On the first day of Tribeca’s De Niro Con, the actor’s Jackie Brown filmmaker Quentin Tarantino unlocked the method actor.
Why was De Niro let go by Mike Nichols off of what would become Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl; the project originally known as Bogart Slept Here?
The movie wounded up being directed by Herbert Ross, and the lead role of struggling actor Elliot Garfield would go to Richard Dreyfus who would win the 1978 Best Actor Oscar for the part.
De Niro landed the part in a stretch of work after his supporting actor Oscar win for The Godfather Part II, which included Bertolucci’s 1900, Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Kazan’s The Last Tycoon. In fact, De Niro had to push Last Tycoon much to the filmmaker’s grumbling.
“It wasn’t working,” says actor, “I shot for about two weeks. I had about three times in my life where I had that experience with a director, where we can’t make them happy–so this was one of them.”
“I was sitting in my camper, you feel this dread,” he continued. “I was going to offer my salary to keep us going for another week of rehearsals.” A meeting was called with Nichols and “he said, ‘I think we’re going to have to end it. He felt terrible. He was really upset.’”
“He didn’t know how to work with me at that time,” said De Niro. The actor would eventually meet up with Nichols at a dinner party where he apologized to De Niro.
“I’m like ‘I’m OK,’ I did OK. No problem. Part of me was over-relieved not to be in the pressing with him, it wasn’t working, that happens,” the actor continued.
However, for the most part, the actor’s approach to working with directors of varying personalities is to just go with it.
The movie will find its way: “you give your input, I’ll throw things in, sometimes we’ll disagree.”
Tarantino asked De Niro how he interfaces with younger actors, British actors, and pre-Brando like actors who have different styles of acting.
For De Niro, such moments were never rocket science: “part of acting is re-acting.”
“You make it work, that’s why I like to work with kids and even animals — They’re unpredictable, but that’s OK,” added the star.
Jackie Brown
Tarantino confessed to De Niro atop the conversation “I felt like I kind of jipped your character Louis doesn’t have much dialogue.” In the movie, De Niro played a quiet guy, recently released from jail who hangs around gun-runner Ordell Robbie’s Hermosa Beach apartment, smoking pot, having sex with Bridget Fonda’s surfer girl Melanie in arc that builds up to a suspenseful job for the ex-con with unexpected twists.
“It was about posture, mannerism, detail,” Tarantino says about the role “I think you’re the best actor in the world when it comes to that.”
“I described that posture like it was a pile of dirty clothes,” says the filmmaker about his third picture after Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, the script based on the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch.
Tarantino shared with the crowd how one directs De Niro, joking “With Robert, you shut the f*ck up…if I say nothing, he’ll say ‘What did you think?’”
Tarantino shared how on a prop day with the actor where they chose Louis’ watch, the director/screenwriter was quick to choose one for De Niro. “‘You’re like ‘whoa, whoa’ that’s too fast, we should look at all of them and we can have a discussion.”
It was just part of Tarantino’s excitement, “I’m doing Jackie Brown and I’m a shook up can of soda as a director and I have to have an answer on things, it doesn’t have to be the right answer.”
However, Tarantino says he prepped for De Niro’s methodology on the advice of a theater director at the Sundance Institute, Ulu Grosbard. He gave Tarantino advice on Reservoir Dog pages, saying the burgeoning director needed to “dive down deeper into characters” vs “the big picture.”
But there was another axiom Grobard gave Tarantino: “Look, once Bobby (De Niro) figures out the shoes the character wants, that’s a big part of the characterization.”
Tarantino continued, “Well, Bobby looks at me and says what kind of shoes does Louis wear? Well, I had an answer!” Essentially, they were beat-up tennis sneakers with one toe bent out shape for years after being in storage in jail while the character was incarcerated.
Said De Niro, “It’s a good answer.”
