Ever since he directed Robert Redford to one of his richest, most compelling performances in “The Natural”, Barry Levinson Have had the ability to develop the best in iconic movie stars. Warren Beatty (“Bugsy”), Dustin Hoffman (“Rain Man,” “Sleepers,” “Wag the Dog”), Robin Williams (“Good Morning, Vietnam”), and Michael Douglas and Demi Moore (“Disclosure”), among many others, have done some of their finest work for Levinson in movies that capitalize on their streakths but Provide Opportunities to Deepen and Broaden their Personas.
Even in this company, the relationship between Levinson and Robert De Niro is special. Since they first worked together at “Sleepers” in 1996, Levinson and De Niro have created a series of indelible characters, from Spin Doctor of “Wag the Dog” and the besieged producer of “What happened just?” to real fraud Bernie Madoff in “The Wizard of Lies.” However, these were just a warm -up for Levinson and De Niro’s latest collaboration ”Alto Knights” – A movie that contains two Great De Niro performances at the price of one.
In “The Alto Knights”, De Niro plays both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, criminals who grew up as friends but ended as rivals whose conflicts reshaped organized crime in the 1950s. Levinson credits producer Irwin Winkler with the idea of throwing De Niro in both roles, but notes that it felt like an organic growth of the true history of the screenwriter Nicholas Pelleggi (returning to the environment which he undead in “Goodfellas”) told.
“I thought the idea that Bob would play both were exciting and certainly challenging,” Levinson told IndieWire. “Because childhood friends are similar, and then they begin to grow apart and different emotions develop is an aggressive, a quick speaker, and the other is more intentional.
For every scene where Costello and Genovese interact, Levinson had to plan their shots so that they would feel credible to an audience – in other words, to present the action in the same way he would do if there were two actors, neither used flashy tricks nor avoiding shots with both characters as shares. Some of the most impressive blockages in “The Alto Knights”, as in a scene where Costello and Genovese meet in a candy store and introduced together in a well -worked choreographed tracking shot, are barely noticeable at the first show because it is so organic.
“You have to plot them, and then you basically have two days to shoot each scene,” Levinson said. “You shoot one side and then you shoot the other side, and Bob had an actor he worked with at any time he had one of these scenes, because he didn’t just want a screenwriter who fed him lines.
For Levinson, the key to his partnership with De Niro is their shared desire to listen to each other rather than enter each scene with a predetermined idea of how to do it. “It is not,” you have to do it this way, “said Levinson.” It is: “This is what we want to achieve. Sometimes it comes out in a way that I may not have thought of.
Throughout the process, Levinson was struck by how committed De Niro was for these opportunities and by the actor’s refusal to rest on his warehouses. “He has all possible awards that you can have as one of the great actors, but he not only lets up and goes through the movements,” Levinson said. “We spent days to go over and refine every stage, just fine -tune the language and the different rhythms between the two characters he just works and works on it, with incredible commitment – and then he finds a way and it just comes out and looks like he was doing it all.”
