Barry Levinson Directs Two Robert De Niros for The Alto Knights

Ever since he directed Robert Redford to one in all his richest, most compelling performances in “The Natural,” Barry Levinson has had a knack for bringing out the most effective in iconic film stars. Warren Beatty (“Bugsy”), Dustin Hoffman (“Rain Man,” “Sleepers,” “Wag the Dog”), Robin Williams (“Good Morning, Vietnam”), and Michael Douglas and Demi Moore (“Disclosure”), amongst many others, have finished a few of their best work for Levinson in films that capitalize on their strengths however present alternatives to deepen and broaden their personas.

Even on this firm, the connection between Levinson and Robert De Niro is particular. Since they first labored collectively on “Sleepers” in 1996, Levinson and De Niro have created a collection of indelible characters, from the spin physician of “Wag the Dog” and the beleaguered producer of “What Just Happened?” to real-life fraudster Bernie Madoff in “The Wizard of Lies.” These had been all only a warm-up, nevertheless, for Levinson and De Niro’s newest collaboration “The Alto Knights” — a film that incorporates two nice De Niro performances for the worth of 1.

In “The Alto Knights,” De Niro performs each Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, crime bosses who grew up as mates however ended as rivals whose conflicts reshaped organized crime within the Nineteen Fifties. Levinson credit producer Irwin Winkler with the concept of casting De Niro in each roles, however notes that it felt like an natural 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 advised 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 every scene through which Costello and Genovese work together, Levinson needed to plan his photographs in order that they’d really feel credible to an viewers — in different phrases, to current the motion the identical approach he would if it had been two actors, neither using showy methods nor avoiding photographs with each characters sharing the body for logistical ease. A few of the most spectacular blocking in “The Alto Knights,” as in a scene the place Costello and Genovese meet in a sweet retailer and are launched collectively in an elaborately choreographed monitoring shot, is barely noticeable on first viewing as a result of it’s so natural.

“You have to plot those out, and then you basically have two days to shoot each scene,” Levinson mentioned. “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 important thing to his partnership with De Niro is their shared willingness to pay attention to one another moderately than enter every scene with a predetermined notion of easy methods to execute it. “It’s not, ‘You’ve got to do it this way,’” Levinson mentioned. “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.”

All through the method, Levinson was struck by how dedicated De Niro was to these potentialities, and by the actor’s refusal to relaxation 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 mentioned. “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.”