The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

De Niro’s approach did not always work. Later in his career, he struggled with playing normal people in films like Falling in Love, as if, when not called upon to craft a full transformation, he was unsure what to do. His process also required long lead times, and the willing participation of his collaborators in his search for truth. During the filming of Joe Pesci’s reaction shots during Raging Bull’s famous “You fuck my wife?” scene, De Niro ad-libbed “You fuck your mother?” to get a reaction he felt was suitably outraged. According to Jerry Lewis, during the filming of The King of Comedy, De Niro hurled anti-Semitic abuse at him, including “If Hitler had lived, he’d have gotten all you cocksuckers,” to provoke his co-star to an adequate level of rage. While De Niro denied doing more to Lewis than “bust his balls,” Lewis compared working with De Niro to “mak[ing] a deal with the devil,” because the actor “is no fool. He knows his craft,” and was willing to do just about anything to get results. During Midnight Run, De Niro requested that Charles Grodin wear real metal handcuffs, rather than prop rubber or plastic ones, for the sake of realism. Grodin, a student of Uta Hagen’s, acquiesced, and wound up with scars for his trouble. For Mike Nichols’s film of Neil Simon’s Bogart Slept Here, De Niro wanted to live on the set with Marsha Mason, the actress playing his wife (she demurred), couldn’t figure out how to make Simon’s highly technical comedy work, and tried to rewri...