything else I wanted to do. And soon, you know, I’d get parts, I’d read for things, I’d do things one after another. I was lucky . . . I really was."

His first acting hero was, of course, Brando.

"All actors my age love him," he says. "He was, I think Jack Nicholson said, ‘a force onto himself.’ He was in his own orbit. But my other favorites were Montgomery Clift, James Dean. Spencer Tracy, too. Walter Huston. Greta Garbo . . ."

Scorsese connection

The first director to see
De Niro’s spark was Brian De Palma, who cast the actor in two dark, countercultural comedies, "Greetings" and "Hi, Mom!" They’re not well known today — which may be one reason so many fans were shocked in the ’90s, when
De Niro started doing farces. But the actor’s always liked the change off.

"It’s a different kind of thing in comedy," he says. "You feel like you have a little more freedom or leeway to stretch it. You can put more emphasis on things that you normally wouldn’t, where you’d be going over a line.

"This film, ‘Everything’s Fine,’ it’s more of a dramedy. But something like ‘Meet the Fockers.’ it’s not real, in a sense it’s kind of surreal — it’s a comment on real life, instead of being real life. You can kick it up a bit."

Of course it was Scorsese who added unpredictable danger to the sharp humor by casting De Niro as Johnny Boy in "Mean Streets" in 1973; the two quickly fell into a friendship, and a rhythm, that hasn’t slackened yet. (In fact, De Niro was supposed to play the Martin Sheen part in "The Departed," but had to bow out when his own film, "The Good Shepherd," ended up taking too much of his time.)

"Marty and I have a couple of projects that we want to do and we will, hopefully," De Niro says. "One is based on this book, ‘I Heard You Paint Houses’ (about a hitman). And we have this other, more ambitious idea, about reflecting on the past, and using footage from a different movie — it’s a very complicated thing, I don’t know if we’ll be able to do that, or combine that thing with this other thing, but I’m intrigued by it."

Students of acting were always intrigued by De Niro’s approach which — long before Daniel Day-Lewis or Christian Bale — took acting into a new realm of reality. To truly live the experience on- screen,
De Niro felt he had to have lived it off-screen, first — so, depending on the part, he drove a cab, learned the sax, even had a few middleweight bouts.

Scared more than a few people, too. But De Niro, who jokes about his edgy, intimidating persona — "I play off that, make fun of it in certain movies" — says that’s all it ever was, an image.

"You don’t take it with you," he says. "If it’s a very emotional scene, you’re kind of relieved when you’ve done it, kind of spent. And there are times when you can be rattled, certain characters if they’re hyper, that can carry over, the residue of that. But I try to leave it on the set. It’s funny, because I think of the story about the actor coming home and forgetting that he’s home — what is that? He’s doing a play?"

"A Double Life," I say. Where Ronald Colman starts to think he is Othello, instead of just playing him.

"Yeah, yeah, I thought that was an interesting idea, if you could get it right," De Niro says. "That’s a movie I talked about it with Marty, we dabbled with that, looked at doing that for a while somehow. But we could never quite get it."

More, with less

What De Niro has gotten, over the years, is a new appreciation for minimalism.

He’s spent most of the last part of his career trying to pare down performances to the essentials. If the material isn’t quite there, of course, it can look as if he’s just walking through things. But when he has a good script behind him — as in "Casino," as in "Everybody’s Fine"— he can fit an entire speech into a stare.

"I think you learn to be more economical," he says. "It depends on the part, but in general, I think you learn to do less. I always go back to how people behave. If you watch how people actually behave in a situation, it’s very simple and honest and contained. You don’t need to use as much expression, as much feeling. Some characters will boil over, and that’s another thing, but a lot of times I think you can just do very, very little."

Professionally, of course, De Niro has done a lot. His career is so long and varied, he’s worked with Elia Kazan and Quentin Tarantino, done "Bullwinkle" and Bertolucci, hit the ’70s trifecta of
De Palma, Scorsese and Coppola. He’s made more than 75 films — more than 20 in the past decade. And while he will receive the Kennedy Center Honors this year, there are no signs of retirement.

"Yeah, yeah, I don’t think about that," he says with a smile. "I just hope, you know, I go out with a little dignity."

His personal life has been busy, too. He married again, for the second time, in 1997; he has extensive real-estate holdings and businesses throughout downtown New York; he oversees a busy production company: and continues to promote his annual Tribeca Film Festival.

Not that there haven’t been the occasional dustups. His festival has been criticized for being more interested in civic boosterism than cinema; many of his recent films have been panned. And a move to award him Italian citizenship was protested by some Italian-Americans, decrying his Mafioso parts (Italy went ahead anyway; De Niro is now a registered voter in Molise, the home region of his great-grandparents).

"The celebrity stuff, the photographs, the TMZ thing, I don’t know," he says about the tabloids and the gossip sites. "It’s kind of, you know, it’s a cruel world out there, and you just have to watch yourself. People are going to do what they do for themselves, and they have their reasons. It’s not for me to ask why. But you can’t get caught up by that stuff."

Our time is up. An assistant enters. De Niro asks her to get him a double espresso, with milk and extra sugars. To go.

"You know, it’s interesting ..." he starts. "Well, I don’t know if you’d call it interesting, it is what it is. But time goes on, you know, and suddenly 40 years have passed. When I was younger, I’d say, you know, one day I’m going to be over there. So I had things that I was very focused on doing, that I wanted to do right then. And now suddenly it’s 40 years later, you know? So that’s an interesting thing, I think. Time goes on. So whatever you’re going to do, do it. Do it now. Don’t wait."

Are you listening? He’s talkin’ to us.