The Tribeca Film Festival paired up an odd couple for its Thursday afternoon salute to Universal Pictures’ 100th anniversary: Festival co-founder and screen icon Robert De Niro and top comedy auteur Judd Apatow. (The duo might have seemed less incongruous if the third announced panelist, Meryl Streep, hadn’t cancelled due to a family illness.)
Moderator Michael Fleming of Deadline Hollywood began the discussion by focusing on one of De Niro’s 12 films for Universal, 1978 Best Picture Oscar winner The Deer Hunter, leading Apatow to wonder how Fleming was going to ‘transition from Deer Hunter to Knocked Up.” “There’s no way I don’t look like a jackass,” he admitted.
Apatow made the tenuous connections between himself and De Niro a recurring comedic theme, but there was at least one wholly valid one: The sketch that helped co-creator Apatow get the green light for the early 1990s Fox series “Ben Stiller Show” was a parody of De Niro’s psychopathic turn in Cape Fear, with Stiller as Eddie Munster in “Cape Munster.”
Surveying the Universal output through the years, Apatow noted that he’s a “gigantic John Hughes fan,” and also praised De Niro’s own Midnight Run as one of the all-time great odd-couple comedies. (De Niro confirmed that a sequel is in development in which he would be paired with the son of the Charles Grodin character.)
The invariably taciturn De Niro could only respond “I just don’t know” several times when asked his feelings about the growing trend toward watching movies on laptops and smart-phones, but Apatow had a mischievous answer that won’t be welcomed by theatre owners: “Anything that allows me to watch a film while going to the bathroom is awesome.”
De Niro did surprise when queried about the fabled “golden age” of independent-minded studio films of the 1970s: “I see many more independent films now than when I started out.” The star of Raging Bull and Taxi Driver feels there may actually be more funding options and diversity in the new millennium’s indie world.
My next blog post will be from the CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas. More Tribeca coverage this week from Screener correspondent Sarah Sluis.
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