Who’s Scorsese’s Bestfella? De Niro and DiCaprio face off on screen
Martin Scorsese at last has brought his two leading men, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, together in the same film.
Eight years ago, Martin Scorsese directed a 16-minute advert called The Audition, for which he was paid a lot of money, to advertise a casino in Macau.
Proof that cinema is finally dead? Not at all. This ad – which can be found on YouTube – is a surreal, self-aware blast. It has Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio playing themselves, reportedly paid $US13m each for two days’ work.
For a long time it was also a collector’s item for the director’s fans: the only chance to see his two favourite leading men in a Scorsese film together.
The plot involves the actors competing for the same role in a Scorsese film, the joke being that both men claim him as their own.
The competition gets testy. DiCaprio derides his rival as “Big Bobby D”, who calls the younger man “a child” – then insults his little beard. In the end, Scorsese ditches them both and chooses Brad Pitt.
The Audition is a silly, if surprisingly worthwhile, sellout, which raises a question: which of the two stars is Scorsese’s greatest muse?
Both actors emerged in glittering decades for film – De Niro in the 1970s, DiCaprio the ’90s. But cinema is different today and the grown-up movies they love to make have become rarer in an industry largely built around teen-pandering projects that feature lead characters in spandex backed by computer-generated effects.
To the rescue, then, is Killers of the Flower Moon: a Scorsese epic that has its world premiere at the Cannes film festival on Saturday.
It stars not only De Niro but DiCaprio too. Adapted from David Grann’s nonfiction book of the same name and set in the 1920s, it concerns the serial murders of members of the Native American Osage tribe following the discovery of oil on their land in Oklahoma. The resulting investigation played a formative role in the emergence of the FBI.
The film had a $US200m ($300m) budget and runs for three hours, 26 minutes (slightly shorter than the director’s previous film, The Irishman).
Scorsese, 80, is evidently delighted to have brought the two stars together again for such an extended run in his 27th film as director. “This is my sixth film with Leo, my 10th with De Niro, and my first with both,” he has said. Scorsese knows the significance of these icons sharing a screen, as they did for DiCaprio’s breakthrough, This Boy’s Life, by Scottish director Michael Caton-Jones, in 1993.
At the time DiCaprio really was just a boy. “I got into this business because I worked with De Niro,” DiCaprio said.
“I wanted to see everything that he had done and that led me to this guy called Martin Scorsese. Since I was 16, they’ve been my mentors, icons, heroes.”
When Scorsese works with either man, the results are often electric. Most of De Niro’s credits with him roll off the tongue: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, New York New York, Raging Bull, King of Comedy, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino and The Irishman.
“I know of nobody who can surprise me on screen the way he does,” Scorsese said once. “No actor comes to mind who can provide such power and excitement.”
About DiCaprio, he says: “Leo has a similar sensibility to me. I’m 30 years older than him, but we see the world the same way.”
And while DiCaprio’s collaborations – Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island and The Wolf of Wall Street – are less renowned than De Niro’s, it is superb work.
The pair have between them made four films, with Scorsese nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards. Only The Departed won. It also gave Scorsese his sole best director Oscar.
Conventional wisdom puts De Niro as the muse of choice: the mohawk of Taxi Driver; the slo-mo end of Raging Bull; even the prescience of the TV satire King of Comedy.
That is cinema that has stood the test of nearly 50 years, while DiCaprio’s films with Scorsese have proved more divisive.
The Wolf of Wall Street is derided as misogynistic (its defenders argue instead that it is a portrayal of misogyny), while Gangs of New York is often thought of as one that Harvey Weinstein botched through extensive cutting.
But DiCaprio deserves more reverence, not least because he and Scorsese are making big-budget films for adults that nobody else is, as opposed to De Niro’s heyday.
And DiCaprio is the one getting them made. He is an executive producer on Killers of the Flower Moon and the duo have The Wager, a naval epic, in the works.
“When you’re young,” Scorsese has said, “and have that first burst of energy, you make five or six pictures in a row that tell the stories of all the things in life that you want to say.”
DiCaprio, though, is energising Scorsese at the other end of his career – and is that not more impressive?
The Times