by Shawn Levy
Despite the brevity of his involvement and any on-set frustration that he may have caused, De Niro became a strong ally of Gilliam’s in late 1985, when Universal Pictures refused to release the film in the United States in the director’s cut, particularly with the downbeat ending that he’d written. Although Brazil had been playing profitably for months in Europe and elsewhere, although it was warmly received at the Cannes Film Festival, Universal, which had put up roughly two-thirds of the budget, refused to show it to the American film press or schedule a firm opening date. Gilliam bought full-page ads in the Hollywood trade papers, bordered in black like funeral notices, addressed to the Universal production chief who was his main antagonist: “Dear Sid Sheinberg, when are you going to release my film?” Gilliam showed the film at universities, which his contract permitted, and invited members of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association to see it. They rallied around him by naming Brazil the best film of 1985—even without a theatrical release.
Still Universal remained obdurate. In another gambit, Gilliam showed up on ABC’s Good Morning America to state his case, and he achieved a considerable coup by bringing De Niro along with him as a star and advocate of the film. De Niro barely spoke, and only in niceties and commonplaces, but his heft as a respected megastar surely played some part in getting Universal to finally release Gilliam’s cut of the film—albeit in the most cynical way possible, at once trying to capitalize on the Los Angeles Film Critics prize as a potential Oscar lure and keeping bookings and advertising to an absolute minimum. It didn’t matter that Gilliam had produced a visionary classic; Brazil, and the battle to get it onto American screens, would mark him as a profligate and a nuisance for the rest of his career.
IN THE SPRING, De Niro was in New York doing something else he hadn’t ever done before: playing the leading role in a romance, Falling in Love. There were little love stories in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, 1900, The Last Tycoon, The Deer Hunter, and Raging Bull, but none of those could truly be said to be romantic films, let alone full-fledged melodramas. (Told by Gene Siskel in an interview a few years later that he had never said “I love you” on-screen before, De Niro was taken aback: “Didn’t I say ‘I love you’ to the girl in ‘Once Upon a Time in America’? No, ah, I guess I didn’t say it quite that way. I guess I’ve never said it before that directly. That’s interesting.”)
But, as indicated by the title of the new movie, which was written by Michael Cristofer, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of The Shadow Box, this was first and foremost a love story. It would be something of an old-home week as well. It would pair De Niro with Meryl Streep for the first time since The Deer Hunter, and feature Harvey Keitel as his character’s pal and confidante; Ulu Grosbard would direct. And it would be filmed in and around New York, which, increasingly, was a matter of genuine import in De Niro’s choice of projects. “I was tired,” he explained. “This script came along. It was a nice story, set here in New York.”
That didn’t exactly speak of an obsessive need to play the part. In fact, De Niro’s notes for the film were scantier than any he had ever made in a film in which he had a significant role. (It’s interesting, too, to note that on the two occasions he chose to work with Grosbard, he did so partly, by his own confession, so that he could commit himself less to his work than ordinarily.) His choice of props was minimal—a watch, a wallet, a ring, a shopping list. He wore the most workaday clothes as wardrobe. Remarkably, he didn’t figure out what his character did for a living. “We weren’t even sure if this guy was an engineer or a construction worker,” he confessed. “I still don’t know. That isn’t what mattered.”
To be fair, he did put effort into calculating the nuances of the progress his character, Frank Raftis, was making from an ordinary life to the verge of a passionate extramarital affair. In his first scenes, his notes reminded him to remain oblivious to the goings-on around him that had nothing to do with him, to adopt an air, as he put it, of a non-actor caught on the reality TV prank show series Candid Camera, “totally unaware of anyone watching me.” He later indicates that he’ll note his character’s movement from interest in his new acquaintance to romantic feelings: “There’s got to be that look, that imperceptible look!” And he spells out with precision his character’s frame of mind during the climactic confession of his feelings: “Telling her is more important than anything, precedes and supersedes anything, and not only do I love her but she loves me and she knows it. She might not want to see me and might not think we ought to see each other, but she can’t say she doesn’t feel the same way about me.”
He also finally shed almost all the extra weight he’d gained for Raging Bull, hiring a personal trainer named Dan Harvey to work with him at his own gym and whip those final twenty pounds off his stomach and legs, bringing his body fat down from an uncharacteristic 20 percent to a far more familiar 9 percent. His character was tweaked to include a fondness for exercising, and for the first time in years on-screen his famous cheekbones were once again clearly defined; when he smiled, the crinkles around his eyes were sharper and deeper than they had been since The Deer Hunter.
But the recovery of his fitness didn’t translate into happy responses to the film. Falling in Love was released at Thanksgiving, as a kind of alternative at the multiplex for grown-ups, and it got swamped by its competition, finishing sixth at the box office in its opening weekend with $3.1 million in its first five days, well behind the ticket-selling champ of the week, Supergirl.
IF HE HAD CHOSEN to play a small role in Brazil and an easy-to-manage role in Falling in Love, at least in part because he was tired, De Niro soon found sufficient energy to tackle a series of new challenges and one of the most arduous projects in which he’d ever involve himself. The Mission was based on “a suggestion for an original screenplay” written in 1975 by Robert Bolt, the prize-winning playwright and screenwriter responsible for, among many things, A Man for All Seasons, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago.
Asked by Italian producer Fernando Ghia to look into colonial South America as inspiration for a story, Bolt learned of the Guarani War, an eighteenth-century conflict between Amazonian natives and the forces of colonial Europe, which meant to impose slavery on the indigenous population despite the objections of the Jesuit order of Catholic priests, who made up a large portion of the missionary corps. He conflated that story with the life of Roque González de la Cruz, a Jesuit priest born of Spanish noble stock in 1576 in what is now Paraguay, who devoted himself to forging peaceful coexistence between colonists and natives and brought the ire of Spanish authorities down onto the Jesuit order.*1 Helping himself to bits of de la Cruz’s story as raw material for one of his protagonists, the Jesuit Father Gabriel, Bolt created the other out of whole cloth. Rodrigo Mendoza is a savage Spanish mercenary, exmilitary, who traffics in slaves. After a personal crisis, he forsakes his ways of anger and violence to follow the guidance of Gabriel, whose order he joins after a dramatic penance. Combined, the two men and their adherents try to create a small Eden of peaceful cooperative life in the remote jungle. But they have run afoul of political change, and they are attacked by a joint force of Spanish and Portuguese militaries.
After he wrote a screenplay for Ghia, who failed to find interest in it, Bolt poured the story into a novel, his first. But the idea of seeing it on-screen was never far from his mind. As he explained in his original eighteen-page “suggestion”: “The visual background is spectacular and like the story little known to the world at large. All this affords the opportunity to make an artistically exceptional film of international appeal.” In 1984, Ghia brought the material to London’s Goldcrest Films and David Puttnam, the Oscar-winning producer of Chariots of Fire, Midnight Express, and most recently The Killing Fields. Puttnam, like Bolt, thought that big was the right size for this film, and he commissioned a revision of the screenplay with an eye toward making it the second theatrical film by Roland Joffé, who’d directed The Killing Fields. By late 1984 they were
casting around for lead actors, and Joffé made the bold suggestion that they contact De Niro for the role of Mendoza.
It was hardly an obvious choice. De Niro had almost never played a character who was born before 1900 (Vito Corleone and Monroe Stahr were the exceptions, born in the 1890s). For movie audiences, he was unvaryingly a figure of concrete and neon, of the New World and the American century; it was virtually impossible to picture him on horseback, wielding a sword, hacking his way through the jungle. But he was also an international star, somebody upon whom Puttnam and company could hang a $22 million budget and an epic running time and hope to recoup their investment. For Gabriel they had chosen Jeremy Irons, an accomplished actor but still not a movie star, having been seen principally on exports of British TV’s Brideshead Revisited and in the screen version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. De Niro, or someone of similar stature, would be necessary to infuse the production with star power.
Joffé and Puttnam met De Niro at Blakes Hotel when he was in London to make Brazil, and it was something of a delicate dance of diplomacy. De Niro liked the material. “I thought it was really a wonderful, meaningful story,” he later said, “and the idea of this man changing appealed to me a lot.” It didn’t seem to matter to him, somehow, that he would have to spend months in rugged and remote corners of Colombia or that he was playing a part almost as physically demanding as Jake LaMotta. The challenge was part of the appeal for him.
But Puttnam wasn’t sure De Niro was the right man. He knew of the actor’s penchant for multiple takes and on-camera rehearsal, and he expressed concerns about those habits right up front. De Niro sought to appease him: “I understand your problem,” Puttnam recalled him saying, “and I will never delay your picture.” Puttnam had other reservations about how well suited De Niro was for the part, but he was mollified by De Niro’s collaborative assurances, and he eventually agreed to the actor’s terms: $1.5 million, plus a percentage of the net profits, plus expenses. He did, however, have a backup plan: Liam Neeson, a strapping and little-known Irish actor, was hired to play a small part with the thought in the back of Puttnam’s mind that he could use him as a substitute if, for any reason, De Niro couldn’t do the film.
As so often in the past, De Niro treated the film as his own project. In addition to learning horsemanship (in Manhattan, naturally, at the Claremont Riding Academy on the Upper West Side), swordsmanship, and a bit of Spanish, he pitched in on the production in material ways. “He spent eight weeks with Roland Joffé,” recalled Puttnam, “reading every actor we cast.” He dined with Robert Bolt, who had suffered a stroke since writing the script and struggled to communicate his thoughts about Mendoza, which De Niro dug for regardless. (He also, per Bolt’s biographer, failed to pick up the bill for dinner.) When the producers hired the radical Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan to accompany the crew to Colombia and serve as both an actor (in a cameo role) and a technical consultant, De Niro availed himself of access to the famed activist. (In his diary of the production, Berrigan admitted that he was of more use to Irons, whose character he understood more thoroughly. “Bob sees his role as someone who must make plausible an extraordinary change of heart, from murderer to Jesuit. He has to explain what would lead one to such a change. I can only outline the steps.”)
De Niro arrived in Cartagena in the early spring of 1985 and was greeted with a box of Cuban cigars from Joffé and a cadre of bodyguards, two of whom would be with him at all times—outside his hotel room door, on the set, wherever. It was the height of Colombia’s cocaine-fueled drug wars, in retrospect an absurd time to shoot a multimillion-dollar production there. Puttnam said that it was “sheer hell.” Not only did nobody outside of the capital, Bogotá, care that the government wished the filmmakers to be shown all courtesies, but some fool of a functionary had decided to build crucial sets along a well-traveled drug courier route, meaning that there was a constant threat of genuine peril and a heavy-handed military presence. The weather proved oppressive. “There were floods,” recalled Puttnam, “torrential rains, temperatures of 110 degrees.” Worse, he said, “almost everybody fell ill with dysentery—except Bob. He takes terrific care of his body.” Whether by virtue of his diet or his constitution, De Niro, who had the most arduous role in the film, never succumbed.
He built Mendoza with his characteristic exactness, adding such physical touches as a scar, reminding himself that the character ought constantly to be “tense like Mad Dog Kelly,” and continually stressing that the transforming Mendoza must learn how to empathize with other human beings, whom he’d previously seen as objects: “Remember, always relate, always relate, the key, the key.” Joffé was astounded to watch his star transform himself for the role: “Bobby De Niro actually changed,” he said. “His look changed. In three days of walking about with Colombian men and observing their ways, the New York Italian began to disappear and a powerful Hispanic appeared.” After meeting him in New York and spending time with him in Cartagena, Berrigan was fascinated by De Niro’s absorption in the role and the process. “De Niro seems many light-years distant,” he wrote in his diary. “Somewhat as though his existence and personality have passed into the film. As though, for the duration, his life will be available only to the camera and the director. This is a hard vocation; also, if the term makes any sense, a notable asceticism.” (Imagine how the elder Robert De Niro would have appreciated that insight into the making of art!)
But even with the pressures of mass-scale filmmaking, angry weather, and a drug war just off camera, De Niro insisted, as ever, on working his scenes as he always had, take by take, piece by piece, despite the conditions, even despite the response of his co-star. As Puttnam remembered, “Jeremy [Irons] would come entirely prepared. He would be word perfect whereas De Niro was used to rehearsing on camera … by take three, it was probably as good as Jeremy would ever be. [But] on take three, De Niro was just limbering up. By take seven, when De Niro was beginning to get somewhere near a performance, Jeremy would get bored. By take 13, when De Niro was delivering a very, very good performance, Jeremy was glassy-eyed!” (To be fair, as difficult as this may have proven on the set, the film’s editor, Jim Clark, saw the point of De Niro’s craft: “With De Niro, you don’t cut him, you mine him. You have to seek out the performance because it varies so.”) Nobody faulted De Niro’s application to the tasks the film presented him. Patsy Puttnam, the producer’s wife, was visiting the set when she noticed a ragamuffin figure bounding about the jungle barefooted. She asked associate producer Iain Smith, “Who on earth’s that?” “It’s Bobby De Niro,” Smith answered. “He’s got to do that in his scene tomorrow.” She was appalled: “But his feet …”
Still, there were limits to what the producers would let their star do. At one point he questioned not only his dialogue in a certain scene but the very actions and thoughts behind it, suggesting that the script was flawed. Joffé tried to talk him into seeing through the pages as written, but he was stubborn. That night, dining at their hotel, De Niro discussed his reservations with Puttnam at length. When the producer realized that he wasn’t making any progress in steering the actor back onto the task at hand, he took another tack: “Well, Bobby, you may be right, but if you’re not, we stand to lose a lot of money. We’re walking into a brick wall here. You know, if ‘The Mission’ only takes as much as your last four films combined, we’ll lose a lot of money.” De Niro, chastened by the reminder that moviemaking was a team sport and that his team had been on a poor streak of late, made no further protests.
After more than four months’ work, shooting of The Mission wrapped in late 1984, and the completed film premiered in May 1986 at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the top prize, the Palme d’Or, marking the second time in a decade that De Niro was the star of a film to be so recognized.
PERSONALLY, DE NIRO seemed pleased with the film. He loved Colombia, calling it “an incredibly beautiful, mysterious place,” and he was fond of Joffé: “He’s a good director with a lot of hea
rt.” But there would be no denying that he was at the very least a curiosity in the finished picture. In his first-ever film set prior to the twentieth century, De Niro is, by and large, a man lost in time. He credibly conveys Mendoza’s macho hauteur, his ruthlessness, his pride. He bears himself with a ramrod certitude, a fearless gaze, a beefy masculinity, a somehow credibly Latin air of nobility; he manages to look at home on a horse and plausible with a sword. But as soon as he opens his mouth and essays Bolt’s stagey, old-timey dialogue, he’s sunk. “So me you do not love?” he asks the woman he wishes to wed, sounding like he’s translating his lines in real time, and badly. Only in the scene in which, having taken religious vows, he makes a grandiloquent and sarcastic display of apologizing to everyone in Asunción for an outburst of temper does he manage to wrestle the language into something that feels his own.
As it happens, the physical aspects of the role are more prominent, though that isn’t always to the film’s advantage. In the excruciating sequence in which Mendoza commits a personal penance by schlepping his battle armor over a mountain, up a waterfall, and through a jungle, De Niro seems entirely determined in what he’s doing and entirely blind to how daffy he looks: a guy from Greenwich Village sent back to the eighteenth century to drag a bag of pots around Paraguay. But in the final going, when Mendoza forsakes his priestly vows and resumes his warlike ways, something of the character’s earlier confidence returns to him, and his ferocious fight is credibly engaged. That spectacle is among the strengths of the film. But, like its star, whenever The Mission opens its mouth to say what it’s thinking, it loses almost all of its power.
