De Niro Quotes

“He’s gone the other way. He’s used his emptiness—he’s reached down into his own anomie. Only Brando has done this kind of plunging, and De Niro’s performance has something of the undistanced intensity that Brando’s had in Last Tango.” Even more ecstatically, Jack Kroll of Newsweek”
― Shawn Levy, De Niro: A Life

“He has hints of Brando’s jowliness and one of Brando’s most famous lines—“I make an offer he don’t refuse”—but more than that he has Brando’s bearing.”
― Shawn Levy, De Niro: A Life

“He also, of course, had to calibrate his performance to match Brando’s. The Don Corleone whom Brando had made world-famous had certain physical, vocal, and behavioral characteristics that De Niro would have to incorporate in his portrayal of the younger man in order to make the connection between the two credible to audiences.”
― Shawn Levy, De Niro: A Life

“And then came Jane Rosenthal (De Niro's handpicked CEO to oversee his production company). She had adored Rocky and Bullwinkle as a girl, and her husband, real estate investor Craig Hatkoff, had made a Valentine’s Day present to her of the collected series on DVD. She, like others before her, thought there was a potential film in Ward’s iconic characters and surreal sensibility, and in 1998 she negotiated a deal with Universal Pictures to acquire the rights and produce a $75 million film for the summer moviegoing season.”

...Fearless Leader, a role for which Rosenthal thought De Niro was perfect. When she asked him, she recalled, “he really laughed at me.… He didn’t grow up watching it. It wasn’t his thing.” But she persisted. “I was always joking with him about it. Then I finally said, ‘Okay, you’ve got to get serious here. It’s a three-week role. Do you want it or not?’ ” Amazingly—perhaps because he knew the film was, as he called it, “Jane’s baby”—he did.

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― Shawn Levy, De Niro: A Life

“Paul Schrader drove past theaters in New York where the film originally played and were at once thrilled and sickened to see lines of young men dressed in Bickle’s familiar outfit of army fatigues and blue jeans, waiting to see the film for, presumably, second and third go-rounds.”
― Shawn Levy, De Niro: A Life