Читать книгу De Niro: A Biography - John Baxter - Страница 9

I met a man in filmland, a patron of the arts, He bought my scheme to turn my dream into a peeping art.

From tide song of the film Hi, Mom!

As he approached twenty-five, De Niro felt that his working life hadn’t really begun. He had little commitment to acting as a career. ‘I didn’t want to act for a while,’ he later told Chris Hodenfield of Rolling Stone magazine. ‘I was afraid that I would get wrapped up in it so much that I wouldn’t have time to do what I wanted.’ He still thought he might return to Europe, and spend more time in Paris, where he’d enjoyed the sense of anonymity. For the moment, he did the next best thing, playing in occasional off-Broadway plays, just another obscure fringe performer.

But 1968 marked his definitive decision to take acting seriously. ‘When I was about twenty-four or twenty-five,’ he said, ‘I committed; started to look for stuff, go out on auditions, sent out résumés. The whole thing.’

The change had much to do with Brian De Palma, who, having graduated from Sarah Lawrence, continued to make short films. Their voyeuristic undertone was increasingly obvious, particularly in the 1966 Murder à la Mod, a three-part fantasy with a middle section much influenced by Hitchcock. The film attracted interest, but no distributor, so De Palma used his earnings from working in a Village restaurant to hire the Gate Cinema in the East Village and show it himself.

One person who saw it was Charles Hirsch, who had a vague job scouting new talent for Universal, which was toying with the idea of investing in some low-budget features to cash in on the student audience and the art-house boom. Through Hirsch, De Palma got a small development grant from Universal’s parent company, MCA, but they rejected all his ideas as too radical.

De Palma and Hirsch became friends, however, and sat around Universal’s New York office for days on end, talking movies. ‘Out of that frustration,’ says De Palma, ‘smoking cigarettes and waiting for someone to return our calls, we came up with the idea for Greetings.’

The inspiration was Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculine Feminine, a film in fifteen fragments during which Jean-Pierre Léaud moves in with a girl he meets in a café, then spends the rest of the film wandering Paris, quizzing her and her friends about politics and their way of life.

Writing their screenplay, De Palma and Hirsch addressed a similar ragbag of topical issues: marijuana, pornography and censorship, computer dating, the underground press, the new climate of tolerance for homosexuality, the Kennedy assassination; but particularly Vietnam and its manifestations on TV. The three lead characters, Paul, Jon and Lloyd, are all preoccupied with avoiding the draft: the title comes from the preamble of the draft notice – ‘From the President of the United States, Greetings.’

Nobody in Hollywood found the script very funny, so Hirsch offered to produce it, finding the $43,000 budget himself. De Palma rounded up a cast, mostly of old friends prepared to work for little or nothing. Gerrit Graham played Lloyd, the conspiracy theorist, and De Niro, with nothing particular on the horizon, agreed to be the voyeur and De Palma alter ego Jon Rubin. Not yet confident enough to leave his day job, Hirsch waited until his paid vacation, during the thirteen days of which he and De Palma shot the film.

Greetings announced its topicality from the first scene. Audiences accustomed to the kneejerk patriotism of films like The Green Berets hooted as Paul, hoping to be so badly beaten up the army won’t accept him, walks into a tough bar and demands, ‘Which one of you niggers wants to take me on?’ He escapes with only a few cuts and bruises, however, and Lloyd and Jon urge him to think more imaginatively – pretending, for instance, to be homosexual, or part of the fascist underground.

In any event, they decide he should arrive at the recruitment office exhausted, to which end they keep him awake for two nights, dragging him around New York city and involving him in their own obsessions, in Lloyd’s case the Kennedy killing and in Jon’s sex, in particular voyeurism. Lloyd chats with an artist about the way in which photographs, enlarged, can reveal unexpected truths, and even uses the nude body of a girl to mark Kennedy’s wounds and argue that a single bullet couldn’t have caused them. Another conspiracy freak contacts him in the bookshop where he and Jon work, warning him that shadowy forces threaten any who discover The Truth. In the end, a sniper’s bullet makes Lloyd the eighteenth victim of the Kennedy conspiracy.

Meanwhile, Paul tries dating by computer, which matches him with a series of unsatisfactory partners. Jon follows women around New York, filming them. Trailing one to the Whitney Museum, he’s sold a 16mm porn film by a man in the forecourt, who assures him it’s a work of art. He also picks up a shoplifter and persuades her to undress while he films her through a window – supposedly for an art piece. All this ends when he’s drafted, though the last scene shows him as a sniper in Vietnam, less interested in the TV reporter trying to interview him than in the pretty Viet Cong girl glimpsed through his telescopic sight.

While Greetings did imitate the apparent randomness of the nouvelle vague, large sections were as contrived as any Hollywood film. As the three friends, hanging round a clothing shop, discuss ways of ducking the draft, their hats and scarves change arbitrarily from shot to shot, and the client in the foreground suddenly switches places with the seller on the other side of the counter. Gerrit Graham and English pop artist Richard Hamilton sit in a New York park as Hamilton explains how he used photo enlargement in one of his recent works to create an ambiguous image of reality – music to the ears of someone who spends most of his time staring at the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s death.

De Palma shuns stylistic consistency. The three men cavort around Manhattan as if in a New York version of A Hard Day’s Night, and De Palma drops in a speeded-up sex scene which may have inspired Stanley Kubrick to insert a similar sequence into A Clockwork Orange. As in The Wedding Party, titles introduce sub-sections. In one, titled ‘Two Views of Vietnam’, the maker of a Vietnam documentary describes how it was shot, and a man at a party explains in lubricious details the sex and drugs available in Saigon.

But the film’s naïveté is deceptive. Shot by shot, De Palma transforms the audience into voyeurs, luring us, as does Hitchcock in Rear Window, from casual curiosity to an obsessive interest in what’s happening through the window opposite. He opens the film with a TV speech by Lyndon Johnson to the American labour organisation AFL/CIO, urging America to fight in Vietnam to protect the American Way. It’s shot from a TV screen, and in a domestic interior, as if we’re watching over someone’s shoulder (a copy of the book Six Seconds in Dallas sits prominently next to the set). De Palma filmed some scenes with a hidden camera, including the long conversation between De Niro and the pornographer, and others, the framing slightly off-centre, with people wandering in and out of the background, as if the actors weren’t aware of the camera.

De Niro worked on the role of Jon with the zeal that became his trademark. ‘It was make-up and clothes that changed his look,’ said De Palma, ‘but it was more than that. He had inhabited the character, and become different physically.’ Picking up on De Niro’s enthusiasm, Alan Goorwitz, a friend from the Village who’d joined the Actors Studio and changed his name to Allen Garfield, agreed to come up to the Whitney Museum and improvise the scene as the pornographer. De Niro also improvised most of his scenes with Rutanya Aida as the shoplifter who strips on film for him. As she peels, he keeps up a running commentary that is also a parody of Strasberg’s Method, explaining that this is a ‘private moment’ and that she should behave naturally, as if unaware of an audience.

Unexpectedly, Greetings was a commercial success, in part because its nudity won it an X certificate, which brought people flocking. Its sarcastic view of Vietnam also harmonised with the prevailing cynicism. The film opened on 16 December 1968. Four days earlier, the embarrassed incoming administration of Richard Nixon, who’d squeaked to a narrow election win in November, announced that American fatalities in Vietnam, now the longest war in American history, numbered 30,007, almost ten thousand of them killed in the first six months of that year.

To De Niro, Greetings didn’t look like the kind of film likely to launch him in movies, even if that had been his ambition. Like Pacino and his other friends and competitors, he thought of himself as pre-eminently a stage performer. The best theatre on the east coast was being done by regional repertory companies like the Long Wharf and the Boston Theater Company, and in 1969 De Niro signed up to work with the latter under its innovative producer David Wheeler – only, paradoxically, to receive almost immediately an invitation to make his first Hollywood film.

1967 had been the year of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, and half of Hollywood seemed intent on trying to repeat its enormous success. Among the first out of the gate was Roger Corman at American-International Pictures, the king of exploitation movies, who announced Bloody Mama, based on the exploits of 1930s gangster ‘Ma’ Barker and her four homicidal sons. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway had re-invented Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow as star-crossed lovers driven by sexual passion and a lust for fame. In case anyone missed the point, the poster copy read, ‘They’re Young. They’re in Love. They Rob Banks. They Kill People.’ The teenage drive-in cinema audience that was AIP’s biggest market lapped it up. James Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, AIP’s owners, instantly understood the lesson of Bonnie and Clyde – that some Hollywood stars would now appear in what had formerly been ghetto genres. Known until then almost entirely for biker pictures and cheap science-fiction and horror films, particularly a series of Edgar Allan Poe fantasies directed by Corman, the company branched out into crime films. In 1967, Jason Robards Jr, then reviving his career between bouts of alcoholism, let himself be miscast as Al Capone in Corman’s The St Valentine’s Day Massacre. The following year, someone at the company saw Shelley Winters playing in two episodes of the spoof Batman TV series as ‘Ma Parker’, a twenties-style gang boss. AIP made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.

With Don Peters, Oscar-nominated for his screenplay for Cornel Wilde’s 1966 The Naked Prey, Robert Thorn, an AIP regular, wrote a treatment based on the Barkers’ career, but Corman found ‘some of the sequences … simply crazy’.

The writers erred by sticking too closely to the unglamorous facts. Notwithstanding the notice at the start of the film that ‘Any similarity to Kate Barker and her sons is intentional’, Thorn’s revised screenplay had little to do with reality. The real Arizona Clark Barker was anything but a criminal mastermind. ‘The old woman couldn’t plan breakfast,’ complained one gang member. ‘When we’d sit down to plan a bank job, she’d go in the other room and listen to Amos and Andy or hillbilly music on the radio.’

Nor was her family the tight criminal unit shown in the film. Her eldest son, Herman, killed himself in 1927 after being wounded by police. Both Lloyd and Arthur, alias ‘Dock’, drew long jail sentences in the late twenties. Lloyd, the character De Niro played in the film, stayed in jail until 1938, after which he managed a bar and grill in Denver, Colorado, until 1949, when his wife murdered him. He wasn’t anywhere near Lake Weir, Florida, where Freddie, Ma, Arthur Dunlop and Alvin ‘Creepy’ Karpis died in a furious machine-gun battle in January 1935.

Determined to outdo Bonnie and Clyde, Corman ladled on violence, with a sixties spicing of incest, nudity and drugs. Kate, now younger, more intelligent and attractive than the real Ma Barker, dominates the story, living and stealing with all her boys, three of whom survive to die with her at Lake Weir. Freddie and Herman do get sent to jail, but Ma robs enough banks to hire a good lawyer and have them released. Lloyd isn’t present at the shootout, but not because he’s in jail. The film turns him into a drug addict, a glue-sniffer who graduates to heroin and dies of an overdose.

Corman assembled the usual AIP cast of wannabes and has-beens, anchored by a few pros. This produced a family oddly mismatched in height, build and hair colour. Don Stroud, 190cm tall, an ex-surfer and nightclub bouncer, towered over Clint Kimbrough and Robert Walden, who played Arthur and Fred. In 1968 Stroud had been the heavy in Coogan’s Bluff opposite Clint Eastwood, but Kimbrough and Warden had almost no film experience, though Walden would later become familiar in TV series like Lou Grant.

To back them up, AIP veteran Bruce Dern played an invented character, Kevin Dirkman, while the part of Herman’s girlfriend Mona went unexpectedly to a classic Hollywood casualty, Diane Varsi. After an Oscar nomination in 1958 for her role as Lana Turner’s daughter in Peyton Place, Varsi’s career nose-dived when she broke her contract in 1959 and fled Hollywood, supposedly to ‘retire’ but actually to keep the illegitimate child she wasn’t prepared to abort or adopt. In 1969, she’d just returned to films and was taking any roles she could get.

Into this mix, Winters introduced her protégé, Bobby De Niro. Corman says he’d watched at least some of De Niro’s work before casting him, but it would hardly have mattered if he hadn’t. On paper, Winters and Stroud dominated the film. The remaining meat of the script went to Robert Walden’s Fred and his masochistic relationship with the bisexual sadist Dirkman, whom he meets in prison and brings home to join the gang, and to oust Herman as Ma’s lover. De Niro as Lloyd looked to be just along for the ride.

Having Shelley Winters in the cast inspired AIP to spend more money than usual. Most of the performers, including Winters, had Los Angeles homes and so didn’t need hotels, but De Niro was put up at the Beverly Hilton, a luxury he didn’t expect or demand; he’d have been just as happy in a tent. By then, however, Winters doted on her protégé no less than did Ma on her boys. ‘Bobby needs someone to watch over him,’ she announced. ‘He doesn’t even know enough to wear a coat in the winter time. When we did Bloody Mama, he didn’t even know how much they were paying him. I found out how little it was and insisted they at least give him some expense money. He was broke all the time, but wouldn’t take money from anybody. So I figured out ways of giving him money without him even knowing about it.’

‘Location shooting’ for AIP normally meant driving up to Vasquez Rocks with a box lunch, but Bloody Mama would be shot in Arkansas, and on a generous schedule, at least by AIP standards. ‘It was a four-week picture,’ Corman says, ‘and that was long for me. I don’t think I’d ever done one before that ever required more than a three-week shoot. But I had looked at the script and I said, “This is going to be very tough. We’re filming all over the state. We’re going to be in the Ozarks in northern Arkansas, then we’re going to be filming around Little Rock and various other places. I really need four weeks.” And they gave them to me.’

In deference to the Method-trained Winters, Walden and De Niro, Corman agreed to rehearse some scenes and even accept a little improvisation – a novelty for a film-maker who once shot an entire feature in one weekend. Mostly, however, Bloody Mama proceeded on the well-worn grooves of the gangster genre. Undeterred, De Niro researched his part with dedication. Arriving a few days early in Arkansas, he loitered round the locals until he learned their speech rhythms – learned them so well, in fact, that Corman suggested he coach the rest of the cast. That was a waste of time, since those who bothered with any accent chose the standard Southern drawl.

In response, and to make his character more memorable, De Niro adopted the most distinctive voice in the film, a murmured sing-song, shot through with echoes of a giggle that harmonised with the snatches of hymns he quotes. This, and an infantile innocence, would characterise his performance, as Shelley Winters discovered when she started the first scene, in which she has to give her boys a bath.

Seeing her hesitation, De Niro came over to her. ‘What’s the matter, Shelley?’

‘I’m upset because I have to bathe five grown men in this scene, and I don’t even know all of you.’

‘But Shelley,’ De Niro said dreamily, ‘we’re all your babies.’

Lloyd’s gentleness makes him unquestionably the most sinister of the Barker boys. Mona, Herman’s mistress, is ready to pleasure his brothers if that’s what he wants, but she draws the line at Lloyd. Watching her through a screen door as she strolls naked around the room, smoking a cigarette, an aggrieved Lloyd whines, ‘Everyone knows what she can do. She can do it even better than Ma.’

Piqued, Mona taunts, ‘You should try my pie crust, little boy. It would melt in your mouth.’

In the end, however, Lloyd prefers dope. Corman, who the year before directed The Trip, an apologia for LSD, not surprisingly drew Lloyd as a holy fool on a permanent high. There’s a goofy domesticity in the way he sniffs glue in the parlour, watched by an uncomprehending Ma (‘When you’re working on those model airplanes, you get to acting awful silly’). The first time we see him shooting up, he’s in the depths of shrubbery, Corman pulling back to show him framed by flowers. When he dies, it’s curled up, smiling and apparently asleep, in the plants at the edge of a lake – ‘Like Moses,’ says his brother.

Such religious references pepper Lloyd’s lines. When Rembrandt (Pamela Dunlap) swims up to him while he’s enjoying a high at the end of a pier, his feet with their two-toned shoes immersed in the water, he murmurs, ‘Jesus, lover of my soul!’ in surprise.

Even though it copies Clyde Barrow’s meditation on his sexual dysfunction from Bonnie and Clyde, the subsequent scene is one of De Niro’s best in the film. ‘Sometimes I can make it. Sometimes I can’t,’ Lloyd muses as he sprawls on top of the complaisant Rembrandt. ‘You can’t hit the jackpot every time.’ He confesses that ‘everything frightens me’, and shows her his needle-marked arms. Spooked, she tries to escape, but the rest of the family drag her inside, tie her to the bed and rape her, after which Herman and Ma drown her in the bath.

De Niro’s involvement in Bloody Mama has gathered an extensive mythology, with Winters the largest contributor. ‘I thought he was concentrating too much on externals,’ she has said. ‘I mean, the things he did to his body! He was a wizard, though. He can blush or turn white just like that! But he broke out in sores. He refused to eat, and drank only water. He must’ve lost thirty pounds. Just to look like an addict.’

Corman denies most of this. De Niro did diet, but not to excess, and indeed doesn’t look any thinner on film than Walden, Kimbrough or Dern. However, Corman confirms that, on location, De Niro, as he would do habitually for the rest of his career, remained in character as the perennially stoned Lloyd even after hours, and stayed largely aloof from the rest of the cast.

In particular, Winters’ description of filming Lloyd’s burial is cemented into the De Niro legend. ‘On the day we were to shoot the burial scene,’ she’s said, ‘I walked over to the open grave, looked down and got the shock of my life. “Bobby!” I screamed. “I don’t believe this! You get out of that grave this minute!” To see the character through to the end, he had actually got down into the pit and half covered himself with dirt so that his fellow actors would look down and get an honest reaction.’

This would not have been out of character for De Niro, but, unfortunately for Winters’ story, there is no burial in Bloody Mama, and no grave. De Niro agreed he did ‘play dead’ in one scene, but it was the one in which he’s found curled up in the grass.

‘I was just lying in that state, without getting up,’ he explained later. ‘It seemed like an easy thing to do and I wanted to help the actors, because once they saw me like that, they were forced to deal with it.’ Which they do, staring down at him, apparently asleep, then gradually coming to the understanding that Lloyd is dead – followed by the thought, ‘How do we tell Ma?’

This was Winters’ cue to enter. The day before, she’d announced that she would find inspiration for the scene by spending the morning in a Little Rock funeral parlour, fully made-up and costumed as Ma. Corman was not to bring her to the location until they needed her.

When she arrived on the set, it was in the grip of a creative jag verging on hysteria. Finding that Herman and Kevin aren’t even there, but out in a boat machine-gunning a famous local alligator (a true incident), she stands at the edge of the water and bellows for them to come and mourn their brother. There follows some desultory grave-digging by Fred and Arthur, watched by Mona, then a hysterical outburst from Ma. Corman tried to rein Winters back, but Robert Walden dissuaded him. ‘Be very careful,’ he warned. ‘She’s in the part. Don’t do anything that might take her out.’ Deferring to someone who knew the needs of the Method, Corman went along. The result was high-adrenalin emoting on the Strasberg model, and hilariously false.

Whatever its limitations, De Niro’s performance is one of the few in the film that aspires to go beyond cliché. Only Diane Varsi as Mona creates anything like the same sense of personality. Her anachronistically curly hair and small breasts with their tweaked nipples, her puzzled confessions of love for Herman and her sense of ‘How did I get into this?’ breathe the perfume of regret that also permeates the films of James Dean. Under a different director and in a better project, she and De Niro could have made beautiful music together, but, one on his way up, the other on her way down, they were destined never to do so.

If Bloody Mama did nothing else, it opened De Niro’s eyes to the possibilities of film acting. Since there was no ‘real’ Lloyd Barker, it had been necessary to invent one, and in doing so he found that Stella Adler’s training prepared him well. Once he had visualised the character completely and understood his motivations, he could make informed choices about Lloyd’s tone of voice, his way of dressing and moving. The technique operated creakily in Bloody Mama, but Lloyd is as recognisable a De Niro character as Vito Corleone in The Godfather II and Max Cady in Cape Fear.

Like the great impersonating actors of the twenties and thirties whom he increasingly resembled, De Niro came to believe that creating a convincing character demanded detailed research and physical effort, even suffering. One had to ‘earn the right’ to play that person. The theory would cause him considerable discomfort, but would produce his best work.

De Niro and Winters returned to New York, Bobby scuffling for the same jobs with Pacino, who was increasingly regarded, with some judicious promotion from his friends at the Actors Studio, as the coming young actor. He had even gone to the Boston Theater Company and scored the success that might have been De Niro’s.

Pacino was then living with Jill Clayburgh, whom he’d met in Boston. They shared a hard-drinking lifestyle. Pacino and De Niro shared something too, since both had been involved with Susan Tyrrell, a minor actress and major party animal who’d appeared in films like Andy Warhol’s Bad, and at the time was Sally Kirkland’s flatmate. Tyrrell, shortly to earn an Academy Award nomination in John Huston’s Fat City, radiated a sensuality that was echoed in her activities off-screen, which she made the subject of a sour one-woman show in 1990 called My Rotten Life. Shelley Winters has described an incident from the period that almost certainly refers to De Niro’s relationship with Tyrrell and its conclusion. ‘I gave a Thanksgiving party. Invited all my theatrical waifs, my babies. Bobby was there, waiting for his date, a young actress he had a crush on. She didn’t show up until dessert. She sort of floated in. “Oh, hi, Bobby …” He went into the bedroom and pounded on the headboard with his fist. He was crying. He never talked to her again.’

Editing on Bloody Mama finished at the end of 1969 but the film didn’t open until March 1970. To reinforce the thirties look, not very well realised, Corman inserted old newsreels, with a voice-over from Winters to remind people when the story was set. By the time it was ready, the Actors Playhouse on 7th Avenue in the Village had accepted Winters’ play for production, and De Niro was headed for another stage role that might, he hoped, launch him into the same orbit as Brando.

Much rewritten, with the injection of more sex and profanity, the piece, originally called ‘Gestations of a Weather Man’, had become One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger. The three one-act plays, each with a different cast, depicted stages in the life of an actress not a million miles from the author. In the first, Sally Kirkland was the actress and Richard Lynch the man who arouses her latent leftist tendencies. Joanna Miles played her in the second segment, located in Paris, against the background of the Korean War and the anti-Communist blacklist. The third and longest section, called Last Stand, took place in the present. The actress was played by Diane Ladd, married to Bruce Dern and even then pregnant with the young Laura Dern.

In the play, Ladd’s character has just won her Academy Award, and meets an arrogant young actor at the celebratory party. He spikes her drink with LSD, and after a dazed candle-lit seduction during which the actor is revealed as a karate fanatic and bisexual, they end up in bed.

Winters pleased De Niro by offering him this role. He learned to splinter planks with his bare hand, and worked diligently with Ladd on developing his character, despite the interference of Winters, who doubled as director, and insisted on De Niro appearing mostly in a pair of abbreviated floral briefs. But the opening on 17 November 1970 became a debacle when Actors’ Equity walked out of seventeen off-Broadway theatres, the Actors Playhouse among them, in a dispute over wages. Winters wept as those few actors in the piece who weren’t old friends refused to appear. The curtain didn’t rise, and stayed down until 30 December, by which time Joanna Miles had taken another job.

The few people who saw the play when it did finally open felt De Niro succeeded in his melodramatic role, though Winters, with her usual hyperbole, said it was ‘like watching sexual lightning on stage. Every night was a different performance.’ Some were more different than others. On one occasion, De Niro, without alerting Ladd, placed additional lighted candles on stage for their love scene. As Ladd got out of bed and began to dress, a sleeve caught fire. An anguished Winters rushed down the aisle, but Ladd had enough presence of mind to snuff the flames out and carry on.

The following morning Ladd abused both De Niro and Winters for their lack of professionalism, but by then catastrophic reviews had condemned the piece to death. One critic found it a ‘foolish and vulgar affair’. Another compared it to ‘an evening of audition material’. To a third, it was ‘a trio of tawdry peepshows’ which ‘makes sex so ugly and dull that even the most ardent voyeur would be turned off’. The Village Voice, in an otherwise negative review, rated De Niro ‘stunning’, but that wasn’t enough to save the play, which closed after seven performances. Winters was in tears. ‘I’ve been clobbered, and I’m in a daze,’ she sobbed. ‘Nobody understands my plays.’

De Niro quickly put the failure of One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger behind him. He continued to make brief stage appearances, mostly off-Broadway or in short repertory seasons, but the action was moving to Hollywood as the best young directors, writers and performers in live TV drama and the stage followed their audience to the movies. In 1967, one film, The Graduate, earned more money than the whole Broadway season combined.

With the New York pond smaller, those actors who remained there had to struggle harder for work. The atmosphere drove De Niro’s already furious ambition. Roy Scheider remembers going up against him for a part on Broadway. ‘I got it,’ he recalled. ‘And a couple of days later I was in Joe Allan’s, and De Niro was at another table. He stared across at me, and I thought, “Wow, this guy really means it.”’

Unable to shake off the characters of Greetings, De Niro started writing a screenplay about a man based on an amalgam of Jon and Lloyd – a young drifter in New York, fascinated with assassinations. He found writing was harder than it looked. Non-verbal, he was non-literate too. Years later, he would admit, ‘I couldn’t sit down and write – I had ideas, I’d always be making notes about things, but I just couldn’t have the discipline to sit down and write. It’s another type of discipline, that’s hard. I could co-write something, collaborate in a certain way, but not really the way you have to in order to come up with a screenplay.’

He would later show what he’d written of this screenplay to Paul Schrader, the eventual screenwriter of Taxi Driver. Schrader remembers the incident well. ‘I said to him, “Do you know what the gun in your script represents?” I said it was obvious to me that it was his talent, which was like a loaded gun hidden in him that nobody would let him shoot, and that if somebody would just let him fire once, the whole world would see the enormous impact his talent would have.’