Opposite: Shawl-collar tuxedo, $5,380, BRUNELLO CUCINELLI, 212-627-9202. Dress shirt, $425, RALPH LAUREN PURPLE LABEL, 212-606-2100. The John Drake bow tie, $120, DAVID HART, davidhartnyc.com. Oval cuff links in sterling silver, $250, TIFFANY & CO., tiffany.com. Groomer: Lynda Eichner. Fashion assistant: Julia Chu. Prop stylist: Nick Des Jardins at Mary Howard Studio. Produced by Lauren Alderman at the Production Club. Photographed on location at the Greenwich Hotel.
Irish-American mobster Jimmy Burke depicted in Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy. Burke is believed to have engineered the Lufthansa heist, an infamous robbery at John F. Kennedy Airport. The book and the movie Goodfellas center on Henry Hill, who worked for Burke before turning informant. Hill recalls De Niro relentlessly grilling him about every aspect of Burke’s life. The actor would be “on the fuckin’ phone constantly,” Hill states in a 2006 documentary about his life. “I mean, like fuckin’ seven, eight times a day. He wouldn’t leave his fuckin’ trailer without talking to me twice. ‘How did Jimmy hold his cigarette?’ I thought he was a fuckin’ nut job.”
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n his 90-plus films, Robert De Niro has portrayed a Jesuit missionary, an architect, a soldier in Vietnam, an oncologist, a retired CIA officer and many, many other characters. But he is perhaps most closely associated with organized-crime figures. Asked what people find so compelling about their gory tales, De Niro says, “Well, for me as an actor, they’re all fascinating characters. I did feel with something like The Godfather that the reason it was so popular is that that was a time the country was in a lot of discord. So the family actually had more of a code of ethics than the outside world, which was going crazy with demonstrations and the Vietnam War and all that. It had a finality to it, a code of ‘You did wrong, you paid for it.’ You didn’t, you were rewarded. It was a romantic idea, but there were many truths in essence about what people feel and want to aspire to.” In a way, The Family adheres to a similar code in a thoroughly complicated time. Ultimately, the film is about a marriage and a family that has stuck together through impossibly difficult circumstances, sometimes of their own making. They’re scarred and they’re hardly perfect, but they have survived. In addition to The Family, De Niro has the comedy Last Vegas, in which he stars with Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline, coming out soon. He’s also working on a stage musical version of A Bronx Tale, the first
“You’re like, ‘Damn, how does he do that?’ De niro never forces it.” —Michelle pfeiffer
film he directed. “I probably shouldn’t say that,” he says about the project, “because something always comes up and then it doesn’t happen. But we’ve been working on it, and it’s been going well. It’s coming along.” So De Niro is working as hard as he ever has. No one takes filmmaking more seriously. Who, other than Robert De Niro, could publicly confront Jay-Z at a party for not returning his calls? It seems that Jay had agreed to give De Niro a song for a project and then went missing, despite De Niro’s attempts to contact him. At a birthday party for Leonardo DiCaprio last November, De Niro let the rapper know in no uncertain terms that he was not happy about getting blown off. It was a matter of respect between two Kings of New York, and not something De Niro was going to let pass without speaking his mind. “When I was 17, the head of the dramatic workshop I was in asked me, ‘Why do you want to be an actor?’ ” De Niro recalls. “I said, ‘I just want to be an actor.’ I really didn’t know what acting was. And he said, ‘To express yourself.’ And I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ And that was it.”
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for Goodfellas II—the English title of the Tonino Benacquista novel on which the film is based is Badfellas—will be surprised by the sweetness of De Niro and Pfeiffer’s relationship and the humor, domestic and otherwise, that earns the film its punning title and its billing as a comedy. That tonal complexity is part of what De Niro likes best about The Family. “The movie is, what would you call it? Is it a comedy?” he asks as he leans back on a black couch in his office. “I’m not sure. It kind of reminds me of the Italian comedies. There’s definitely a European feel to it, which is not a surprise from someone like Luc.” Lightness of touch is a central theme in De Niro’s conversation. As for so many artistic masters, his decades of experience haven’t led him to bravura performances but to a quiet internal understanding of how to determine exactly what needs to be done and then doing just that and no more. That approach was evident on the set of The Family, Pfeiffer says. “What is amazing about watching him work when you’re there with him on the set is that it seems like he’s doing so little,” she recalls. “And then you see it on the screen and he just has all of these dimensions that you didn’t pick up on. You’re like, ‘Damn, how does he do that?’ He never forces it. It’s a lesson that all actors can take.” That restraint is essential, De Niro believes, particularly in a film like The Family, where both the violence and the comedy could easily topple into parody. “You can’t do any more than is asked of you to do,” he explains. “There’s a delicate balance of how far to push it and how far to pull back. Not to try to show the feeling and the texture of the scene but to let it happen and unfold and trust that the texture will be there. What the scene is about will come out more easily than you think.” The prospect of directing De Niro was especially enticing for Besson. “I saw Mean Streets and Taxi Driver when I was 15,” the director says, “so to be able to work with Robert was a big privilege for me. At the same time, after a couple of minutes you just have to roll up your sleeves and get to work. What’s the point of having Robert De Niro aboard if you do nothing special with him? He’s a hard worker. He’d be calling me on the phone, asking me questions all the time.” It’s that attention to detail again. He builds his characters from the outside as well as from the inside. Nothing is superf luous; everything is telling, even crucial. He took outward transformation to extremes with Raging Bull, when he gained 60 pounds to play Jake LaMotta in his decline. He could have worn a fat suit, but that was not the way he did things. In fact, it was LaMotta’s weight that first intrigued De Niro and made him want to tell his story. “I ran into Jake LaMotta when I was in my late teens,” he says. “I was going down Broadway and I saw him working as a bouncer in a kind of gentleman’s club. He was heavy.” De Niro holds his hands in front of him to convey LaMotta’s girth. “It was like, ‘Jesus, he was a fighter and now he’s here and he’s so heavy.’ It was just interesting to me, the whole thing.” Jump forward to the mid-1970s, and De Niro was in Italy, shooting 1900 with Bernardo Bertolucci, when he read the memoir co-written by the middleweight champion boxer, called Raging Bull: My Story. “I called Marty and said, ‘You should read this. It’s not a great book, but there’s something about it. It’s got a lot of heart’...I thought maybe I could do it as a play, like a one-man, stand-up play.” Instead, De Niro and Scorsese took a screenplay that Paul Schrader had written and shaped it to their own ends. Scorsese has described making Raging Bull as “kamikaze filmmaking.” “I threw everything into it,” he said, “and if it meant the end of my career, then it would have to be the end of my career.” The film today is considered one of the most powerful ever made and won De Niro the Academy Award for best actor. Ten years later, De Niro played a real-life person from another book, the