Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel’s run-in with the “slimiest” Italian paparazzi
When it comes to the favourite directors of Martin Scorsese, it’s hard to look beyond the likes of Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, with the former featuring in the likes of Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Raging Bull and the latter in Mean Streets, The Last Temptation of Christ and The Irishman, to name but a few.
Quite simply, both De Niro and Keitel have some serious star power in Hollywood and across the world. But that fame comes with a cost; seeing as the two are some of the best-known actors in the world, it’s easy to see why they might have had their fair share of run-ins with the paparazzi.
In an interview with Playboy, De Niro once opened up to suggestions that both he and Keitel had been arrested in Rome in 1981 but put the entire situation down to the fact that the paparazzi in Italy are far worse and less respectful in America and surely, that’s saying quite something.
“We weren’t thrown into jail,” De Niro began. “The paparazzi in Italy are the worst. They’re so bad, you have to laugh at them. They were chasing us in a cab, and we couldn’t get away from them. It was then that I learned something: It’s hard to escape, especially in Rome, where people drive up one-way streets the wrong way and don’t care about lights.”
Eventually, the police caught up with the two actors in a taxi, and the driver told them to stop the car behind who had been following them for pictures. However, the police ended up getting the wrong end of the stick, and somehow, both De Niro and Keitel ended up in a Rome police station.
“A couple of minutes later, the cops were behind us with their sirens and lights going,” De Niro continued. “They stopped us, got us out, they had machine guns on us, put us up against the wall, and the paparazzi were right behind them, taking pictures of the whole thing.”
He added: “They took us to the station. They didn’t put us in jail; we just sat around and talked. One or two of the cops were so stupid and belligerent, saying, ‘Ah, so you were in this movie, acting like a bully’, talking about Taxi Driver. They finally let us go.”
De Niro and Keitel argued with the paparazzi at the police station, saying that they had no right to treat them in such a manner. “They’re the slimiest people who ever lived,” De Niro said. The photos of the two actors appeared in a British newspaper just a few days later, and De Niro’s distrust of them was ever-greatened.
