“Nah, I don’t want to do that”: when Robert De Niro rejected Martin Scorsese
Over the years, Hollywood has given us some iconic actor-director partnerships. Alfred Hitchcock and James Stewart, Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, Quentin Tarantino and Samuel L Jackson, Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst, and of course, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. These partnerships have produced some incredible films because, as collaborators, these filmmakers and stars know each other well, understanding what the other needs from them.
Scorsese and De Niro remain one of the most enduring partnerships in cinema, having worked together on some brilliant movies over the course of decades. Together, they’ve racked up Oscars and helped each other to become Hollywood stars. Talking to the Hindustan Times, Scorsese recalled that they first met when they were just teenagers.
“With Bob De Niro, it’s a formative relationship,” he said. “It goes back to when we were 16 years old. But we’d lost track of each other. I didn’t know he wanted to act and he didn’t know I started directing.”
They were re-introduced by Brian De Palma, a fellow New Hollywood filmmaker who had cast De Niro in his films Greetings, The Wedding Party, and Hi, Mom. From there, De Niro became Scorsese’s go-to, first casting him in Mean Streets. The movie was a success, helping to establish both De Niro and Scorsese as talented artists. This was further cemented when they reunited a few years later for Taxi Driver, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
The pair continued working with each other as the years rolled on, with De Niro taking on a musical role alongside Liza Minnelli in Scorsese’s New York, New York. The 1980s effort Raging Bull was another hit, winning two Oscars, including ‘Best Actor‘ for De Niro. Since then, they’ve worked together on six more feature films, including Goodfellas and The Irishman. It might seem as though De Niro is down to work with Scorsese whenever he is offered the chance, but that is actually not the case.
Scorsese had actually considered casting De Niro in his 2006 movie The Departed, but De Niro was not interested. “We talked to Bob about it, but he didn’t want to do it,” he told Deadline. The director revealed that the pair simply have other priorities at times, and De Niro doesn’t have any obligation to star in every movie he directs. “I didn’t work with Bob for 10 years until we did Goodfellas; we went off in different directions. Then we made another two, three films. And then, for another 19 years, we didn’t.”
They’re still close friends, of course, with their friendship going back decades. Yet, they’re not the same people they were when they started out in the late 1960s. He explained that they had “long periods of not working together, because, you know, people change. He still wanted to do certain things. Casino really solidified it for me. That was the ultimate, in terms of that type of picture for him and me.”
Then, they took a break from working with each other until they found something they wanted to collaborate on again. “I talked to him about other projects, and at one point he said, ‘You know the kind of stuff I like to do with you.’ I said, ‘OK.’ That became The Irishman, and it took nine years. We were always looking. ‘What about The Departed?’ ‘Nah, I don’t wanna do that.’ ‘OK.’”
