In Conversation With Al Pacino and Robert De Niro

In an MW exclusive, the two legendary actors talk New York, cinema and coming back together on screen for the third time

- Mayank Shekhar

There are many ways to see New York City. One of them is to view it through the lens of films starring Al Pacino, 79, and Robert De Niro, 76, over generations. Of course, I wouldn’t have thought of this if it wasn’t for a morning in end-September, that I woke up in a hotel facing Central Park, to walk to a work appointment — a 20-minute jointinterview (along with a Filipino and Japanese journalist) — with De Niro and Pacino themselves.

Nothing has defined these two method actors — brothers from other mothers whose careers have mirrored each other’s — than the city they grew up and honed their craft in. Almost simultaneously, albeit separately. Both De Niro and Pacino were born in Manhattan — Pacino on 86th Street, and De Niro in Greenwich Village. Both went to the same acting schools in the City — The Actors Studio, Stella Adler, HB Studio. Both debuted in the same year (1969). They first bumped into each other through common friends on 14th Street, much before they became famous…

In the same way, their films have defined New York City to global audiences as well. Just gazing from the sidewalk at Manhattan, through a Pacino film, the first thing that comes to mind is him heading out of Hotel Waldorf Astoria in Scent Of A Woman (1992)— causing chaos, zipping in his car through the city’s crisscrossing avenues and streets, being literally blind (“Hoo haa!”).

With De Niro, of course, you instantly reimagine the neighbourhood Little Italy that he immortalised, chiefly through his collaborations with director Martin Scorsese, starting with the masterpiece, Mean Streets (1973).