INTERVIEW: Robert De Niro and Nicholas Pileggi Discuss Their Friendship, Collaboration, and The Alto Knights

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Like the topics of their new movie The Alto Knights, Robert De Niro and Nicholas Pileggi have had a decades-long bond.

“I read a great piece that [Pileggi] had done in New York Magazine about Little Italy,” Robert De Niro tells me after we sit down to debate his new movie The Alto Knights. “I actually told Marty [Scorsese] about him. I said, ‘You gotta read this thing. It’s great.’ God, this was more than 60 years ago.”

Pileggi has made a profession from mob tales, penning legendary Scorsese scripts and the books they had been primarily based on, courting again to his debut screenplay 1990’s GoodFellas, which earned him an Oscar nomination.

“I’m just fascinated by the subject, and I’ve been writing about it since I was a journalist at the Associated Press,” he says.

The seed of their newest collaboration, The Alto Knights, dates again to 1974, serving as a testomony to how persistence is required to carry a narrative to the massive display.

“We’d already told the story about the young mob, and we all know about how the mob lost Las Vegas, sitting on billions of dollars and screwed that up,” says Pileggi. “[The Alto Knights] was the end of how it all ended, and I thought Frank Costello and Vito Genovese told that story.”

What Is The Alto Knights About?

Born January 26, 1891, Frank Costello moved from Italy to the USA when he was a boy, turning into the boss of the Genovese crime household in 1937 when his good buddy, Vito Genovese, fled the nation after a double murder.

The Alto Knights follows the interval when Vito returns to the USA, eager to reclaim his title.

Robert De Niro on Becoming a member of The Alto Knights

De Niro takes on the function of each Frank and Vito in The Alto Knights, telling me, “We both felt that I should play Costello, but then who would play Vito?”

The seek for Vito was reduce brief when producer Irwin Winkler prompt De Niro play each roles.

“I said, let me think about that,” De Niro says. “I wanted to work with everybody again. I’d known them so long and worked so many times with everybody that it was like Old Home Week.”

“I definitely wanted to do it and would’ve done it anyway, but the fact that Irwin brought this up made it more enticing and more of a justification on many levels,” he continues. “I said, yeah, okay, I’ll do it.”

Robert De Niro and Nicholas Pileggi on The Alto Knights

“I noticed it was called Wise Guys at that time,” De Niro says. “[Vito] had a social club called ‘The Alto Knights’. [Nick] and I had a meeting. I said, ‘Where did you get this place, The Alto Knights? When I was a kid, I would hang out there.'”

Nicholas Pileggi had his personal connection to the social membership, taken over by Genovese within the ’50s.

“I used to walk by it all the time, and I knew it because I was a reporter covering that area,” Pileggi says. “Bob had a picture… [turning to De Niro] you had a picture of yourself in front of that club as a 16-year-old kid.”

The 2 reminisce, and Pileggi says, “We both had a personal knowledge of the neighborhood. I knew the club. I knew the neighborhood. Bob grew up there as a kid, so we both know that world a little bit, and we’ve been writing about or being in movies about organized crime in that world.”

Robert De Niro on Taking part in Two Roles in The Alto Knights

As soon as De Niro received on set, he knew he wished somebody to bounce strains off of throughout filming.

“The thing that I realized was that I couldn’t just do it with somebody reading lines to me,” he says. “The other mob characters were cast already, so I interviewed a few of them to see who would be the best as the other actor opposite me. There was one actor who played [Joe] Profaci named Joe Bacino. Joe learned the two scenes, and we worked on them until maybe two weeks before we were gonna shoot them. I couldn’t have done it without having another person like him do it.”

Nicholas Pileggi Discusses the Language of The Alto Knights

Having the right actor shouldn’t be sufficient with out having the right script to match. The Alto Knights has reams of rhythmic dialogue impressed by the sample of the folks inside that world.

“I try to get as close to the original language as I can,” Pileggi says. “A lot of this stuff is later testified to in court or court records. The FBI has recordings of a lot of organized crime guys talking, so what I try to do is get as close to the real voices of these men and their inflections, and what they say, and their rhythm.”

Robert De Niro and Nicholas Pileggi on the Collaborative Effort of The Alto Knights

The Alto Knights jumps round in time, a call which got here throughout the making of the movie, with Pileggi revealing, “Sometimes the screenplay works perfectly fine, but all of a sudden the director sees something that the screenwriter might not see. Or an actor might see something and say, ‘Wait a minute, what if this scene came before that scene? What if we open when he gets shot instead of opening at the Copacabana?'”

As De Niro talked about, telling this story is a homecoming for the crew. With so many good folks on set, concepts had been bouncing round.

“We shot this two years ago,” De Niro says. “The time that we had because of the strike and because of – I don’t know if COVID had affected us – but the strike and then getting it released at a time that Warner Brothers felt would be the best time gave Barry and Nick and Irwin and myself, to some degree, to look at versions and have Barry re-work some of the stuff with the editing and so on, which I think improved the film even more. As Nick says, it’s collaborative.”

Pileggi provides, “It’s an orchestra. There’s no one instrument.”

Nicholas Pileggi on the Kefauver Hearings in The Alto Knights

One in every of The Alto Knights‘ most gripping moments is pulled straight from actual life, the place Frank Costello went earlier than the USA Senate Particular Committee to Examine Crime in Interstate Commerce.

Reduce like a sports activities match by editor Douglas Crise, Pileggi reveals what makes the second so vibrant and why he needed to embrace it in his screenplay.

“It’s an astounding thing, and it happens in real-time in real life,” Pileggi says. “You can’t improve upon the reality of that moment. That, I think, is what makes this film so close to the truth. It’s about as close to the truth as you can get, and that’s what people are seeing, I think. They’ll see how it really happened. How it went down.”

Nicholas Pileggi on Tales He’d Like To Inform Subsequent

When requested what tales he’d like to inform subsequent, Pileggi chuckles and says, “Well I don’t know if I’ll give that out.”

However there’s one second from The Alto Knights that also has him pondering.

“The business in the movie where you [turning to De Niro] get the divorce from your wife… Vito Genovese. That actually happened,” Pileggi says. “I got all those court papers. All of that is real dialogue. This man’s wife actually sues him. Anna actually sues Vito. Who would believe you’d have this divorce court… Vito Genovese in divorce court. In New Jersey. And it all happened. And it’s in that movie. None of that’s made up, and it lends a reality to what is basically fantastic stories.”

When Is The Alto Knights Launched?

The Alto Knights hits theaters on March 21, 2025.