From the Archives: Robert De Niro's Directorial Debut
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Robert De Niro is in a sound booth at Forty-ninth and Broadway with Lillo Brancato, the sixteen-year-old star of his new movie, and they are looping lines. Which is to say that Lillo is repeating lines he has already said when they were actually shooting the film, but he is saying them clearer this time, better, more like De Niro wants them. De Niro is pacing around drinking coffee (double espresso with five sugars), tearing bread off a baguette left over from lunch (a meal he almost never eats), and he does not take his eyes off the scene on the screen in front of him or his actor, who has spent the morning beeping himself on his brand-new beeper and who has informed me that "there's nothing better than going out at night and coming back home when the sun is coming up."
The movie, A Bronx Tale, is a charming coming-of-age story about a boy (Lillo) torn between the influence of his hardworking father, a bus driver played by De Niro, and Sonny, a glamorous mobster played by Chazz Palminteri, who also wrote the film. It is De Niro's directorial debut and Lillo's acting debut—unless you count the fact that he has spent his entire life doing De Niro imitations, stuffing orange peels in his mouth to do Jake LaMotta because he didn't have a mouthpiece, growing his hair out and slicking it back to do Cape Fear's Max Cady. A year ago he was a kid hanging out on Jones Beach. Now he's a movie star having trouble paying attention.
"Fight the medication, Lillo," De Niro says, grinning. "I'm gonna get you some other stuff. Ritalin. It'll focus your attention." He is joking, of course, but I suggest to the sound tech that maybe Ritalin is responsible for De Niro's own almost superhuman focus. "Nah," says the sound man: "Bob's on espresso."
He needs it. So far he has spent $21 million on this movie, originally a one-man show by Palminteri, an actor who was having trouble getting parts so he wrote eighteen for himself in one sitting. De Niro saw the play in Los Angeles on the advice of his trainer and took a flier—Palminteri had gotten seven-figure offers for his script, but only De Niro would guarantee him the role of Sonny. "The thing I'll tell you about Bob De Niro," says Palminteri, "is that he is a real man. In my neighborhood, we'd say Bob is a stand-up guy. When he gives you his word, that's it, period. He looked me in the eye and said, 'You will play the part of Sonny and no one else will touch the script.' And that's what happened."
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