De Niro and Paci­no on The Irish­man and the gang­ster­i­za­tion of US politics

Robert De Niro and Al Paci­no hopped over to Lon­don with Mar­tin Scorsese’s new gang­ster epic, The Irish­man. An audi­ence with two of the most influ­en­tial actors to ever rise up through the Hol­ly­wood ranks cov­ered the pair’s long friend­ship, their remark­able col­lab­o­ra­tions in the gang­ster genre and De Niro’s pun­gent­ly-word­ed thoughts on the cur­rent commander-in-chief.

LWLies: What do you like most about work­ing with each other?

Paci­no: We’ve known each oth­er for a real­ly long time. We met in 1968. And we were both young actors at that time. I think ear­ly on in our careers, we con­nect­ed and we found we had sim­i­lar things hap­pen­ing to us. That cama­raderie, that sym­bio­sis, that got us togeth­er. And we’ve been that way ever since. We don’t see each oth­er much, but it’s always been there, and from a very ear­ly time we shared cer­tain things. And in a way, I think we helped each oth­er through­out these meetings.

How would you define the rela­tion­ship between these two char­ac­ters, Frank Sheer­an and Jim­my Hoffa?

Paci­no: Well, we had a chance to explore that again; some­thing we’re famil­iar with. It was a root to a rela­tion­ship, I think. We’ve played it before: in the film Heat, we were actu­al­ly on oppo­site ends, and in Right­eous Kill we were close, and in this film we were close in a dif­fer­ent way. It came rel­a­tive­ly easy to come to that place. I don’t even think we talked about it con­scious­ly, but it was in the writ­ing, of course. And in the nature of the two people’s rela­tion­ship in real life, too.

Scors­ese has said that The Irish­man is a kind of a sum­ma­tion of pre­vi­ous films. Do you feel the same way, with the cast, and the scale of this movie, that it’s a full-cir­cle moment for you?

De Niro: Yeah, in a lot of ways it is. When I was talk­ing to Joe Pesci about it, he was going back and forth, and I said, ​‘Joe, c’mon, you don’t know if we’re going to be able to do this ever again. And for that rea­son itself we should do this.’ And it was tough enough to get it done, tough enough to get the mon­ey to do it. But yeah, it is full cir­cle. I don’t see us doing anoth­er movie like this. Hope­ful­ly we will do oth­er films togeth­er, maybe even some­thing in this genre, you nev­er know. But it’s not like­ly. So this is it, probably.

Is there a rea­son, Al, that you’ve nev­er made a film with Scors­ese before?

Paci­no: I know. Like every­thing in this busi­ness, if you’ve been in it for a while, you realise things get start­ed, and then they go into dif­fer­ent places. They don’t always cul­mi­nate into a film. A cou­ple of times, Mar­ty and I were gonna do some­thing togeth­er. One project par­tic­u­lar­ly was the Modigliani film. We had been work­ing on it for almost a year, and then it slipped away. Either the text doesn’t come togeth­er or sched­ules are dif­fer­ent… it’s odd how that hap­pens. I’m myself sur­prised that I haven’t worked with him.

Do you think regret is a key ele­ment of this char­ac­ter, one that dif­fer­en­ti­ates Frank from oth­er mob­sters you’ve played?

De Niro: The actu­al sit­u­a­tion was that Char­lie Brandt, the author [of the book the film was adapt­ed from, ​‘I Heard You Paint Hous­es’] was a pros­e­cu­tor and a guy who was good at get­ting con­fes­sions out of peo­ple. Frank liked him, and he was an adver­sary in court, but lat­er he hired Brandt to rep­re­sent him and got to know him. Even­tu­al­ly, he got it out of Frank. So, Frank Sheer­an had a lot of Irish-Catholic guilt. That’s just as valid as Jew­ish guilt and Ital­ian guilt, and all the oth­er guilts.

What is it like work­ing now ver­sus when you first started?

Paci­no: It sort of depends on what you’re doing, and some­times you’re work­ing in a way because it’s – I hate to say it – some­times it’s between inspi­ra­tions. I guess you can go 20 years in between inspi­ra­tions. You’re just work­ing, and the work you’re doing to sur­vive is occu­py­ing your abil­i­ty to find some­thing that you real­ly con­nect with and real­ly want to do. So some­times you get back to look­ing around and see­ing what’s out there for you. It’s a lot like any form of expres­sion or creation.

You got the blank page. And hope­ful­ly you keep the blank page, that can­vas is always emp­ty. Because that char­ac­ter you’ve not explored yet, so that gives you some­thing to work for. Some­times, I feel – Bob, I don’t know if you feel the same – I know noth­ing about act­ing. And then you start, and that’s excit­ing for me, and inter­est­ing. There’s some­thing on the hori­zon com­ing. It’s the same thing for me as it always was. You’re still deal­ing with this new per­son, this new char­ac­ter, this new story.

The­mat­i­cal­ly, with The Irish­man, although you were try­ing to make it 10 years ago, it seems very rel­e­vant now, with the gang­ster­i­za­tion of Amer­i­can politics.

De Niro: The unions have been cleaned up more in recent years, but now, we have an imme­di­ate prob­lem. We have a gang­ster pres­i­dent who thinks that he can do any­thing he wants. The gall of the peo­ple around him to actu­al­ly defend him, these Repub­li­cans, is appalling. And we must do some­thing about it. Peo­ple must do some­thing about it. They can’t get away with bul­ly­ing us. They can­not do it. It’s a shame, it’s a shame that peo­ple behave so badly.

Do you think Trump will go to jail?

De Niro: Oh, I can’t wait to see him in jail. I don’t want him to die… I want him to go to jail.

The Irish­man is released 27 Novem­ber via Net­flix. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.