De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  Yeah? Huh? Huh? (he slides his gun into his hand) … Faster than you, fucking son of a … Saw you coming, you fucking … Shitheel … I’m standing here; you make the move. You make the move. It’s your move (he slides the gun out again) … Don’t try it, you fuck.

  You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Well then, who the hell else are you talking … You talking to me? Well, I’m the only one here … Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? Oh yeah? Huh? OK … Huh?

  “It was the last week of shooting,” Scorsese remembered. “I asked Bobby to talk to himself, and he improvised. I was sitting at his feet with my headphones on. Because the noises from the street were drowning his voice, I asked him to repeat it: ‘Again! Again!’ Gradually he found a rhythm.”

  The famous words were, apparently, stolen from Bruce Springsteen, who was about to burst into superstardom with his forthcoming album Born to Run, the release of which was preceded by a series of shows at the Bottom Line nightclub in Greenwich Village that De Niro had attended. Ever the master showman, Springsteen would do a bit in which he pretended not to realize that the audience’s hoots of “Bruuuuuuuce” were for him. “You talkin’ to me?” he would ask in mock humility. De Niro held on to that phrase and turned it into one of the most famous lines in all of American movies. “He just got into this wonderful paranoid monologue,” Scorsese recalled. “He did this riff, like a jazz musician. He would just go.” It was glorious. Even Schrader had to admit that it was a genius bit of improv: “To me, it’s the best thing in the movie. And I didn’t write it.”

  Technically, Scorsese did wondrous things, using his camera with piercing intelligence and taste to create an atmosphere that he likened to “a seeping virus.” He shot many of De Niro’s close-ups, especially those of his eyes, at forty-eight frames per second, twice the normal speed, conveying a hypersensitive effect to “draw out and exaggerate his reactions. What an actor, to look so great against a technique like that! I shot all those shots myself, to see for myself what kind of reaction we were getting.” As a director, he was already becoming famous for an athletic ability to move the camera, but there were no handheld or freewheeling shots in the film: “I felt that it should be all tied down. Dollied or tied down, because the character is rigid.” And, in a stroke of genius that kept the film from getting an X rating from the MPAA, he desaturated the blood in the scenes of gore to give them the timbre of what he liked to call “Daily News violence”—a lurid, otherworldly feeling. “It’s sort of like tuning in a color TV where you get black-and-white at first,” he said. “It’s more what I wanted in the sense that it’s more like a black-and-white daily tabloid newspaper.… I was going to do the whole picture that way but I couldn’t afford it.”

  There was another bit of on-the-fly inspiration. One of Schrader’s most disturbing inventions was a scene in which a man in the back of Bickle’s taxi talks about the violence he wishes to wreak upon his unfaithful wife, a terrifying and explicit speech filled with misogyny, profanity, and hate. The part was to be played by George Memmoli, the rotund actor who debuted in Mean Streets in the pool room scene in which he refuses to pay a debt he owes to someone he considers “a mook.” But Memmoli had injured his back while trying to perform a stunt on another film, and Scorsese, surprising everyone, elected himself to take his place.

  Scorsese had appeared in Mean Streets himself, of course, also in a car, also with a gun. But that character had no lines. This character was nervously, horrifically chatty, and Schrader was one of many on the production who wasn’t convinced that Scorsese could pull it off. “I think the director’s or writer’s job is behind the camera,” he said, and “I think you should get a pro to do that stuff.… I knew his egotism was such that he wouldn’t admit it if he was wrong, so we could very well have a bad scene on our hands.” But Scorsese said, “I didn’t trust anybody with it. So I just got in the back of the taxi and played the part myself.”

  Fortunately, he had an acting coach in the front seat who forced him into a real performance: namely, De Niro. “I learned a lot from Bob in that scene,” he said. “I remember saying, ‘Put down the flag, put down the flag’ [referring to the taxi meter’s on/off switch]. De Niro said, ‘No, make me put it down.’ And Bobby wasn’t going to put down the flag until he was convinced that I meant it. And then I understood. His move had to be a certain way and if he didn’t feel it, the move wasn’t going to be right.”*6

  THAT TRANSACTION WAS indicative of the synergy that blossomed between director and star in the course of making the film. From that first formal meeting at Verna Bloom and Jay Cocks’s house, De Niro and Scorsese had always felt simpatico, and that feeling had grown deeper during the making of Mean Streets. But during that fetid summer in which they made Taxi Driver, the two developed a rapport that would make their collaboration of the coming years one of the most justly celebrated in the history of cinema.

  “The real stuff between Bob and me is private,” Scorsese said. “Bob talks to me private [sic]. He needs a lot of time. We need a lot of time.” Even during the shoot—especially during the shoot—the two would habitually convene in prolonged head-to-head talks, which irked another of Scorsese’s actors sufficiently to complain about their process to the press (albeit anonymously): “Bobby hogs Marty on the set. Marty gives Bobby anything he wants. And what Bobby wants is constant attention—constant talk about his character.” In fact, some of their interactions, perhaps the most important ones, were subverbal. “We understood each other perfectly,” Scorsese said. “We don’t need words to work together. The communication between us is like a form of sign language.”

  It could seem to outsiders—meaning everyone else, even Scorsese’s wife—that they were uninterested in what the rest of the world thought or felt or had to say. “In Martin,” sighed Julia Cameron, “Bobby has found the one person who will talk for 15 minutes on how a character would knot a tie. I’ve seen them go for 10 hours nonstop.” And Scorsese admitted that the two of them were perhaps too fond of chewing over minutiae: “We have a shorthand. We have a longhand, too. We talk a great deal. Very often we talk about the same thing over and over.”

  But De Niro had some reasonable explanations for their intimacy and their lengthy parleys. After the pair had made a few more films together, he said, “I like sometimes to be very personal with the director. He can say whatever he wants to other actors, but when we talk, it’s with each other and that’s it. We’ve worked so much with each other now, we trust each other. Not that we didn’t trust each other before, but I think now if there’s another person around, we can still talk. I still like to just talk to him on the side so nobody hears. Maybe it’s something I’m going to try, and I want to prepare him for it so he can cover it. It might get a reaction from the other actors, so he has to be ready for it.”

  And Scorsese equally valued their intimacy. Just as sports coaches relied upon certain players who could see a game with a managerial eye even while participating in the actual run of play, Scorsese found in De Niro someone who shared his vision of what the film was supposed to be and which details did and didn’t aid them in achieving their aims. De Niro would, for instance, notice a prop or a bit of wardrobe that was out of sync with the rest and point it out to Scorsese: “It doesn’t seem right.” And the director would often agree: “Oh, absolutely, I didn’t see it.” This ability, according to Scorsese, derived from De Niro’s astounding gift for concentrating within a character, a scene, a story. “His whole thing is concentration,” he explained. “There could be a war going on, you know, he could be in the middle of the DMZ, and he’ll be like this—[in a trance] ‘Are you ready?’ ‘Huh?’ ‘Yeah, I’m ready.’ ‘I mean, go, now you go first.’ ‘No, no, after you.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘No, I’m fine.’ Bobby. It’s incredible.” Or, as he put it later, “He was Travis. A piece of scenery could collapse behind him and he would react the way Travis would.”

  When production wrapped in late July, they pa
rted knowing that it wouldn’t be for long. De Niro had his next film lined up already, and he would be moving to Los Angeles to make it. And soon afterward Scorsese would join him there, to edit, score, and polish Taxi Driver and to begin pre-production on their next collaboration, a 1940s-style musical entitled New York, New York about the tormented marriage of a saxophonist, whom De Niro would play, and a big-band singer.

  And De Niro had yet another project in mind. During the production of Taxi Driver, somebody had slipped him a copy of Raging Bull: My Story, the autobiography of boxer Jake LaMotta, a middleweight from the Bronx famed for his ability to take a pounding, for his series of titanic fights with Sugar Ray Robinson, and for confessing to taking a dive to enrich mobsters he knew from his old neighborhood. De Niro had become chummy with LaMotta’s boyhood friend and co-writer, Pete Savage, who had a cameo in Taxi Driver as a man who gets into Bickle’s cab with a hooker. De Niro thought there might be a film in LaMotta’s story, and he encouraged Scorsese to have a look at the book.

  * * *

  *1 It’s worth underscoring here not only that De Niro rewrote much of his dialogue per his understanding of Sicilian but also that he pared away at Vito’s lines, giving himself, in a perverse reversal of actorly ego, less to say than the script indicated.

  *2 The other nominees in the category were Fred Astaire for The Towering Inferno and Jeff Bridges for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.

  *3 De Niro had a heavily annotated copy of the play among his papers.

  *4 There was another honor in the wake of his Oscar. De Niro had never submitted to the Actors Studio’s famous two-step audition process, but after winning his Academy Award, he was granted admission to the Studio by Lee Strasberg.

  *5 De Niro repaid Schrader for the clothes with the gift of a money clip. Decades later, the screenwriter auctioned off the clip for $10,000 on a crowd-funding website to help raise money for his film The Canyons.

  *6 With his Luciferian beard and horrifyingly frank delivery of scalding dialogue, Scorsese was so good in the scene, according to De Niro, that “he was offered the Charles Manson character for the television movie Helter Skelter. But he was a little paranoid. He figured they were going to come after him, too.”

  “WE’VE MISCAST IT.”

  In a Warner Bros. screening room in Burbank in August 1975, director Mike Nichols, screenwriter Neil Simon, and a pair of studio executives were watching rushes from the set of Bogart Slept Here, a comedy about an off-Broadway actor who finds himself overwhelmed by good fortune when his very first movie unexpectedly becomes a huge international success. The film had only been shooting for a week, but there were alarms indicating that something was going very wrong.

  Marsha Mason, Simon’s actress wife, was playing the actor’s wife, a role written specifically for her. Playing the actor was De Niro. And it was De Niro whose work was worrying the filmmakers.

  De Niro had arrived on the Hollywood set of Bogart only three days after wrapping Taxi Driver, and Simon and the other principals felt extremely lucky to have him. He was a rising star, a box office attraction, the hot new thing. Personally, Simon found him affable and approachable, if shy. “He didn’t say very much,” the writer recalled, “but what he said, you listened to. He spoke softly, nodded and shrugged a lot, and occasionally he gave you a quick smile that caused his eyes to squint.”

  But from the start there were troubling signs. De Niro had decided that his character should wear a single earring, and he spent, as Simon remembered, the better part of a day poring over a selection of earrings that the property master rustled up for him. Then there was the matter of acting styles. Mason had performed Simon’s work onstage and was familiar with its blend of spritzing patter and warm sentiment. De Niro hadn’t played such material since his dinner theater days, and scheduling the shoot so soon after Taxi Driver meant that he wouldn’t be able to undertake his normal studying process or get to know the script in a proper rehearsal period. He would be finding his character, in effect, in front of the camera—a dicey prospect.

  In fact, it was disastrous. He flailed at Simon’s sensibility, unable to find a pry hole that would allow him to enter the world of the screenplay. And Mason was left to act opposite a cipher, forced to abandon her own instincts about how to play a part that had always been hers in order to find a way to engage with her co-star.

  Simon, who’d seen enough theatrical work to know that it could take an actor a bit of time to get into the rhythm of a role, was willing at first to ride it out, to let De Niro find his sea legs. But he was growing concerned. “In the first few days of dailies,” he remembered, “it was clear that any of the humor I had written was going to get lost. It’s not that De Niro is not funny, but his humor comes mostly from his nuances.” The script Simon had written was broader than that, and De Niro’s subtlety was pushing it into a different tenor.

  Nichols, who may not even have remembered that he had auditioned De Niro for The Graduate almost a decade prior, told Simon that it was going badly, that De Niro was misreading the part. “Well,” said the writer, “maybe it shouldn’t be funny. Maybe it should be a more serious picture.”

  “That’s not what you wrote,” Nichols replied, “and it’s not what I saw when I read this script. If there’s no humor in the first half of the film, we’re dead.”

  So they ran the rushes for the Warner Bros. brass, who agreed that something was wrong. And when they asked Nichols what he thought should be done, he gave them a stunning answer: “Stop the picture.”

  “Reshoot what we have?” asked an executive.

  “Yes,” Nichols said. “But not with De Niro … We’ve miscast it.” They sighed, they huddled, and the next day they called De Niro into an office and, in effect, fired him.

  “He was, of course, livid,” Simon recalled. “Luckily I was not in the room when he was told.”*1

  The word hit the trade papers like a mortar shell; rumors circulated that Nichols had called De Niro “undirectable” and that De Niro had outright walked off the production when Nichols and Mason tried to tell him that he didn’t know what comedy was. His friends, including Shelley Winters, spoke publicly to defend him, but there was sourness in the air. De Niro explained years later, “It didn’t work, just didn’t work out.” But, he added, “then they tried not to pay me.”

  Everyone just wanted the whole sad episode to go away. Warner Bros. halfheartedly looked at a few other actors in the hope that there was a way to save the project, but nobody was deemed appropriate, for any number of reasons. Nichols went back to New York to the stage; he wouldn’t direct another dramatic film until 1983. Simon continued to write smash hits for Broadway and the screen, arguably none bigger than one that grew out of the aborted Bogart Slept Here. Among the actors who tested to fill De Niro’s shoes was Richard Dreyfuss, right on the heels of his titanic success in Jaws; Dreyfuss wasn’t right for the part, according to Nichols, but Simon liked his rapport with Mason so much that he retooled the material for the pair, resulting two years later in The Goodbye Girl, for which Dreyfuss would win an Oscar.*2

  WHILE HIS STAR was getting himself fired from a Neil Simon comedy, Martin Scorsese had come to Hollywood to put the finishing touches on Taxi Driver, tweaking the edit to slide the violence past the censors, and adding a score by the legendary Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite composer, the man who wrote the terrifying staccato chords of the shower scene of Psycho, among dozens of other works for film and orchestra, including the scores of Citizen Kane, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Cape Fear, and most recently Brian De Palma’s Sisters. It was a new situation for Scorsese: Mean Streets and, to a lesser extent, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, were particularly celebrated for soundtracks built out of the sort of popular music that the characters in them would have listened to. But Travis Bickle, cipher that he was, didn’t listen to music (“I don’t follow music too much,” he confesses on a date. “But I would like to, I really would”). Scorsese needed an original score,
and he went for the best.

  At first Herrmann wanted nothing to do with the project, based on the proletarian sound of its title alone. Then Scorsese got him to agree at least to read the script, and one thing seemed to sway Hermann to the film: “I like when he poured peach brandy on the cornflakes,” he told Scorsese. “I’ll do it.”

  He came to Los Angeles to do his work just before the Christmas holidays, and conducted the recording of the soundtrack himself, right up until the final session, which was held on December 23 and witnessed by Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, who’d been invited to meet the composer. Herrmann finished his work and went back to his hotel for the night. He never woke up, dying in his sleep of a heart condition on Christmas Eve. Not two months later, the first ominous notes of his remarkable score, which would go on to be recognized with an Oscar nomination, would be heard by audiences for the first time, as Taxi Driver made its way into the world.

  To call the film a sensation would be an understatement. Critics and audiences had never seen anything like it, and the reviews and box office were beyond anything that Paul Schrader, the Phillipses, Scorsese, or De Niro had ever imagined.

  HE IS A twenty-six-year-old midwesterner, honorably discharged from the Marine Corps two years before, alone in New York with no work, living on a steady diet of junk food, booze, pills, and porn, his life an eddying pool of loneliness, stasis, thoughts turned inward on themselves. He has received only a scattered education, yet he keeps a diary—a quaint affectation—and it reveals an intelligence, a sense of aspiration, an acquaintance with the Bible. You can see pain, fuzziness, skittishness in his eyes, which are often squinched defensively. But in the main he’s a cipher—out of touch, by his own confession, with music, films, politics, social mores, and most every other aspect of ordinary life.