You Talking To Me?

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday February 16, 2007

HELEN BARLOW

Raging Bull Robert De Niro reckons he's a funny guy. HELEN BARLOW isn't arguing.

Robert De Niro is meant to be a great bloke to have a drink with, but interviewing him is like pulling teeth. He was, however, putting in a special effort in Berlin to promote his second movie as director, The Good Shepherd, about the early days of the CIA.

De Niro usually played a thug of some sort in his movies with Martin Scorsese. Surprisingly for an actor made famous for such grisly roles as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, De Niro is not a fan of violence in movies.

"When I work with a director I always give my opinion but I support what they want to do," De Niro says. "Marty has a stylistic thing about violence. It has another meaning that is totally valid. But me, personally, I just didn't want to do that stuff. I don't like seeing movies that have a lot of blood, people getting killed left and right as if it's so easy to go out and kill people. I wanted my movie to be more realistic and credible."

The 63 year old, who was appointed the first Westerner to be president of the Moscow Film Festival 24 years ago, is fascinated by the former Eastern bloc.

"I actually hitchhiked through East Germany to Berlin in my early 20s and had no trouble at all. It was fascinating stuff, the two worlds that existed in Berlin, that you would go through Checkpoint Charlie and everything would change."

De Niro's first directorial effort was 1993's A Bronx Tale, a story set in the New York neighbourhood of his youth. He had been preparing The Good Shepherd, originally slated to be directed by Francis Ford Coppola, for more than eight years. The story presents a portrait of a steely CIA agent Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), who devotes his life to his job at the expense of his own happiness.

"Bob's famous for his obsession with details," says Damon, who starts off as a young man and ages more than 20 years during the film.

"That's why he's such a great actor and it's the same reason he's a great director for actors. He said earlier on that he'd basically prepared my role already."

De Niro becomes most animated when talking about the historical details in the film: "The Yale stuff, the Skull and Bones [secret society] stuff, who got the German scientists after the war, that's great."

He also gets excited and reverts into De Niro-ese when talking about women. It's like waving a flag at a raging bull when I wonder how Damon's character could neglect his wife when she is played by Angelina Jolie.

"You've gotta be kidding me!" he says. "If you're with someone and it's not working, it's not working. I don't care how beautiful they are. It was just the circumstances ... he got her pregnant ... he did the right thing. In those days he married her."

Jolie's presence in the film helped raise the cash.

"This was a hard film to get made because it's not a formula movie or action movie," De Niro says. "It's got traditions of storytelling. At the end of the day Matt didn't take much of a salary. Otherwise, we couldn't have got the movie done so he was great."

De Niro has mellowed over the years, particularly since he found his funny bone when sending up his mafioso image in Analyze This and playing the dour father of Ben Stiller's girlfriend in Meet the Parents.

"Well, you know, I felt that Travis Bickle had humour, too, and there were other things I've done I thought were funny, not obvious humour but ironies or situations that are funny. My mother always thought I had a good sense of humour."

He hopes to make two more CIA movie instalments, dealing with the Bay of Pigs and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

"[The Bay of Pigs] is another long chapter where it would be great to find out where Edward Wilson winds up," De Niro says. "Then for the third movie we'd go from 1989 until the present day."

But De Niro, who also plays a general in The Good Shepherd, will always be first and foremost an actor.

"I'm doing a movie based on a book. It's called What Just Happened? and it's about a producer and I'm playing him. And, yeah, it's funny," he sniggers.

THE GOOD SHEPHERD

Director Robert De Niro Stars Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro, Alec Baldwin Rated M. Screening now.

smh.com.au/metro

See the trailer

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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