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By Woodrow J. Hinton
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Imitation of De Niro's Life: the veteran actor talks
about his role in City By the Sea.
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We hear a lot from directors and stars about their obsession with factual minutiae when they turn a true story into a Hollywood film. That doesn't much matter to Robert De Niro.
He never says it himself, but it's obvious that everyone involved with his latest project, City By the Sea, doesn't overly concern themselves with nailing all the details of truth. To hear them tell it, the facts are secondary. They just wanted to make a good movie.
"The real part of (this movie) made it more interesting to do," De Niro says. "What I was taken by was the script. It doesn't matter who you do a story about -- it could be Christ -- if the script at the end of the day is not there, you got nothing."
De Niro and his co-stars, Frances McDormand and Eliza Dushku, sat down together in a New York City hotel recently to discuss turning tough non-fiction into Hollywood fiction.
The story behind City By the Sea begins in the 1950s, when a then-8-year-old Vincent LaMarca watched his father get arrested and later executed for a botched kidnapping. Young Vincent pledged to live life straight, growing up to become a respected New York City police detective. When the body of a Long Beach drug dealer washes up on the Manhattan shore, the LaMarca's name hits the headlines again when his estranged son, Joey, is the prime suspect.
The story was first told as a 1997 Esquire magazine article, "Mark of a Murderer," by Michael McAlary. Warner Brothers bought the rights to the story, hired a screenwriter and enlisted the cooperation of the real Vincent LaMarca. It was shortly after Michael Caton-Jones signed to direct that De Niro (with whom he'd earlier worked on This Boy's Life) committed to the project.
For LaMarca, there was no higher compliment than having De Niro sign on to his life story, even if the legendary actor would show the whole character, warts and all.
"How De Niro played me was never a concern," LaMarca says. "(The producers) were quick to tell me, hey, your flaws are going to be portrayed. There were scenes where I didn't like myself. But my concerns were addressed -- how my father was portrayed, how my son was portrayed."
De Niro did not meet LaMarca before filming, but that was not by design. He enjoys and prefers to meet people he portrays. He says it can only help him begin his discovery of that character. For whatever reason, that meeting just didn't happen with LaMarca until after shooting wrapped.
Screenwriter Ken Hixon actually preferred not to meet LaMarca, choosing instead to use the facts he knew and the back-story that the Esquire article provided to craft his screenplay. Getting involved with the subject matter would hinder Hixon's ability to tell the story. If he became too encumbered with the facts, the script would not have evolved into a marketable entertainment film.
To keep the script streamlined and "Hollywood-ed," a phrase the real LaMarca used incessantly during the interview, several creative liberties were taken. For one, Vincent was not the investigating officer of the murder. He was actually retired. Also, the girlfriend character played by McDormand didn't exist at all. Vincent was in his second marriage at the time.
"The liberties that were taken don't mean anything," LaMarca says. "The core of the story -- the guilt feelings I had about not being there for my son, what I went through as a child seeing my father executed -- those things were not interrupted in this movie."
For McDormand and Dushku, accepting the script's divergence from the truth was nothing compared to accepting De Niro's infamous divergence from script. Both say they were aware of his legendary mid-scene improvisations but neither believe they handled it very well.
"He's a master of it, and I'm really bad," McDormand says. "Our scenes were very long with huge monologues. So I think the improv popped up more in the smaller scenes with little dialogue. It was very exciting. I'm more a stick-to-the-script type, so it was scary to be thrown off."
Dushku, who also worked with De Niro on This Boy's Life, says she learned from him that improv is just another way to get to the heart of a character and to learn how characters should interact with each other. De Niro is quick to brush off the praise, preferring to extol the screenwriter's work.
"They were just moments, really. As Frances said, many of those scenes were written so well, I didn't want to change anything. I didn't feel I could do any better by improvising."
Throughout the shoot, the actors say they remembered that, despite it being "just a movie" in many ways, there was a real family behind City by the Sea that was torn apart. And in portraying that, they had to respect what Vincent must still be going through today.
Vincent says that, in a weird way, watching the movie has actually helped him and his family deal with the tragedy. He credits De Niro and the filmmakers with handling the events and the characters fairly.
"I like how everyone was humanized in the movie," he says. "You didn't just see a criminal. You saw my son. It wasn't just a cop drama. It was a real human being going through a lot of emotional struggles." ©
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