Adam Sherwin
“Are you talkin’ to me? Well, I ain’t talkin’ to you!” A Radio Times writer has called Robert De Niro “condescending” after the actor took offence at her line of questioning and walked out of an interview, saying: “I’m not doing this, darling.”
A notoriously reluctant interviewee, De Niro was plugging his new comedy film, The Intern, co-starring Anne Hathaway.
Appearing “depressed”, he delivered some perfunctory opening answers, albeit “glumly”. But the Oscar-winner bridled when Emma Brockes asked how he resisted the temptation to go into “autopilot” on set, followed by her observation that the Tribeca district of New York, where De Niro co-founded a film festival, had been taken over by bankers.
De Niro, 72, asked Brockes to pause her recorder. She wrote in the magazine: “He then pops up out of his chair, starts pacing madly and says he’s cutting short the interview because of the ‘negative inference’ of what I just said.
“What, about the bankers?! All the way through,” says De Niro. “All the way through. Negative inference.”
“Er, like where else?”
“The whole way through and I’m not doing it. I’m not doing it, darling.”
Brockes protested that all she had been doing was asking questions about De Niro’s methods as an actor. De Niro replied: “You’re probably not even aware that you’re doing it. The negative inference.”
The exchange continued: “That’s quite a presumption. I’m a very good reader of character.”
“So am I.”
Brockes wrote: “De Niro is sticking his head out of the door, looking for an aide to come by and save him. Walking out alone doesn’t seem to be an option. Hang on. So where else am I being negative?
“‘The question about being on autopilot - negative inference,’” he tells me.
“Wait, but I asked that question to establish how it is you manage not to be on autopilot.
“There’s a negative inference.”
“Now that you’re going on about it, it makes me think you were on autopilot and you’re super-sensitive about it.”
The encounter concluded: “His jaw is working and he looks around as if in search of a window to jump through. ‘I’m not doing this, darling. I think you’re condescending.’
Brockes told The Independent: “I have sympathy with De Niro because nobody wants to be there for these choreographed junket interviews. I was expecting him to be a little quiet, but the hostility and condescension irritated me and I ended up losing my cool. I certainly didn’t go in looking for an argument but when it happened I did think, ‘at least he’s finally saying something’.” – The Independent