The director Robert De Niro was “honoured and flattered” to work with
Most actors only dream of one day working with the greats. Robert De Niro seems to collect them like stamps. Since he took his first steps into acting in the 1960s, he’s worked under the direction of some of the best filmmakers in the business, from cult auteur Quentin Tarantino to French new wave icon Agnés Varda to the founding father of the western, Sergio Leone.
The director De Niro has become most closely associated with is Martin Scorsese, who he kicked off a collaboration with back in 1973. Mean Streets led to Taxi Driver, which led to New York, New York, and they quickly became one of the most dependable actor-director duos in Hollywood. But even though De Niro has consistently worked with some of the brightest filmmaking talents in the industry, he still feels fortunate to have the opportunity to do so.
One director he felt particularly honoured to work alongside was Nancy Meyers, who he linked up with for The Intern in 2015. Meyers worked within quite a different realm to many of the filmmakers De Niro had favoured before. She didn’t make violent tales of crime and excess like Martin Scorsese. She didn’t scatter her scripts with endless expletives like Tarantino. Instead, she made warm, family and box office-friendly films while still maintaining a distinctive style.
However, the fact that Meyers’ filmmaking wasn’t full of grit and gore didn’t turn De Niro away. Rather, he once told Pop Entertainment that he was “honoured and flattered” that she asked him to star. “She gave me the script, I read it, liked it a lot,” he explained. As a result, De Niro agreed to take on the role of the titular intern, working under Anne Hathaway’s CEO.
De Niro was particularly intrigued by the way Meyers had flipped expectations on their head with the lead characters. While many would look at the poster, at a suited, grey-haired De Niro and a fresh-faced Anne Hathaway, and assume that she was the intern, Meyers didn’t play into those expectations. “That’s what makes it more interesting and fun,” De Niro surmised.
Perhaps Meyers’ filmmaking style also acted as a breath of fresh air in De Niro’s career. The Intern came along in between a string of collaborations with the likes of David O Russell, Todd Phillips and, as always, Scorsese. While they are all great directors, their style and stories can lean in quite masculine directions.
Meanwhile, Meyers looks to maintain a more female gaze through the camera lens, fleshing out the women she writes and affording them more time and attention than most of her male counterparts. She also has a much more light-hearted style than many of the directors De Niro had been working with at the time, finding success in the feel-good quality of her movies and their warm realism.
The Intern provided yet another example of the success of this formula. It isn’t necessarily the most acclaimed or admired film in the actor’s filmography. It didn’t win Academy Awards or a place amongst the greatest films of all time. But it won over De Niro with its script just as it won over audiences at the box office. De Niro is yet to star in another Meyers movie, but it seems like he’d surely jump at the chance to work with her again.
