The bang-average director Robert De Niro tipped for the very top: “Everything he does will be special”
Cinema’s greatest actors tend to work with cinema’s greatest directors, and Robert De Niro is no different, with the living legend surrounding himself with some of the finest talents to ever step behind the camera.
His frequent collaborations with Martin Scorsese will always define him, not that there’s anything wrong with that when several of them can be counted among the best movies ever made, but his muse is merely the tip of a directorial iceberg that would easily turn the Titanic into dust.
The two-time Academy Award winner has starred for Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Mann, Brian De Palma, Bernardo Bertolucci, Eliza Kazan, Michael Cimino, Sergio Leone, Agnès Varda, and Alfonso Cuarón, and those are only a few of the filmmaking heavyweights he’s sparred with during his incredible career.
With that in mind, you’d expect someone of De Niro’s knowledge and experience to know when an up-and-coming director is destined for big things, but he wasn’t quite on the money when he suggested that a relatively untested name, who did have a couple of hits under their belt by then, was going to spend his career dabbling exclusively in onscreen excellence.
In 2009, he played the leading role in the entirely forgettable drama, Everybody’s Fine, and indulged his hyperbolic side. “I like Kirk Jones, the director,” he told Parade. “I think everything he does will be special. Good directors can bring certain things out of you, with their intensity or gentleness or sensitivity or understanding. They can make an actor feel he can do no wrong.”
Despite being greeted tepidly at best, De Niro regards the film as his finest work, which is strange when there are so many other, and better, options. Jones’ debut feature was the delightfully quaint sleeper hit Waking Ned, and he followed it up with another critical and commercial success when he directed the Emma Thompson vehicle, Nanny McPhee.
In the decade and a half since Everybody’s Fine, though, he hasn’t lived up to De Niro’s hype. His follow-up was the unstoppably formulaic, and Razzie-nominated rom-com, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and then the completely unnecessary sequel, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, which earned almost $300 million less at the box office than its predecessor and was vastly inferior in every way.
To be fair, Jones may have turned a corner. 2025’s I Swear, the first picture he both wrote and directed since Everybody’s Fine, was celebrated as one of the best British movies of the year. The biopic of the activist John Davidson was a true return to form, and it looks as though leaving Hollywood behind and returning to the United Kingdom may have re-energised the filmmaker’s creative energies.
It was his first film in nearly ten years, and the first indication since De Niro said it out loud that he really can be a special talent when working with the right material.
