The only choice is to learn to embrace life, the good and the bad: Robert De Niro

Indian Express

15-05-2025

One of the most anticipated events at the ongoing Cannes Film Festival was a centre-piece conversation with Robert De Niro, who comes with the formidable refutation of saying one word if two won't do.
For much of the hour-long chat, moderated by French visual artist JR , it appeared that the veteran actor, a spry 82, would stick to the plan. It wasn't as if the audience wasn't primed : the Debussy theatre, which boasts of the steepest steps at the Festival de Palais, was full, and De Niro got a standing ovation, his second in two days.
Sitting in the last row was a bit of a bummer, but there wasn't much that your reporter missed because the man who has starred in some of the most enduring Hollywood blockbusters, was basically just sitting across his interlocutor and going 'yes', 'yeah', 'yes exactly', and then lapsing into silence.
A documentary he is making on his father's life, directed by JR, is still a work in progress. But the glimpses we got, especially when the thespian shared details about his father, who also has the same name, moved the chat somewhat into the realm of the personal.
'Bobby is a very private person,' said JR, and it was clear that De Niro finds it hard, or at least that's what he projects, to give us a peek into his personal life.
'When I was younger I was all over the place,' De Niro said, fending off his mother's attempts to get him interested in 'family stuff'.
One of the most striking scenes in the film has the actor stretched flat out on a huge cutout of his father,on a boat chugging along in New York harbour. If the rest of the film is even half as impactful as that one scene, we are in for a rare treat.
A showreel ahead of the chat gave us glimpses of some of his most memorable roles. From Martin Scorsese's 'Raging Bull', in which he plays a washed-up boxer, to Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver' in which he plays a disturbed cabbie, and that stunning scene in Sergio Leone's 'Once Upon A Time in America', with those four young men crossing the road under the bridge, as well as his later films, including yet another Scorsese opus 'Killers Of The Flower Moon'.
It recalled a time when movies were what we went to, so unlike now when they come to us, nestling in our devices, switched on and off by a button.
It took him almost till the end of the conversation to start getting warmed up. When asked about the state of cinema these days, he said he couldn't speak broadly about cinema: 'All I know is telling stories visually, and the movie theatre experience is special'. An actor asked what he looks for when a script comes to him. 'When in doubt, have no doubt, follow your instinct, and trust your first impulse,' De Niro said.
The conversation ended with a profound thought startling in its simplicity, when someone asked how come he wasn't scared of death. 'If I have no choice, then I have to accept it,' he said. Growing older is the only option. 'What I knew then, I do not know now, and what I know now, I did not know then. The only choice is to learn to embrace life, the good and the bad'.