The “hysterical” 2008 movie scene Robert De Niro could barely shoot: “It cracked me up every time”
It says something about Robert De Niro‘s general demeanour and the vast majority of the acting roles he’s played over a 50-year career that I can’t actually picture what he looks like smiling. That may be down to the fact that even when he does comedy films, he tends to be the straight man, like in Analyze This and Meet the Fockers, but even still, has an actor ever smiled less?
Apparently, he does have a sense of humour, though, because there was a film that he made some time ago now that apparently cracked him up so much that he wasn’t able to keep it together on camera at all, if you can imagine such a thing without him kicking someone in the face or slamming a car door on their head.
The movie in question was 2008’s What Just Happened, the answer to which may well be ‘your film just flopped spectacularly’. That’s because it was a little-remembered industry love-in, the kind that famous people fall over themselves to appear in, as proved the case with a cast of luminaries, some of whom played themselves, including Bruce Willis, Kristen Stewart, Sean Penn, Stanley Tucci and John Turturro.
The satirical drama was the story of De Niro’s veteran Hollywood producer, who is struggling, somewhat ironically, because his latest film is doing disastrously in test screenings, mostly because a dog gets killed at the end. In real life, the critics weren’t kind either, as, despite the stellar cast, it was described as ‘sluggish and painful’. Audiences were even less kind; the film had a budget of $25million and struggled to bring back $6.7m of it at the box office.
Nevertheless, it seems that the famously stony-faced De Niro still had a whale of a time making it; the black comedy involved leaving him in stitches, especially the moments, weirdly, involving the ill-fated hound and an iconic cartoon character.
While he apparently found the dog death denouement, after which the camera ends up covered in blood, funny, as he did the moment when he pushes a screenwriter into an open grave, it was a scene in which a Disney favourite self-immolates that had him slapping his knees.
De Niro told The Times, “The line about Mickey Mouse dousing himself with petrol and setting himself on fire. I was hysterical. I could never say that line straight. It cracked me up every time.”
Fair enough. Regardless, the film absolutely tanked, and actually, it came in the midst of a pretty barren spell for De Niro…his 2006 thriller The Good Shepherd, which he directed, had lost tens of millions; his one-two with Al Pacino, Righteous Kill, was panned, and it was only the 2007 fantasy adventure Stardust that had done much business for him since Meet the Fockers in 2004.
Ironically, it was a return to comedy and a sequel to that film that finally got him back in the black – Little Fockers did massive numbers at cinemas, making around $200million, even if it was universally slated by critics. And now, some 16 years later, De Niro is reuniting with Ben Stiller for a follow-up, Focker-in-Law, which will arrive in cinemas in November, and… doesn’t look great from the trailer, it has to be said.
