Al Pacino predicted Robert De Niro’s success after their first-ever meeting
Al Pacino and Robert De Niro are two greats of cinema who have always been locked in a state of friendly competition. Coming from similar Italian-American upbringings in New York, exploding into the New Hollywood of the 1970s around the same time, and going on to great critical acclaim, it was clear there would always be a link between the two.
Despite both appearing in king-making roles in The Godfather: Part II, it took until the restaurant scene in Michael Mann’s Heat for the two to actually appear onscreen together. Nevertheless, the stories of these two cinematic icons have been linked since one day in Lower Manhattan in the early 1970s when they ran into each other on a street corner.
It’s a humble and mundane story to kick off a decades-long career as acting rivals at the top of the craft, but Pacino, in particular, remembers the moment clearly. Speaking to Variety to promote their newest collaboration in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman back in 2019, the two actors reminisced on their first meeting and pinpointed exactly where it took place.
It was between Avenues A and B in Manhattan’s Alphabet City – a stone’s throw from the eventual shooting location of much of De Niro’s performance as Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Walking down 14th Street came young Pacino with then-partner Jill Clayburgh (who would go on to be known as an accomplished actor in her own right). The two then bumped into a just-starting-out De Niro, who at the time had appeared in low-budget films like The Wedding Party, an early student project of legendary director Brian De Palma.
But Pacino knew there was greatness in De Niro from the jump – or at least that’s what he tells reporters nowadays, with the benefit of decades of hindsight: “There was something about him. He had a certain charisma. He had that look. I thought, ‘That kid’s gonna go far.’”
Pacino had, at this point, appeared as a drug addict in The Panic in Needle Park, a role that got him noticed enough to land the career-making part of Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. And just two years later, the two men were in a picture together, with De Niro playing the flashback version of Pacino’s father.
And through the 1970s, the two would come up together in the conversations of casting agents, with both trying for the same roles several times. De Niro, who had tried and failed to land Pacino’s parts in both Needle Park and the first Godfather film, told Variety the two “felt competitive as actors” in the early days. According to Pacino, the two came together as friends upon realising that they were going through the same meteoric rise in Hollywood and shared New York roots. “We got together at times because there was something we were going through in life that was very similar. We could share things that were going on and talk about our movies.”
Both legendary actors are still at it – they’ve both recently played off Leonardo DiCaprio in films like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Pacino) and Killers of the Flower Moon (De Niro) – so perhaps there’s time for another Pacino-De Niro collaboration in the 2020s.
