Ever since he directed Robert Redford to one of his richest, most compelling performances in “The Natural,” Barry Levinson has had a knack for bringing out 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 strengths 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 on “Sleepers” in 1996, Levinson and De Niro have created a series of indelible characters, from the spin doctor of “Wag the Dog” and the beleaguered producer of “What Just Happened?” to real-life fraudster Bernie Madoff in “The Wizard of Lies.” These were all just a warm-up, however, for Levinson and De Niro’s latest collaboration “The Alto Knights” — a movie that contains two great De Niro performances for the price of one.
In “The Alto Knights,” De Niro plays both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, crime bosses 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 casting De Niro in both roles, but notes that it felt like an organic outgrowth of the true story screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi (returning to the milieu he immortalized in “GoodFellas”) was telling.
“I thought the idea of Bob playing both parts was intriguing, and certainly challenging,” Levinson told IndieWire. “Because as childhood friends they’re similar, and then they begin to grow apart and different sensibilities evolve. One is aggressive, a fast talker, and the other is more deliberate. Bob was very meticulous about shaping those rhythms and ultimately finding two distinctive looks.”
For each scene in which Costello and Genovese interact, Levinson had to plan his shots so that they would feel credible to an audience — in other words, to present the action the same way he would if it were two actors, neither employing showy tricks nor avoiding shots with both characters sharing the frame for logistical ease. Some of the most impressive blocking in “The Alto Knights,” as in a scene where Costello and Genovese meet in a candy store and are introduced together in an elaborately choreographed tracking shot, is barely noticeable on first viewing because it’s so organic.
“You have to plot those out, 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 that he worked with anytime he had one of those scenes, because he didn’t just want a script supervisor feeding him lines. He wanted a really good actor that he could play off of to help his reactions.”
For Levinson, the key to his partnership with De Niro is their shared willingness to listen to each other rather than enter each scene with a predetermined notion of how to execute it. “It’s not, ‘You’ve got to do it this way,’” Levinson said. “It’s, ‘This is what we want to accomplish. What’s the best way to do it?’ Sometimes it comes out in a way I might not have thought of. Bob and I will go in with certain ideas but you explore and you go, wait a minute, there’s something interesting here — let’s explore that. You don’t want to be rigid. There has to be a certain kind of elasticity to explore the possibilities of any given scene.”
Throughout the process, Levinson was struck by how committed De Niro was to those possibilities, and by the actor’s refusal to rest on his laurels. “He’s got every imaginable accolade that you can have as one of the great actors, but he does not just let up and go through the motions,” Levinson said. “We spent days going over and refining every scene, just tweaking the language and the different rhythms between the two characters. He just works and works at it, with incredible commitment — and then he finds a way and it just comes out and looks like he made it all up.”
