THE GODFASTHER PART 1
ROBERT DE NIRO OPENS UP ON BEING MARTY'S MAIN MAN FOR ALMOST HALF A CENTURY
You have Irish roots yourself, don’t you?
Yeah. My mother’s Dutch, French, German. And my father was Irish and Italian. I hitchhiked around Ireland when I was about 18,19. I’ve been trying for years to find relatives there. For some reason it’s not easy. Italy was easier.
What did you make of Martin Scorsese when you met him for the first time?
Well, Marty and I used to see each other when we were teenagers in Little Italy. We hung out with different groups of kids. And there was a kid who would go between our groups — he was in the productions Marty was directing and would tell me what Marty was doing. I was interested in him because I wanted to be an actor; that’s what I was telling my friends. Then our mutual friend, Jay Cocks, set up a Christmas dinner. Marty and I started talking about Mean Streets there. He said, “What do you wanna do in it?” Harvey Keitel was playing the lead and I was trying to decide which part I would play. I kept going back and forth to Marty: “What should I do? This or that?” He sort of just let me figure it out. [He ended up choosing the role of livewire Johnny Boy.]
That was the first of your New York movies with him. Why did you decide to stay rather than move to Hollywood? With Mean Streets we actually shot two weeks in New York and three in LA. And I was living in LA a little bit. My son was born there. But I just prefer New York. You walk around — you can be anonymous if you want. It’s just a different feeling.
The two of you made the city look terrifying in Taxi Driver. Well, everybody loved what Paul [Schrader] had done with the script. I’m from New York, and even I felt alienated as a young man here. He was not from New York, Travis. And anybody can identify.
Do you have a favourite of your Scorsese collaborations? They‘ve all been special in their own way. Every one was different. Taxi Driver was a lot of nights. Raging Bull [below] was just a long shoot — I believe it was nine weeks of fighting stuff in LA, then we took a hiatus and shot for another ten weeks in New York, when I’d gained the weight. It was all hard work. I mean, even eating is no joy after the first 15lb.
When you did your famous eating tour around Europe, were you alone?
Yeah, I was on my own. I was just hanging out, eating as much as I could. Travelling. You think it’s gonna be fun, but it’s just work. ’Cause it’s unnatural. So I was seeing a doctor and monitoring it and everything.
Scorsese took convincing to do Raging Bull. He’s not a sports enthusiast, is he? No, he didn’t care about that. This guy Pete Savage gave me the book [Jake Lamotta’s memoir, Raging Bull: My Story]. I was doing 1900 with Bertolucci at the time. I read it and called Marty from Italy.
I said, “This is interesting. It’s not very good, but it’s got heart.” And the idea of actually gaining the weight interested me. The writer, Mardik Martin, and I did a lot of research; we went to visit Jake’s ex-wife, Vikki. And then the script got stalled, so Marty brought in Schrader, who gave us a structure. We went somewhere in the Caribbean and worked on it. And that’s how it started off.
As a director he seems to relish doing things nobody’s done before...
I always say this. Marty was always open to trying something. “You wanna try this? Let’s try.” My first wife [Diahnne Abbott] was in New York, New York — I forget the song she sang in it — and she asked if she could read for him. She did, and he put her in the movie. I mean, he’s not afraid to do things even though they may not be obvious. It’s good, because it gives you a sense that you can do no wrong. There’s a freedom, yet there’s a guide there.
Harvey Keitel is also in The Irishman. Is it true the two of you were mistaken for terrorists in Rome in the ’80s? Yeah. We were on the road for Raging Bull and Harvey came along. We were in the Hassler Hotel, on a long street just above the Spanish Steps, and we were trying to leave but the paparazzi were all waiting outside. We said, “How can we get out of here?” The hotel guy said, “Well, there was a convent in the back once and Frank Sinatra went out that way, but that’s too hard to do now. You can go out a side door over there, but you have to ask the manager.” So I said, “Who’s the manager?” He said, “I’m the manager.” It didn’t matter — we went out the side door and were still followed by the paparazzi. And then the police thought we were the Red Brigades, so they had us up against a wall, and took us to the police station. The cops said, “Don’t worry, we have the cameras.” Yeah, right. The pictures were all over the papers and everything the next day. [Laughs] It was silly.
of his father, Robert De Niro Sr. “It was fascinating and simple. I liked the character: how he was introduced to this world and slowly saw how it worked.”
The actor scribbled the date in his inside cover, as is his wont, then hustled over to Scorsese’s office to recount the tale. “When he sat down to tell me this story, he reacted with a great deal of emotion,” says the director. “Having taken a cue on Raging Bull that way, I knew that when Bob says, ‘There’s a movie in there,’ you gotta make the movie.”
Just like Raging Bull, the new film — quickly retitled The Irishman — is about a real-life, brutal, complex figure: Frank Sheeran, the eponymous Irishman, who goes from truck driver to Mafia enforcer, completing blood-soaked tasks for labour leader Jimmy Hoffa and Pennsylvania crime boss Russell Bufalino. Sheeran becomes close friends with each, wearing a gold ring given to him by Bufalino and a gold watch from Hoffa. But against an epic sprawl of American history — the Bay Of Pigs, JFK’S assassination, the rise of the Teamsters — the three men draw closer to a violent endgame, and Hoffa’s notorious disappearance in July 1975. De Niro loved the relationships between the three men, the shocking ending, and the little bits of underworld arcana: “I heard you paint houses” is code someone would use over the phone while hiring Sheeran to kill people; to “go to Australia” is to be wiped off the face of the Earth.
Suddenly, Frankie the hitman was out, and Frank the hitman was in. A screenplay was written by Steven Zaillian in 2007. And in a lightning flash of inspiration, De Niro and Scorsese realised who could play the two key supporting roles: Al Pacino as Hoffa and Joe Pesci as Bufalino. The Irishman was shaping up to be celluloid nirvana, bringing together a host of screen gods. It would be the ultimate gangster movie. ‘Bestfellas’, if you will.
Yet, unbelievably, the greenlight remained resolutely red. “We couldn’t get it going,” says Scorsese. “Bob can get pictures made. I can get pictures made. But not that picture. At that time there wasn’t too much of a demand for that kind of film, particularly with the amount of money it would cost.”
The tricky thing was that, like the book, the script whizzed back and forth over a period of over 50 years, requiring characters to age many decades on screen. “The possibility of them playing younger in make-up, you could do. But as time went on, we lost that opportunity,” Scorsese notes. “There was talk about shooting it in such a way that the flashbacks would obscure the characters.” At one particularly desperate juncture, somebody suggested casting three other actors to play the younger De Niro, Pacino and Pesci.
The conversations went on and on. Until, in January 2013, in an attempt to hook prospective investors, a taped reading of the script was set up in De Niro’s office. One by one the icons arrived: De Niro himself, Pacino, Scorsese, Harvey Keitel, even the lesser-spotted Pesci, seen in only two
films since 1998’s Lethal Weapon 4.
“It was around 2pm, definitely post-lunch — none of them are morning guys,” laughs producer Emma Tillinger Koskoff. “Total goosebumps. I just sat and was awed for the whole readthrough and several days after.” Even Pacino got the jitters, asking Bobby Cannavale, who was starring in Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway with him and had just signed up to play ‘Skinny Razor’ Ditullio in The Irishman, to accompany him to Tribeca. “Al said, ‘Can we ride down together? I’m a little nervous. I’ve never worked with Marty before,’” says Cannavale. “But he just destroyed in that reading.”
As Pacino remembers now, “It was quite apparent to everyone that there was a real film there. The atmosphere in that room was the opposite of toxic: it was full of life.” De Niro himself was just as pleased. “It read better than when you read it on the page,” he says, looking around the room where it happened. “And when I watched it after, I was pleasantly surprised.”
But even this gambit failed to drum up the finances they needed. “We got everyone in the room,” says Jane Rosenthal. “But afterwards I believed that tape was all we’d ever have of this project.” JOE PESCI HAS A Rule, WHICH he SHARED with Empire back in 2012: “Talking about something you want to do is like stepping on your dick.”
When it came to The Irishman, Pesci’s pal decided to break that rule. “I’m very careful about announcing a film,” says De Niro. “I used to be superstitious — I wouldn’t say anything, ’cause you’ll talk it away or whatever. But I felt with this one, it was different. We didn’t go out making speeches, but we kept putting it out there that we intended to make it.”
De Niro’s determination to get The Irishman on screen never waned. As Scorsese went off to shoot Hugo and The Wolf Of Wall Street and
“i said to joe, ‘wegottado this. who knows if there’ll be anything after?’” robert de niro
Silence, the actor kept hoping. When Pablo Helman offered his miraculous de-ageing tech to Scorsese midway through the Silence shoot in Taiwan, things looked bright. When Mexican financier Fábrica de Cine withdrew in 2016, citing the rising budget, resulting in Paramount dropping out too, things looked bleak. Then Netflix arrived on the scene, offering to pick up the entire tab, with a limited theatrical release before the film hit the streaming service. Suddenly, The Irishman was packing heat.
On 18 September 2017, the shoot finally began, with a De Niro/pesci scene. It’s been widely reported that Pesci, who’s been busy golfing and breeding racehorses (one of whom he named ‘Pesci’ ), turned down the role 50 times. The claim is not exactly denied by Scorsese. “In his trailer, he turned it down!
As he came out of the trailer — eventually — he turned it down! While we were shooting a scene, he turned it down!” the director cackles. “That’s part of the performance. He has to feel right. He could not do anything that would be false.” It was De Niro, as Pesci’s best friend, who was responsible for coaxing him back to the screen. “Yeah,” De Niro grins wryly when asked if it was a tough task. “He doesn’t want to act too much or anything. But I said, ‘We gotta do this together. Who knows if there’ll be anything else after this?’”
Pesci may be playing another mobster (one who, according to legend, had final script approval over The Godfather), but his performance as Bufalino is a long way from the pen-stabbing, vice-wielding, waiter-shooting firecrackers of Goodfellas and Casino. “Marty told me that it’s not going to be like organisedcrime figures I’ve played in the past,” says the man himself. “My character always remains in control. He has a quiet power.”
A couple of months into the shoot, Pacino arrived. “I came onto this movie like jumping on a moving train,” he tells Empire. “I even said it, ‘WHOA! I’M COMING! HOLD ON THERE!’ But it immediately felt like territory where I belong. It’s set in a world that Marty of course excels in. But he’s looking at it here through a different lens. It’s a different energy. And there’s something very moving about these relationships and what happens.”
At times, the presence of the three acting titans made their supporting players feel like Spider at a Goodfellas card game. “My first scene I’m with De Niro and Pesci and I broke out in hives,” admits Ray Romano, aka lawyer Bill Bufalino. “I really was a wreck. After every take, I would go over and Bobby Cannavale would hold me, because I was so nervous.”
Stephen Graham, who plays hot-tempered capo Anthony ‘Tony Pro’ Provenzano, had an even rougher time. “Fuck, man,” he says. “I phoned my missus from the Winnebago and said, ‘I’m shitting myself! I’ve been in the toilet about seven times. I’m spraying deodorant everywhere, but my guts are all over the place.’ She told me to pull myself together, that I’d earned the right