The Marlon Brando role that made Robert De Niro and Barry Levinson fall in love with cinema
Throughout his iconic career, Robert De Niro has often been synonymous with one director: Martin Scorsese. After all, they have made 10 films together, including some of either man’s best. However, De Niro’s other favourite repeat collaborator has to be his Alto Knights helmer Barry Levinson, a director he’s worked with on four feature films and one TV movie. Perhaps the two men – who are only a couple of years apart in age – formed a strong bond over their shared love of Marlon Brando, specifically the one role that made them both fall in love with cinema in the first place.
The first time De Niro and Levinson worked together was on 1996’s Sleepers, a star-studded legal drama that banked an impressive $165million at the box office. They followed that up a year later with Wag the Dog, a political satire beloved by critics that notched several Oscar nominations. It would take until 2008 for their third collaboration, another satire entitled What Just Happened, which was largely dismissed as too ‘inside baseball’ in its attempts to skewer Hollywood. In 2017, De Niro played Bernie Madoff for Levinson in the HBO film The Wizard of Lies, and it became HBO’s biggest original movie in four years.
By the time De Niro and Levinson re-teamed for a fifth time on The Alto Knights, a gangster drama that saw De Niro cast in two different roles as rival mob bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, they were a well-oiled machine. However, Levinson told Reader’s Digest that they still worked hard every day to achieve a naturalism in film that makes the audience feel like what they are watching is truly happening. Fascinatingly, both men attribute their desire to make movies this way to formative experiences watching Brando in one of his most defining roles.
“I found that you have to find a comfort zone for the actor,” Levinson mused. “If the mechanics of it suddenly become dominant, then the character’s moments don’t seem spontaneous because they’ve got to do this and that.” Instead, he wants his actors to feel like they are inhabiting the characters and aren’t thinking about their movements. At a certain point, they’re just doing what feels natural, such as when Brando reached down and grabbed a fallen glove off the ground in a classic Oscar winner.
“The most defining moment [was when] I went to see On the Waterfront, and there’s a scene with Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint,” Levinson explained. “She drops a glove, and he picks it up, and he wanders over to the swing, and he is putting on those white gloves, and he’s talking to her. As a kid, I went, ‘Wow.’ I was so fascinated by it. It seemed so real to me as a kid. That stayed with me, and it’s stayed with me ever since.”
In truth, it’s likely De Niro felt the very same way when he watched this scene as a boy. He namechecked Brando as one of his idols, along with James Dean, the icon of ’50s teen rebellion. “When you saw James Dean do East of Eden, he was great, but you can’t do what he could do,” De Niro said in 1994. However, he put the Godfather star on an even higher level, saying, “Brando with On the Waterfront or A Streetcar Named Desire are considered the great performances of that time – and still are.”
Indeed, De Niro’s love for Brando was so intrinsic to his soul as a film fan and an actor that he twisted Scorsese’s arm into letting him perform a tribute to him at the end of Raging Bull. That’s right – De Niro’s interpretation of Brando’s seminal “I coulda been a contender!” speech from On the Waterfront wasn’t something Scorsese wanted to include, but De Niro talked him into it.
