The movie Robert De Niro knew was a “mistake” from the start: “I didn’t know what I was doing”
All actors make mistakes when it comes to picking roles, only seeing the potential possibilities of an opportunity and not the downsides, especially when an acclaimed director is in tow.
During the height of Robert De Niro’s success in the 1970s – he was a true icon of the New Hollywood era – he was quick to accept a role in a movie that would see him work with a European filmmaker he deeply admired. Was he simply sick of the kraft catering and was hoping for more European delicacies on set. But, like a man who has just eaten his third bowl of ghoulash, he realised he’d been too hasty.
It was 1976, the same year that the actor had appeared in Martin Scorsese’s unforgettable Taxi Driver, which won the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. De Niro had already graced our screens with roles in Mean Streets and, of course, The Godfather Part II, so his star power was pretty high. It looked like it was only going to get bigger – that’s if he played his cards right.
De Niro effectively had Hollywood at his fingertips, and such access can easily become quite boring. With a chance to jump into a new experience, De Niro went the holl hog and became a part of a huge ensemble cast.
1900 would prove to be a bit of a flop. Despite so many great actors attached, with Gerard Depardieu and Donald Sutherland intow, and Bernardo Bertolucci behind the lens, things just seemed to fizzle out. The director had just been involved in the controversial erotic film Last Tango in Paris a few years before. De Niro felt like he might achieve a similar windfall as Marlon Brando had.
However, if he was honest with himself, the writing was pretty quickly on the wall. For starters, the film was set to be 317 minutes long (that’s almost five and a half hours), so there was a big chance it was going to be divisive. Such lengthy movies usually are.
Few movies of such epic proportions have been successful, because how do you keep momentum up for that long? It’s hard enough to get audiences to sit through two and a half hours sometimes, let alone more than double that. Looking back, De Niro can acknowledge that he didn’t think the project through closely enough, and he got a little carried away.
Talking to The New York Times, De Niro revealed, “I’m older now, and I’m more experienced, so I don’t get thrown by the directors that I’ve worked with. Rarely happens. And I’m certainly not a person that feels precious about myself — it’s just common sense. But when I was younger, I was a little more nervous about stuff. With Bernardo, sometimes he would be — I felt that he was European, they make certain demands.”
There was a moment when the actor knew that the film wasn’t going to work, but he was too afraid to say anything. He was just a hired actor, after all. “In 1900, we shot the old stuff on the first day, and I realised there that that was a mistake — it just wouldn’t work, nobody was into it.”
He added, “I didn’t know what I was doing sitting in another country with this director who I like very much, but it was like, ‘Where are we?’ If I had thought about it more, I would have said, ‘Can we not do this scene later, not the first day?’ I was sensible enough to know you don’t do things so out of order. But I went along with it, I remember that, and it just didn’t work.”
Now, older and much wiser, De Niro can recognise when it’s right to speak up, feeling like he has the ability to use his voice if he sees it necessary to point out a movie’s potential flaws. 1900 wasn’t an utter mess, but it certainly sagged under its own weight, and De Niro perhaps would’ve been better giving it a miss.
