De Niro: A Life (79 page)

The film would shoot on location in Montreal between May, when rehearsals started, and September 2000. De Niro was committed to the longest spell—sixty-eight days before the cameras, compared to Norton’s forty-one and Brando’s twelve. But the producers made him comfortable, outfitting his rented home with gym equipment and vintage wines and flying Toukie Smith and the twins up to visit him. Montreal suited him—foreign yet familiar, Old World yet with a touch of New York.

Would that anyone had been able to make the director feel similarly content. From the get-go, Oz was under the cosh, with Brando leading the assault, Norton creating drama, and De Niro, a relative gentleman, standing to the side. The original script had a tongue-in-cheek
tenor (Brando’s Max, for instance, was depicted as a flamboyant old queen), and at De Niro’s urging, the ensuing rewrites aimed at a grittier feel, not noir, exactly, but more realistic and character-driven. When the cast showed up for rehearsal, though, they weren’t entirely satisfied that the transformation was complete. There were rewrites during the shoot. Norton was famous for insisting he be allowed to work on scripts, which he did with Smith throughout his time in Montreal, fixing not only his scenes but the overall structure and tone. De Niro, characteristically focused on the veracity of details, read up on thieves, safecrackers, and cat burglars and even hired an ex-burglar as a consultant to help write revisions of the robbery scenes. (As Norton put it later, “It was a studio affair and it did have the limitations of a lot of people standing around opining about it.”) During the shoot, the three stars, famous for their love of actorly exploration on the set, for ignoring the pages, and for immersing themselves in the reality of the moment as it struck them, noodled to such an extent that two full weeks were added to the schedule.

And Brando? He made life merry hell for his director. Everyone knew the stories: how he wouldn’t learn his lines but rather had himself cued by bits of paper with dialogue on them taped around the set or even on the actual bodies of his fellow actors; how he often didn’t even know the plots of his films when he showed up to work, and frequently challenged the basic story line even when so much footage had been shot that no deep changes could be made; how he kept himself secluded and unavailable on days when he was on set, holed up in a trailer watching TV and, O brave new world, surfing the Internet; how he reviled the press and the movie business and, it would seem, his very collaborators. He was the most revolutionary—and arguably the greatest—American actor since World War II, yet he seemed contemptuous of acting, of filmmaking, of show business, of the people around him, of himself. Getting him to appear in the film was a coup, yes, but it was also a recipe for stress, crisis, and pain—and maybe,
maybe
, some flashes of genius in front of the camera.

Considering the strange ways in which their careers intertwined—in addition to growing up venerating Brando’s movies and studying with his acting teacher, Stella Adler, De Niro literally quoted
Brando’s two Oscar-winning performances in his own Oscar-winning performances—it must have felt like a kind of fulfillment for De Niro to get to work with the master. He knew him only slightly, and—judging by the way he talked about it—the visit he’d made to Brando’s island with Scorsese some fifteen years prior hadn’t been an entirely idyllic one. But they had a real bond, and Brando respected him and his work and treated him well. Too, both of the older stars felt sufficient kinship with Norton to treat him as a peer.

But Oz was made to suffer as if he had somehow personally been responsible for every inanity, injustice, and inconvenience Brando had ever suffered in the movie business. The two clashed immediately over tone: Brando appeared for his first scene almost campily attired, made up, and pitched, and Oz had to ask him, run-through after run-through, take after take, to be less froufy. Brando complied, to a point and never happily, frankly telling Oz, in front of the whole crew, “
Fuck you,” and referring to the director openly as “Miss Piggy” (one of the characters that Oz had invented and voiced for
Sesame Street
). “I bet you wish I was a puppet so you could stick your hand up my ass and make me do what you want,” he declared. He insisted on playing some scenes pantsless (he was overcome by the heat and humidity of Montreal), forcing Oz to shoot him from the waist up. Finally he refused to work with Oz present in the room at all, forcing De Niro and an assistant director to act as go-betweens while Oz himself sat in another room watching the goings-on via monitors.

Time
reported all of this sensational stuff just before the film’s July 2001 release, and word spilled into the media everywhere (how could it not?), which meant that Paramount Pictures had to do some damage control. In statements from the producers, Norton, and Oz, the studio tried to make Brando’s behavior seem like part of the creative process, the stress that turns coal into diamonds: “
The assumption that conflict is bad is wrong,” Norton said. “It’s just creative wrestling.” Even though he was clearly the aggrieved party, Oz more or less apologized to Brando in both
Time
and the
New York Times
: “
I probably could have handled it better. I wish I had done things differently,” and words to that effect.

There are a number of good reasons to lament the lost opportunity
of
The Score
: the combination of Brando and De Niro promises something titanic, even so long after Brando had effectively forsaken even the least hint of trying to be good at the work and when De Niro, too, seemed to see acting more as a paying gig than a form of personal expression. They have a few scenes together: a breezy one near the start of the picture in which Brando’s Max tries to cajole De Niro’s Nick into taking the job, and a sweaty, desperate one near the end, when Nick comes to see how badly Max needs the caper to succeed. But there’s nothing as crackling as the cup-of-coffee scene De Niro and Pacino shared in
Heat
, which, even in its elusive, low-wattage fashion, truly played like a confrontation-slash-meeting of acting styles and fleshed-out characters.

In fact,
The Score
is a much sketchier and more mechanical enterprise than
Heat
, a talky variation of such caper films as
Rififi
and
The Asphalt Jungle.
The actual robbery isn’t especially gripping, and the film gets distracted by Nick’s romance (with a flight attendant played by Angela Bassett) and by his battle for supremacy with Norton’s Jack. And if it’s appropriate that Oz gives so much time over to Jack’s masquerade as the palsied janitor’s assistant, Brian, it still feels like a cheat because the names of two of the greatest screen actors of all time are on the marquee. Once again, De Niro manages to impart a sense of weight with judicious reserve, probing gazes, and almost as much silence as chatter. But it’s a role he could have performed in his sleep, and, given the
mishegoss
of the production, he may well have wished that he had.

And yet, despite mixed reviews, the conclave of acting giants drew audiences.
The Score
opened strongly and went on to earn $71 million domestically and more than $40 million abroad—an even more successful take than the heist it depicted.

H
E WAS SPENDING TIME AT HOME, ENJOYING A RELATIVELY
sedate year, his burning drive to work somewhat quenched by the global receipts for
Meet the Parents
, going about the daily routines he liked to observe when he wasn’t off somewhere making or selling a film: jogging along the West Side Highway, walking to the office, dropping into one of the restaurants he owned for a bit of lunch, doing something with the kids, dining out or attending some sort of event in the evening with a date on his arm—often his estranged wife. The summer was just about over, and he wasn’t using the beach house or the country house much. It was a crisp and clear Tuesday, and he had to be at the Film Center first thing in the morning.

And then he went home and watched the world change.

“
I left a meeting right after they hit the World Trade Center,” he remembered. “I went to my apartment, which looks south, and I watched it out my window. I could see the line of fire across the North Tower. I had my binoculars and a video camera—though I didn’t want to video it. I saw a few people jump. Then I saw the South Tower go. It was so unreal. I had to confirm it by immediately looking at the television screen. CNN was on. That was the only way to make it real. Like my son said, ‘It was like watching the moon fall.’ ”

The twin towers of the World Trade Center had dominated the view from his home for decades, and now they were gone. Like everyone else, he was uncomprehending, wounded, mystified, helpless. But he felt it a little more personally than many others. It was his neighborhood that had been hit—he lived only about eight blocks north of Ground Zero—and it was devastated.

He reacted well in a crisis. First thing was cleanup and recovery, and he and Drew Nieporent made a commitment to feed the rescue workers at the site of the attack, serving thousands of meals of sandwiches and hot soup and getting the food through the streets from the kitchen to Ground Zero by avoiding the streets altogether: they ferried it along the Hudson, installing a makeshift kitchen on one of the daytime cruise ships that in normal times offered tours of the city.

When fund-raising telethons and events took place, De Niro was present without hesitation: the
America: A Tribute to Heroes
program, broadcast on more than thirty TV and cable networks, and the Madison Square Garden concert and telethon honoring first responders. He appeared in a new round of “I Love New York” ads aimed at getting tourists to commence visiting the city anew. When a documentary commemorating the attacks was made for television, he served as its narrator.

The devastation appeared never to be far from his mind. In October, when he was presented with recognition for lifetime achievement at the Gotham Awards, an event hosted by the Independent Feature Project to celebrate New York moviemaking, he said tersely, “Proud as I am of this, it seems not as important after what has happened.”

Quietly, he was crafting a bigger response. He and Rosenthal were planning an event that would focus positive attention on lower Manhattan, even as a wound lay gaping in what used to be its most visible point. It would be a means to bring people, money, and constructive energy to a neighborhood that still seemed like a tomb weeks after the attacks. “
Bob felt personally insulted by what happened down here,” reflected Harvey Weinstein, and De Niro and Rosenthal were determined to respond.

They had in mind a film festival to be held the following spring, focusing, like Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival, on independent moviemaking. They discovered that the name Tribeca Film Festival was already being used, as a placeholder if nothing else; there was even a fledgling website dedicated to it. Through the aegis of the not-for-profit Tribeca Film Institute, they negotiated with the founder of that enterprise, the artist Nicole Bartelme, to buy the title, and in December, De Niro, Rosenthal, New York governor George Pataki, Martin
Scorsese, Meryl Streep, and others held a press event to announce the first Tribeca Film Festival for the following spring, with American Express stepping in as the chief sponsor to the tune of a couple of million dollars.

At first they said they’d program forty features and a similar number of shorts, but when they finally got around to announcing the full lineup in the spring of 2002, the festival boasted 150 titles, shorts and features combined, culled from more than 1,500 submissions. There were world premieres, including Tribeca’s own production of
About a Boy
, featuring Hugh Grant in an adaptation of a bestselling novel by Nick Hornby, and
Insomnia
, a remake of a Swedish crime thriller starring Al Pacino and directed by Christopher Nolan. There were independent films from around the world. There were films with themes drawn from the experience of September 11, an entire block of children’s films, and a restoration of Elia Kazan’s
Viva Zapata
anchoring a selection of classic films curated by Scorsese. The judges for the awards included Helen Hunt, Kevin Spacey, Frances McDormand, Barry Levinson, Julian Schnabel, Isaac Mizrahi, and Richard Holbrooke; speakers on the various panels dotting the festival would include Susan Sarandon, Alan Alda, and Sidney Lumet. And the event was granted a massive boost when George Lucas agreed to a premiere screening of
Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones
as the centerpiece of a closing-night gala.

Rosenthal wasn’t entirely sure they could pull it off. “
I keep reminding myself I’m going to make mistakes,” she said. “I know that no matter what I do, some important person will feel snubbed. I just hope people will understand we’re only doing this to try to help downtown.” Whether there were any bruised egos among the boldface names or not, the moviegoing public responded to the glitter, the hoopla, and the chance to reclaim lower Manhattan. More than 150,000 tickets were sold to the screenings, talks, and parties, a truly impressive number considering that the festival ran a mere five days. There were grumblings about “Hollywood East” and about how few films actually made in the neighborhood were included in the festival, but these were relatively few, and the thing was undeniably a hit.