The role Robert De Niro went too method for: “He kept fluffing it every time”
Many of us outside of the film business love to make fun of the lengths that some actors go to for their performances, from the crazed logic of Jared Leto, Daniel Day-Lewis and Adrien Brody. Many high-profile actors have bent the idea of ‘creative license’ to try out increasingly extreme ways of getting into character, whether it be slapping their co-stars in the face or mailing them dead rats, and in many cases, this method doesn’t necessarily lead to a believable performance.
However, we continue to entertain the validity of this creative philosophy because of the alleged greatness of the people who adopt it, leading us to tolerate an endless list of strange behaviour from actors who are most likely looking for an excuse to entertain their own fantasies.
While we associate this behaviour with confident and self-assured performers, with no doubts about their character after years spent eating the same breakfast cereal as them, there is one great method actor who struggled to get into character even after months of intensive preparation, all to play a side role as a plumber.
Terry Gilliam has made some of the most distinctive and bizarre films of the twentieth century, directing trippy classics such as Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas, The Fisher King and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He is known for a style that blends fantasy with realism, creating a dystopian world that feels somewhat akin to a nightmarish fairytale, with an exaggerated and discomforting visual style that compliments the heightened performances of the actors.
However, Gilliam is perhaps most well-known for his 1985 film Brazil, which follows a man called Sam Lowry who escapes the monotony of his everyday life through vivid daydreams, finding himself meeting the woman from his reoccurring dream while investigating the wrongful arrest of a man called Harry Tuttle, becoming wrapped up in a web of mistaken identities and lies.
The film was heavily inspired by George Orwell’s 1984, creating a dark and dystopian tone that is perfectly explored through Gilliam’s jarring perspective. Jonathan Pryce stars in the lead role alongside Robert De Niro, with Gilliam describing his surprising experience of working with De Niro and his struggle to get into character.
Despite the fact that his character is a relatively minor role, Gilliam shared De Niro’s difficulties with playing the character through his traditional method approach, saying, “Bobby is so meticulous. He spent months in advance preparing to be a plumber, and we even had the props department build a backup of the set that he was going to be working in with all of his stuff. He chose every single tool himself.”
However, despite his extensive preparation, it didn’t seem to make his job any easier, saying, “On the first day of his work, the cast had been getting on brilliantly, and then De Niro walks in, and I understood what he was experiencing. I don’t remember how many takes we did of a simple shot of his hands, but he kept fluffing it every time because he was so nervous. I found out later he had been up at four o’clock in the morning in his hotel room with the costume on, preparing for the shot, and it was the first time I realised that these great actors are very vulnerable and very frightened when they walk into a situation that they haven’t really spent time developing. In the end, we had to use my hands for the shot. But he was great. I mean, he’s a fantastic actor. I couldn’t ask for anyone better.”
While we can sometimes think that the use of these methods makes actors invincible to nerves and mistakes, at the end of the day, it is still something of a shield to protect them from the very human fear of messing up, something that not even the greats are immune to.
