At Tuesday night’s Cannes Film Festival opening gala, Leonardo DiCaprio presented his friend and co-star Robert De Niro with the Honorary Palme d’Or. “The thing about Bob is, he doesn’t say much, but when he does, it matters,” said DiCaprio. “If I’m lucky, I’ll get a nod from him tonight, maybe even a half-smile, and I will take that as a standing ovation.” Everyone laughed good-naturedly. On Wednesday, the festival hosted a “Rendezvous with Robert De Niro,” during which we all got a stark glimpse into exactly what the fuck DiCaprio was talking about. The legendary actor sat onstage across from French street photographer and artist JR — with whom, it was revealed, he has been making a mysterious, yearslong, no-deadline-in-sight documentary about the lives of his deceased parents — and rarely said more than one or two short sentences at a time. More than once, he replied, “Yeah. sure,” to a question. I never thought I would write this sentence, but I empathize with Leonardo DiCaprio.
In large part, the strangely quiet Rendezvous was the fault of JR, who often monologued instead of asking real questions and then, when confronted with De Niro’s confident Italian silence, jokingly addressed the audience and said things like, “This is what I have to deal with. Now I have witnesses here!” JR essentially asked De Niro a version of the same question over and over again: Why was he only now making this documentary about his parents? Was it for his own sake? For his children? To understand himself better? De Niro, sighing more heavily each time, indicated over and over again that it was some combination of the three. Whenever JR repeated the question in a new way, De Niro replied with fewer words, eventually staring off into the middle distance as if waiting to be rescued by Juliette Binoche in her white hood. At one point, JR jokily referenced DiCaprio’s speech from the previous night — “Leo said you’re someone who doesn’t necessarily say hello, but when you speak, every word counts” — and De Niro replied, “Sometimes.”
Though the Rendezvous kicked off with a moving De Niro retrospective — showcasing everything from The Godfather to Taxi Driver to Killers of the Flower Moon — the two did not for one single moment discuss anything having to do with the dozens of acclaimed films that De Niro has starred in over nearly 50 years. This angered the audience, a member of which yelled, “Talk about cinema!” In some ways, this was impressive in and of itself: How long can you have Robert De Niro in front of you and not ask him anything of actual substance? It’s a question I didn’t know I had, but that I now have the answer to (65 minutes).
JR did show a sort of loose, eight-minute teaser for the documentary, which, as both men repeated over and over again, has no end date in sight or specific structure, save for De Niro looking more deeply into the lives of his father, a painter who died in 1993, and his mother. “We’re kind of seeing where we’re going,” said De Niro. “We’ll just keep going until one day it feels, Okay, now we’ve told enough.” JR confirmed that “there are days we go, and we don’t know what we’re going to shoot,” and that sometimes, De Niro was moody and didn’t want to shoot, but they did it anyway.
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The teaser was intriguing, featuring dozens of surreal, The Cell–style scenes, like De Niro lying prone on top of a massive screen-printed photo of his father, which is itself lying on top of a giant barge crossing the Hudson River. In another scene, he drags the print of his father across a verdant mountain. In yet another, he chats with Martin Scorsese, who stands on a huge ladder next to that giant print and says to him: “You’re going through all this stuff about the past. At least somehow through images, you’re thinking about your father, the past. Why now?” “Well,” says De Niro. “It’s a dream. It’s surreal.” “You think a dream is any different from the reality?” asks Scorsese. “Sometimes reality is a dream,” says De Niro. I felt that.
At one point, De Niro, who is 81, indicated that the documentary would likely go on filming after his death. “It’s not essential that I see the final thing,” he said. “Once I’m not even around, he’s just going to be shooting on and on forever, asking me questions when I’m in my coffin.” JR, looking panicked, stressed that he would in fact like to finish it soon, ideally while De Niro was still alive. De Niro also addresses his death in the documentary’s trailer; when asked if he’s afraid of it, he shakes his head. “I don’t have a choice, so you might as well not be afraid of it,” he says.
At the end of the Rendezvous, another audience member asked De Niro about this incredibly metal statement. De Niro corrected himself, giving one of his wordiest responses: “I’m afraid. But I don’t have a choice. If you know you don’t have a choice, you might as well start thinking about how to deal with it. And you can not be afraid. In many, many ways. That’s it. You have to learn to embrace life, move forward, take everything, good and bad. The least bad, the better. But that’s it.” The conversation, which one attendee described in a now-deleted tweet as “surreally catastrophic” and which Variety described as “hostile,” concluded thusly.
