How Robert De Niro tackled playing two mobsters in ‘The Alto Knights’

You talkin’ to me? Effectively, within the new film “The Alto Knights,” in theaters Friday, Robert De Niro is speaking to himself.

For the primary time in his profession, the 81-year-old Oscar winner performs two main roles in the identical movie: mafiosos, mates and rivals Frank Costello and Vito Genovese.

The cinematic maneuver is much more difficult than it sounds. In a number of scenes, Frank and Vito truly sit at a desk and chat with each other.

“It was interesting!” the sport actor mentioned of the unusual expertise on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” 

Director Barry Levinson (“Rain Man”) informed The Publish that the left-field thought was hatched by the movie’s producer Irwin Winkler, who’s labored with De Niro on many initiatives all through his profession equivalent to “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas” and “The Irishman.” 

At first, the extra restrained plan was for De Niro to solely play Costello, the boss of the Luciano crime household in New York from 1937 to 1957. 

“Irwin Winkler one day said, ‘Well, what do you think about the idea of Bob playing both roles? Playing Frank and Vito?” Levinson recalled. 

“And you go, ‘Well, this could be intriguing. I wonder what’s going to happen here. Let’s see what Bob’s reaction is.’ And then Bob responded to it a couple days later, and we proceeded from that point on.”

For Vito, who was the Luciano boss in 1936 earlier than fleeing to Italy, De Niro lends his voice the next pitch and speaks a lot sooner and extra aggressively. He additionally wears prosthetics to vary the looks of his face.

“We’re not doing a comic book character or anything like that,” Levinson mentioned of the shape-shifting make-up. “We need a character you believe that’s the way he looks. And so, you know, we spent, I don’t know, maybe a week working on the two characters and finding the best face that seemed to work best for us.”

Now with a model new mug, how did De Niro, an actor famed for his technique strategy and occasional improvisations, handle to talk with himself on-screen?

“The key to it is: How to make it seem credible and not mechanical,” Levinson mentioned of the difficult job.

“You can’t do both sides, right? You have to do one, then you’ve got to do the other. But how do you make it seem spontaneous? As if it’s all as fluid as the other work in the film?”

First, they labored collectively to tweak dialogue in such a approach to enable for the characters’ sentences to overlap and depart room for astonishing moments. Levinson and De Niro had been decided the scenes in a sweet retailer and a sales space on the Waldorf-Astoria not be robotic.

So the star picked one other actor in “Alto Knights,” Joe Bacino, to stand-in for whichever position he wasn’t taking part in on the time. When De Niro was Vito, Bacino was Frank; when De Niro was Frank, Bacino was Vito.

“It was Bob’s idea,” Levinson mentioned. “He said, ‘You know, I think I could work well with him, because I need an off camera voice, and I don’t want just a script supervisor just giving me the lines. I want somebody that I can really respond to.’”

Solely when the movie was completed may De Niro lastly watch himself with … himself.

“I wasn’t sure how it would work, how well it would work or if it would not work,” he admitted to Seth Meyers. “But I thought it worked OK.”