Aspen Peak - Niche Media - Aspen living at its peak
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Robert De Niro speaks during Remembering the Artist Robert De Niro Sr. during the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival. The two-time Academy Award–winning actor known for playing boxer Jake LaMotta (Raging Bull), Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver), and Vito Corleone (The Godfather Part II) resides in Humble Valley, where he's turned self-deprecation into an art form. "People treat me with a bit too much reverence," De Niro laments. "Look at Dustin Hoffman. I always envy the way he can speak and be smart and funny and so on. I just can't do that." If De Niro has a running shtick, it's always to turn the spotlight on somebody else. Last October, for example, the Friars Club pre- sented De Niro with its Entertainment Icon Award, given only four times before in the Friars' 110 -year history (Douglas Fairbanks, Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, and Tom Cruise are past award win- ners). Upon accepting the honor, De Niro put his trademark understatement on display. "I'm very happy to be part of an event that raises money for such good causes," he deadpanned. "Thank you, Friars! Who am I giving an award to?" New York City is the soul of De Niro. He and his wife, Grace Hightower, rent a Central Park West apartment for $125K per month. He'll only go to Los Angeles if somebody pays him a lot of money. Nobody has promoted the Tribeca district of Lower Manhattan more than the 71-year-old actor. He cofounded the film studio Tribeca Productions, launched the world-beat Tribeca Film Festival, co-owns two very reputable restaurants (Nobu and Tribeca Grill), and is the proprietor of the Greenwich Hotel—all of which he shrugs off as no big deal. "I get too much credit for the things I'm doing in Tribeca," De Niro tells me in an exclusive interview for Aspen Peak. "Tribeca has morphed into so many things that I'm [no longer] up to speed. We have a big team. [Producer and Tribeca Film cofounder] Jane Rosenthal is the best. The [team] really does the work. If they need me for something very important, I'm there." It used to be that De Niro enjoyed trips to the Colorado Rockies. During the years between Taxi Driver in 1976 and Goodfellas in 1990, he was occasionally seen wandering around downtown Aspen, blending into the community with grace and ease. "Snowmass was where I spent my time," De Niro explains. "But I don't ski much any- more and don't get to Aspen for Christmas like I used to. So when I need to get out of New York City, I go up the Hudson. I looked for a house within a 100 -mile radius and found one. And I also have a little place on the ocean in Long Island. I'm content." But to promote the HBO documentary Remembering the Artist Robert De Niro Sr. (directed by Perri Peltz and Geeta Gandbhir), De Niro appeared with great fanfare at the Aspen Ideas Festival last June. After the film was shown, a panel discussion ensued about his openly gay father's underappreciated artistic career. During his painting heyday, De Niro Sr. had his figurative paintings exhib- ited alongside Jackson Pollock's and Willem de Kooning's. Even though the elder De Niro has been dead for two decades, his inf lu- ence on his world-famous son continues unabated. At first, the film was created only for family consumption. But the end product was so strong, De Niro figured, "Why not share it with others?" So the actor found and purchased old film footage of his father and col- lected his paintings and drawings. "My father left journals and poems," De Niro explains. "When I read them or even think about them I choke up." In the documentary, De Niro, in fact, reads pas- sages from these journals to great effect. When asked whether he plans to publish an anthology of his father's writings and paintings, De Niro perks up. "Well, I hadn't thought about that," he says. "But maybe I should. It's a possibility I hadn't really considered." (Attention book publishers: Get on this!) The seven-time Oscar-nominated actor has been busy on set in the past few months, shooting Bus 657 in Mobile, Alabama (with Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Dave "Batista" Bautista, and Kate Bosworth), and The Intern in Brooklyn (with Anne Hathaway). Then there is Dirty Grandpa, a comedy with Zac Efron in the works. For those who like De Niro in violent films based on characters that are quasi-psychotic, there is Hands of Stone to look forward to, a film in which he plays Ray Arcel, the trainer for middleweight-champion boxer Roberto Duran. Making movies is grueling work, but De Niro wouldn't know how to stop. Ever since he studied acting at Stella Adler Conservatory as a New York City teenager he has learned to embody the characters he plays. "It's true," he once told a reporter of his early days in the or such a heavyweight, actor Robert De Niro treads lightly on his feet in this world. He avoids bad publicity, meaningful interviews, and look-at- me nonprofit heroism. He's not easy to interview. His stoic nature has become the stuff of comedy gold. Saturday Night Live has done a number of skits on his signature one- word answers. If his father, Robert De Niro Sr.—the subject of an outstanding recent HBO documentary—was a Matisse- influenced figurative painter of the celebrated post-World War II New York School before succumbing to cancer in 1993, then his son is the gold-starred minimalist of our times. photography by getty images. opposite page: photography by everett collection 156 aspenpeak-magazine.com