When Famous People Just Say No

With Robert De Niro, it was different. He wasn't much of a player. He was as interested in being interviewed as he probably is in visiting the dentist or a cardiologist. De Niro is an interviewer's nightmare. He is a very private man who doesn't like to talk to the press--and when he does talk, he doesn't have very much to say. It took me seven sessions on two coasts to finish my interview with him in 1988, because he refused to sit still for more than 90 minutes. Every time we started to actually get comfortable, he would look at his watch and say, "I've gotta go." Finally I asked him [where he had to go]. "I'm meeting friends," he said.

What set De Niro off were simple things. When we were in New York there were sirens outside the hotel window, and I observed that the sounds of Manhattan were very different than the sounds of L.A. and then asked him what it was like growing up in the city. He jumped up from the couch where he was sitting and started yelling at me: "You see why I can't do this? You see? I just don't want to do this."

When he calmed down, I tried again.

GROBEL: Didn't you once belong to a street gang?

DE NIRO: That's a whole other thing to talk about, not here. No big deal.

I tried another angle.

GROBEL: Wasn't your nickname Bobby Milk?

DE NIRO: That was one of a few I had.

GROBEL: What were the others?

DE NIRO: I don't want to get into that.

GROBEL: Why Milk?

DE NIRO: Maybe because I drank milk. I don't want to go too much into that.

GROBEL: We don't have to go too much, but maybe just enough to get some idea of where you came from...

DE NIRO: Listen... [reaches over, turns off the tape recorders, talks about the pressures on actors to do interviews]

At this point I realized that an "in-depth" interview with De Niro was going to be out of the question. But I just couldn't let him get off that easily.

GROBEL: What kind of kid were you?

DE NIRO: It's hard to talk about yourself, about what kind of kid you were, and so on. So I don't feel that disposed to it.

GROBEL: Why is it hard?

DE NIRO: It just is. That's why I don't do interviews. I think it's self-evident. I know people who don't want to talk about things in their life. It's a personal thing and it's really nobody's business.

What De Niro considered nobody's business was the stuff that makes interviews interesting. I brought up his past, but that was off-limits. I tried the present, but he didn't like talking about what he was doing. I asked about future plans, and he told me that he didn't want to speak about that because he might "jinx" any projects in the works. "Well, Bob," I finally said in exasperation, "where do we go from here?" His response was to lean forward for the fourth time and turn off the tape recorders before asking me if he could see a transcript of our conversation. I told him no, that wouldn't be possible. He then gave me his reasons why he thought I should make it available.

DE NIRO: I know it's a form of censorship and that's not good, and I know it takes away from what you're doing if I could look at it...[But] now I have to edit my own thoughts. There's a lot of things I'd like to say, but I don't feel I am very clear in my thinking right now...

And there it was: De Niro's fear of being interviewed. He didn't feel that he could articulate his thoughts, he didn't want to come across as dull or boring, he was insecure about his opinions. What can one say to convince the man that whatever he had to say would be devoured by tens of thousands of readers who admired him for the brilliance of his acting? The only thing we were able to agree on was that he was one tough nut to crack. So I stopped trying to get him to talk about anything personal and steered the conversation to his films. There were certainly plenty of those to discuss, and unlike Brando, De Niro was willing to talk about playing the young Don Corleone, the angry Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, the raging bull Jake La Motta, the Russian roulette-playing soldier from The Deer Hunter, the brash Rupert Pupkin from King of Comedy. There was plenty more I wanted to discuss after we covered his career, but he wasn't going to hang his laundry out to dry in public. I knew it. He knew it. I also knew that a good part of our interview would include De Niro's reluctance to talk, his turning off the recorders, his wanting to leave. This was what it was like interviewing Bobby De Niro. And that is the portrait that was drawn of the man. De Niro was the incarnation of Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit, always late for a very important date. And that date was never going to be talking intimately or revealingly to an interviewer.

With De Niro and Brando, I had the chance to capture two great actors who rarely spoke to the press and were both reluctant to reveal themselves. One wrote me a letter in which he was initially annoyed that our interview didn't totally concentrate on the plight of the American Indian, but then he thanked me for making him "more articulate than I remember being." The other called me a "Judas" when I saw him at Pacino's 50th birthday party, angry that I made him look, to his mind, bad.

Twelve years later, I was with Pacino at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival, where De Niro introduced Pacino's film Chinese Coffee. Afterward, about a dozen people went to eat in the Village, and De Niro sat opposite me and said, "I don't know if I'm supposed to like you or hate you."

"Oh, you like me, Bob," I said with a smile. "Though the last time I saw you, you were shaking my wife's hand, saying, 'Nice to meet you, I hate your husband.'"

"Yeah," De Niro laughed, "I probably said that."

"But you were smiling," I added. The problem, in De Niro's eyes, was that I should have been more sensitive to his indecision and discomfort. "It works both ways," I said to him. "How do you think I felt, expecting you to show up at my hotel at 9 in the morning and you didn't come until 5 in the afternoon?"

"That's unlike me to do that," De Niro said. "Usually if I'm going to be late, I have someone call and let the person know."

"I guess that time it slipped through the cracks," I said.

"Oh, now I get it, it was revenge!" he said.

"Maybe we should try it again some time."

"Yeah, maybe we should. I'll talk to you, you'll print how I didn't want to talk, and I'll go, 'He did it again!'"

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