De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  On December 1, he went into Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital, Manhattan’s premier cancer treatment facility, to have surgery to remove the cancerous tissue; there were no complications of any significance, and his recovery went well. And by late January, he began production on Hide and Seek.

  In October 2006, long after the shoot had wrapped, Fireman’s Fund sued De Niro for fraud and misrepresentation, claiming that he had bent the facts when he was examined on October 13 of the previous year and declared that he had never had cancer and had never been treated for prostate illness—both true on the day. The case went to trial, and in March 2008 a California court found in De Niro’s favor, a decision upheld by the Court of Appeals of California in June 2009.

  That was a gratifying result, though not nearly as gratifying, of course, as being free of a disease the fear of which had loomed over him for so long. And there was another positive outcome: during the time of his treatment, the person whom he could most rely on and who looked most vigilantly after him turned out to be his wife, Grace Hightower, who just a year or two before had been living apart from him and trading barbs with him in court and in gossip columns.

  Somehow, despite the acrimony and the court visits and the splashy tabloid headlines of just a few years prior, the problems between them vanished. Not right away, not in so public a forum as their quarrels and split had been afforded. But by the summer of 2003, Hightower and Elliot were once again living in Tribeca with De Niro, she helped stage his sixtieth-birthday party at Le Cirque, and they traveled to Montecatini, Italy, where they were feted by restaurateur Sirio Maccioni at a gala dinner at which Andrea Bocelli sang.

  Perhaps it was the counseling in which they took part, per the judge’s orders. Or perhaps it was the growing recognition that Elliot was facing challenges greater than those that caused friction between his parents. Although no diagnosis would ever be made public, De Niro would occasionally allude to having a child who suffered from an emotional disorder, a description that didn’t fit either the oldest kids, Drena and Raphael, who were adults embarking upon independent lives and careers, or the twins, who were attending school along with their peers.

  Whatever the reason, the reunited couple seemed determined to make it last. In November 2004 they renewed their vows in a civil ceremony on the grounds of the farmhouse De Niro owned in Ulster County in the Hudson Valley. This time it was a bash, with 150 guests including Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, Harvey Keitel, Chazz Palminteri, Tom Brokaw, Ben Stiller, and all of De Niro’s children. Guests gathered around an indoor pool while two justices of the peace (“So they can make sure this one sticks,” De Niro joked) supervised an exchange of rings. A meal from Nobu, a raspberry napoleon cake baked by Daniel Boulud, and cases of Veuve Clicquot were served, and the newly recommitted couple danced to Tina Turner’s rendition of “Simply the Best.”

  IN 2002, he made two pictures. Analyze That, the sequel to the 1999 film that changed his life and career, was another milestone for him: a $20 million payday. But it was a film that nobody involved with it seemed to want to make. “I don’t know if I hoped it would go away or I thought it would go away,” writer-director Harold Ramis said when it was released. As Ramis explained, De Niro was relatively enthusiastic to revisit the big hit, Billy Crystal was “reserved,” and he himself was “skeptical … When I go to the movies, and when I feel people are just flogging the franchise, I resent it.” (As proof, Ramis and his collaborators had, in fact, successfully resisted the pressure to make a third Ghostbusters film for more than a decade.)

  Even with De Niro’s salary more than doubling since the first film, when he was paid $8 million, Analyze That was made for a lower budget, $60 million compared to $80 million. All the more disappointing, then, that it should make only $32 million total, compared to the previous film’s $107 million. It didn’t help that the reviews were almost universally (and deservedly) condemnatory. But such notices didn’t always put audiences off. Rather, it seemed as if moviegoers were beginning to smell out the quality of De Niro’s recent films before they were released.

  His next picture didn’t reverse the trend: Godsend, a sci-fi-ish thriller about human cloning shot for approximately $25 million in the fall of 2002 by director Nick Hamm. De Niro’s role was tiny—how else, at this point, could the budget stay so low?—and so was the film’s impact: it earned back only $14.4 million when it was released in the spring of 2004.

  That delay, in fact, meant that in 2003, despite all of the energy he was putting into work, De Niro failed to appear in a new release in North American theaters—the first time since 1982. He worked that year: he provided a voice for Shark Tale, an animated movie that combined Finding Nemo with The Godfather, and he appeared, even more randomly, as the Archbishop of Peru in an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey that was shot in Spain and also featured Harvey Keitel, F. Murray Abraham, Kathy Bates, Geraldine Chaplin, and Gabriel Byrne.*2 Both pictures surfaced in American theaters long after they were shot: Shark Tale to robust business in October 2004 (with a gross of $161 million, it would be the third-largest box office in De Niro’s career), San Luis Rey to puzzlement, obscurity, and $42,880 in ticket sales in June 2005.

  IF IT SOUNDS crass to think so much about the cost and earnings of these films, it at least provides some sort of context to explain why they were made. And no film would prove that point more obviously than Meet the Fockers, his second sequel to hit multiplexes at Christmastime in two years. As with Analyze That, he would command a $20 million fee and Tribeca Productions would be involved in the creation and the profits. But whereas Analyze That churned over old ground tiresomely, Meet the Fockers was enlivened by the addition of Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman to the comic mix, which turned out to be a canny choice. Playing the parents of Ben Stiller’s Gaylord/Greg, the pair were sex-mad, drug-friendly hippies utterly unlike either their son or his in-laws. De Niro would be asked to do the same things, more or less, as in the first picture, but the context would be significantly wilder.

  There were several iterations of the script, including one by David O. Russell, the indie auteur whose Flirting with Disaster with Stiller had been a smart, if small, hit. But, really, none of that mattered. De Niro had almost nothing to do except show up on the Los Angeles sets, play happily with Hoffman and Stiller, and think about other projects. Fockers was an even bigger hit than the original, claiming the top slot in the box office charts for three weeks compared to Meet the Parents’s four (a result of being released in the competitive Christmas season), but grossing $279 million in North America and $237 million abroad—nearly double the first film’s earnings and easily the top-grossing film in De Niro’s career.

  Meet the Fockers was still holding its own at the box office in January when the delayed Hide and Seek debuted in the number one spot at the American box office. Another potboiler made by another little-known name (the Australian actor-turned-director John Polson), it echoed The Shining and The Sixth Sense in depicting a fractured man (a widower, De Niro) living in isolation with a child (his daughter, played by Dakota Fanning) with apparent extrasensory knowledge of some horrible secret. The reviews, as they seemed to be for all of De Niro’s films now, were dismissive. But the film was a hit, grossing $51 million against its $25 million budget. When it finally dropped out of the box office top ten, the same week that Meet the Fockers did, De Niro had completed the most commercially successful two months of his career. Did it matter what anyone actually thought of the films and his work in them?

  * * *

  *1 Some years later, the Tribeca Film Festival expanded well beyond walking distance of the Tribeca Film Center and Ground Zero. From 2009 to 2012, in partnership with the Qatar Museums Authority and the Doha Film Institute, there was a Doha Tribeca Film Festival, an effort to bridge the cultures of the Arab and Western worlds across the rupture that was defined in part by the September 11 attacks. The festival proved sufficiently successful that Tribeca pulled out of it in 2013
, satisfied that it had helped launch a sustainable event that would continue to grow and to encourage filmmaking in the region.

  *2 Marking, by the way, his first role as a pre-twentieth-century character since Frankenstein and, with The Mission, only his third ever.

  IT SEEMED LIKE A NICE BIT OF PUBLICITY WHEN THE ITALIAN government decided to bestow honorary citizenship on a couple of notables of Italian American descent: Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, two demi-sons of Italy who would be at the Venice Film Festival in August 2004 to present Shark Tale, the tongue-in-cheek animated movie about a blood feud between denizens of the deep, with De Niro and Scorsese providing the voices of Mafia-esque fishies.

  But when the announcement was made before the festival, an outcry arose in the United States, where a heritage group known as the Order of the Sons of Italy objected to De Niro’s career of portraying mobsters and belittling Italian Americans. “He has done nothing to promote the image of Italians,” their spokesperson said, “and he has actually damaged their image by constantly playing criminal roles which tarnish the reputation of Italians.” A De Niro spokesman immediately retorted by pointing out that “Robert De Niro has portrayed men of many nationalities. He has portrayed doctors, policemen, bus drivers, presidential advisors, CIA agents, prize fighters, military men and priests. That’s what actors do—portray other people. He has brought nothing but pride and credit to his life, his profession, and his heritage. To suggest otherwise is irresponsible.”

  It was a silly spat—like housewives swinging handbags at one another in a Monty Python sketch—but it made for lurid headlines and genuinely hurt feelings. Italian authorities promised to take the protest seriously and look into the question more carefully, leading them to delay awarding De Niro his citizenship. De Niro defended himself personally in Venice: “The characters I play are real. They are real. So they have as much right to be portrayed as any other characters.” But he felt sufficiently slighted by the whole business to skip a press event in Rome meant to celebrate a showcase of Italian movies at the Tribeca Film Festival, and he was a no-show at a film festival in Milan where he was to be awarded the city’s highest civilian honor, the Gold Medal of St. Ambrose. It would be a full year before the wounds from this absurd slapfight fully healed.

  MAYBE IT WAS because he was a secretive fellow at heart, but even though he might be the last actor in the world you could imagine starring in a spy story, De Niro had a fascination with the genre. Among the projects that seemed always to be simmering on a back burner at Tribeca Productions was an idea he had to make a film about the Cold War. When he visited Russia in 1997 to receive an award from the Moscow Film Festival, he arranged to stop by a former KGB social club and chat with some former agents in the sauna, just to size them up (one fellow half-jokingly challenged him to a boxing match, being as he was the star of Raging Bull and all, ha ha ha).

  In 1997, when he was in France working for John Frankenheimer on Ronin—playing a spy for the first time in his career—he learned that there was already a well-regarded script about the CIA during the Cold War kicking around and that Frankenheimer was on board to direct it. Was he interested in maybe appearing in it? Yes; yes, he was.

  The script, eventually known as The Good Shepherd, had been written by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) for Francis Coppola, who found himself unable to pursue it. Director Wayne Wang briefly circled it with the intention of having Tom Cruise play the lead character, a man who joins the CIA after attending Yale and is involved in much of the clandestine spy-vs.-spy activity between World War II and the Bay of Pigs. That iteration of the film vanished, too, as did one with Philip Kaufman attached to direct. Then it fell to Frankenheimer.

  Not long after, though, De Niro was in talks not to star in the film but to direct it. He even made a gentleman’s agreement with Eric Roth, stating that if he got Good Shepherd made, then Roth would write a sequel, bringing the story forward from the 1960s to the present day. By the fall of 1999, talk of De Niro directing the film had gotten serious enough that the conversation turned to whom he would cast in the lead, as De Niro himself was clearly too old to play a Yale undergrad. In February 2000, De Niro held a table reading of Roth’s script in New York, with Jude Law taking the lead and Winona Ryder, John Turturro, Christopher Plummer, Jake Gyllenhaal, Martin Scorsese, and De Niro himself reading along. Law never quite said yes, and in 2002 talk bubbled up that had Leonardo DiCaprio in the role. On the strength of that bit of casting, several financiers appeared ready to go through with funding the film’s estimated $110 million budget.

  DiCaprio, though, was proving trigger shy, with a strong commitment to Martin Scorsese to make The Aviator and a plan to follow up immediately with Scorsese’s The Departed. De Niro grew frustrated with the young actor: “I said one night, ‘You have to let me know now. Are you in or are you out?’ ” The combination of DiCaprio’s time constraints and salary demands ultimately swamped the tenuous deal to make The Good Shepherd, and in November 2004 the film seemed to have been scuttled, with producer Graham King declaring, “I’d love to make this movie. It’s one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. But you can’t make this movie for any less than we have budgeted for. I certainly wouldn’t disrespect Bob by getting him to cut the budget.”

  But a lifeline came in the form of DiCaprio’s Departed co-star, Matt Damon, who (1) also loved the script, (2) would finish his work with Scorsese sooner than DiCaprio, and (3) was demanding less money. Suddenly, just a few weeks after DiCaprio’s departure and the film’s apparent demise, The Good Shepherd was back in business, at a budget of just under $90 million with a start date of March 2005. “Matt was crucial,” De Niro later revealed. “He said, ‘I love this script, I’d do it for nothing.’ And he did. Not for nothing, but practically. It couldn’t have been done otherwise.”

  Alongside Damon, an impressive roster of talent agreed to work for De Niro for a song: Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, Timothy Hutton, Billy Crudup, Michael Gambon, John Turturro, and Keir Dullea among them (De Niro took a role for himself, and Joe Pesci showed up as well, as did such friends as Meryl Streep’s son Henry Gummer and Lower Manhattan Development Corporation boss John C. Whitehead). The production took place mainly in New York and Connecticut, with side trips to England and the Dominican Republic. Robert Richardson, who’d shot Casino (as well as a slew of other films for Scorsese and, especially, Oliver Stone), was along as director of photography, and Tariq Anwar would be the editor. Most important to De Niro, though, was Milt Bearden, the CIA operative who’d helped him research his roles in Ronin and, yes, the Fockers movies. “Milt is the real thing,” De Niro always said, and the thirty-year CIA veteran helped impart notes of verisimilitude to the details of the story.

  It had been more than a decade since De Niro had directed, though. The material wasn’t nearly as close to him as A Bronx Tale had been, and he admitted that he wasn’t always entirely steady in approaching the work. “I didn’t have that much confidence,” he said. “As you get older, you have more confidence, obviously. In certain areas. In others … still don’t have much confidence. With this thing, every day I was worried.”

  In part, he overcame his trepidations by focusing not on the epic scale of the film but on his strength as a collaborative actor. He would, according to Richardson, direct his cast from within the scene, letting the camera run as he instructed them on nuances of their performances, even breaking into the scene to do so. “There were a number of sequences where Bob would walk in and out of the frame,” Richardson recalled, “giving the actors notes on how the performances should shift on a particular line.… At some points we ran entire magazines [of film] simply on one line or as small as altering the gesture and position of an eye at a particular point.”

  Such attention to detail was, of course, a hallmark of De Niro’s acting, but it also suited the material of The Good Shepherd, which was far more John Le Carré or Robert Littell than Ian Fleming or Robert Ludlum. “In movies where people are sho
oting at each other all the time, it just seems too much,” De Niro said. “I like it when things happen for a reason. So I want to downplay the violence, depict it in a muted way. In those days, it was a gentleman’s game.” Similarly, he didn’t mind that the film was steeped in ambiguity, which of course was an essential dimension of the world of espionage. “I’m always so used to seeing movies that to me have an obvious payoff that doesn’t really follow logically,” he said. “I felt this should be more restrained.… You want things to add up, and they must add up, but some things don’t add up in life. So that’s … that’s what it is.”

  In October 2005 De Niro brought a short reel of scenes from The Good Shepherd to the Rome Film Festival, a new event that hoped to form ties with Tribeca. A crowd of some fifteen hundred people were on hand to watch the approximately fifteen minutes of footage and hear a few words from the director, who’d finally been granted his Italian passport that day from the mayor of Rome, a full year after the brouhaha about the negative impact of his portrayals of Italian American gangsters. In December, Universal Pictures released the film into theaters in the United States.

  There’s a stately dignity to The Good Shepherd, an intelligence, a clarity of intent, craft, and form. It’s not as complex as a John Le Carré novel (or, indeed, some film adaptations of Le Carré’s oeuvre), but it has grand scope, and it impressively blends delicate character observation and low-boil tension. You admire it, but you never quite warm up to it, and a good deal of that might be because it’s impossible to understand what drew De Niro to make it, more than a dozen years after his notable and clearly personal directorial debut, A Bronx Tale.