Robert De Niro’s preparation for role in The Godfather Part II revealed by major study of his screenplays
He is one of Hollywood’s greatest actors, who famously spent months learning the Sicilian dialect to play the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II. Now the extent to which Robert De Niro prepared every last detail in taking on the Sicilian gangster-patriarch first portrayed by Marlon Brando has been revealed by a major study of his screenplays.
De Niro’s notes for the 1974 film, for which he received an Oscar, reveal how he built up the character’s sinister steeliness, scribbling down shorthand instructions to himself: “NEVER let people know what really thinking. Especially what feel.”
Having repeatedly watched Brando’s 1972 depiction of the Mafia boss in The Godfather – the first part of Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful trilogy – De Niro explored precisely how he would depict the same character as a younger man, telling himself: “Be more still and listen. I’m a listener I don’t move and do a lot, especially after kill [gangster] Fanucci.”
In another passage, De Niro explored how he would reject Fanucci’s offer of a glass of wine, while keeping the upper hand: “I refuse with finger, or add water or just don’t chink.”
He copied down lines about his character from Mario Puzo’s original novel, underlining in red, for example, “His eyes did not smile.”
The Godfather Part II is among scripts within an archive that De Niro donated to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. Their pages are covered in annotations and observations that seemingly cover every conceivable blank space of paper.
Now they have been pored over by British scholars Adam Ganz and Steven Price – of the universities of Royal Holloway London and Bangor respectively – who have just published their research in a book titled Robert De Niro at Work: From Screenplay to Screen Performance.
They write that The Godfather Part II’s pages are “fizzing with thought and suggestions and questions” and cover everything from gestures to costumes.
Prof Price told The Telegraph: “De Niro’s annotations… give you a real insight into how much work he would put into them.”
Prof Ganz added: “What De Niro’s archive shows is all the conscious steps he undertakes, the research he studies, the script suggestions he makes, the attention to details of costume and gesture which enables him then to perform – as if for the first time – on screen in front of an audience.”
In the Godfather screenplay, De Niro questioned whether he should smoke or not and wondered how Corleone could “still be seen as a big shot” in the first film – even though he was not a big shot yet.
Such is the level of detail that, on the reverse of a page in which Corleone comes home, De Niro listed his evening routine down to how he would prepare his dinner: “Put gratings on spaghetti… Making salad no tomatoes oregano salt pepper oil vinegar basil and wine.”
The archive includes scripts for other classic De Niro films that are similarly covered in annotations. The Taxi Driver screenplay shows that he was an active collaborator with screenwriter Paul Schrader and director Martin Scorsese in creating his character, a lonely army veteran, who drives a taxi by night to cope with chronic insomnia.
Prof Ganz said: “His level of written contribution to the creation of the character in Taxi Driver hasn’t been known before.”
On one page, the actor summarised his character: “I’m in here for work. I can’t sleep just got out of the Marines First came home for about a month but couldn’t take that there was nothing there. So I decided to come to NY cause I knew a girl there. But she turned out to just be using me. So now I’m here alone. Don’t have any special skills. Have not much $ left. Had a job as a delivery boy for a messenger service but couldn’t do it any more, it was the lowest. Got some pills from dealers on the lower east side. So, ive been spending money on that. What little I have. I can’t make friends easily. I don’t know why.”
Prof Price said: “The big new insight of the archive and the book is that this most famous of actors, who is routinely regarded as being a difficult and inarticulate interviewee, is actually hyper-articulate in analysing a screenplay and in preparing his performance through his written commentaries on the texts… No other actor that we know of writes commentary of quite this kind.”
Fellow film historian Nathan Abrams said: “Price and Ganz have together plumbed De Niro’s archives transforming our understanding of his practice as an actor. We now have to reckon with his role as almost virtual co-screenwriter.”
