JR Asks and Robert De Niro Agrees: ‘Ellis’ Is Born

An epic snowstorm; permission to shoot on a historic site that had been closed to the public for 60 years; and the availability and willingness of Robert De Niro: those were the impossible ingredients that the artist JR needed to make his short film. For most first-time filmmakers, the bar would seem too high. 

But JR, the Frenchman known for his large-scale street photography who has lately branched off into other artistic fields, like ballet, pulled it off. The result is a 14-minute film, “Ellis,” set in the formerly abandoned hospital on Ellis Island, which was once a way station for immigrants. It’s also the site of JR’s recent installation “Unframed – Ellis Island,” in which he and his team pasted archival images of immigrants in the very rooms they passed through during the great wave of migration in the early 20th century.

The film, with a scripted voiceover written by the Oscar winner Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”) and music by the French songwriter Woodkid, follows Mr. De Niro as he walks through the hospital, which was abandoned in 1954 and stands as a ruin, with broken windows and rusted lockers. “It was very eerie,” Mr. De Niro said at the film’s New York premiere on Friday on the Lower East Side. It will run Wednesday-Sunday through Nov. 8 in a pop-up exhibition sponsored by Galerie Perrotin, JR’s dealer, at 130 Orchard Street. (His photos and some works on wood will also be on display.)

Instead of posting the short online, JR, a star of social media, is offering to send a copy of the film free to people who want to screen it in small groups. (Details are here.) He is also organizing free showings in London, Los Angeles, San Francisco and at Miami Art Basel. “The idea of the film is not to make any money, but just try to get people to see it,” he said. 

JR was first inspired to make the film as a way to document the crumbling hospital. “A lot of the places you see in the film have decayed so much, you can’t see them anymore,” he said Friday. He also wanted to highlight its connection to the current global battles over migration, by including photos of contemporary undocumented United States immigrants, scattered among the collages of faces from a century ago.

Photo

Robert De Niro on the set of "Ellis," a short film by the artist JR.Credit

For Mr. De Niro, who said in an interview that he wasn’t sure if any of his family members had come through Ellis Island, the motivation was simpler. “JR asked me to do it and Jane asked me to do it,” he said, referring to Jane Rosenthal, his partner in Tribeca Film, “and I said O.K.” He and JR have collaborated on several projects, though it has been years since Mr. De Niro agreed to do a short. “I think JR is very personable and likable and smart, and generates enthusiasm,” he said.

Traveling to Ellis Island is an undertaking, involving passports and ferries, and Mr. De Niro arrived with little advance notice, for just half a day, from the set of the David O. Russell film “Joy” in Boston last winter. The small “Ellis” crew scrambled. There was no time for rehearsal, but the snow was fresh. “Everything could have gone wrong, and that’s it, and there would be no movie,” JR said. Instead, “we got really focused.”

“And there was Bob, in the middle of a storm,” he added. “It was magical.”

Robert De Niro American actor

Robert De Niro,  (born August 17, 1943, New York City, New York, U.S.), American actor famous for his uncompromising portrayals of violent and abrasive characters and, later in his career, for his comic depictions of cranky old men.

The son of two Greenwich Village artists, De Niro dropped out of school at age 16 to study at the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting. After working in a few Off-Off-Broadway plays, he appeared in his first film, Brian De Palma’s The Wedding Party (filmed 1963, released 1969). Thereafter he appeared in several minor films, the most notable being The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1971). It was not until his performance in Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) that he was widely recognized as an excellent actor. Mean Streets (1973) marked De Niro’s first association with director Martin Scorsese, with whom he would do some of his most celebrated work. Director Francis Ford Coppola, whose massively popular The Godfather (1972) had won the Academy Award for best picture, was so impressed by De Niro in Mean Streets that he offered the actor the part of young Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II (1974), forgoing even a screen test. De Niro’s brilliant take on the part that was created by Marlon Brando in the first Godfather film earned him a best supporting actor Oscar and made him an international star.


Following The Godfather, Part II, De Niro worked with some of cinema’s most noted directors in such films as Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976), Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon (1976), and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), the last one receiving the Oscar for best picture. But it was his films with Scorsese for which De Niro acquired a reputation for masterfully portraying extremely dark and unappealing figures. He received an Oscar nomination for his role as the isolated and violent Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976) and won the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (1980). Known for his intense role preparation, De Niro spent weeks driving a taxi in New York City before filming Taxi Driver, and he gained more than 50 pounds (about 23 kg) to portray La Motta. By the end of the 1970s, he was widely considered one of the best actors of his generation.


In the 1980s he appeared in a series of box office failures that have nevertheless become cult favourites. Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1983), which offered a desolate look at the hazards of celebrity, won critical praise but little public interest, whereas Sergio Leone’s epic Once upon a Time in America (1984) suffered from postproduction studio interference, as did Terry Gilliam’s futuristic satire Brazil (1985).
De Niro also performed in more conventional films during that era, including True Confessions (1981), Falling in Love (1984), The Mission (1986), and De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987). He revealed a talent for comedy in Midnight Run (1988) and won some of the best notices of his career for his depiction of a catatonic patient in Awakenings (1990). GoodFellas (1990) reunited De Niro with Scorsese for a brutal look at organized crime. Most critics agreed that Scorsese and De Niro had returned to form, but two further collaborations, Cape Fear (1991) and Casino (1995), were met with mixed reviews.


De Niro later appeared in Michael Mann’s crime thriller Heat (1995), which pitted him against actor Al Pacino. He continued to explore his comedic side in such films as the satirical Wag the Dog (1997); Analyze This (1999) and its sequel, Analyze That (2002); and Meet the Parents (2000) and its sequels, Meet the Fockers (2004) and Little Fockers (2010). In 2008 De Niro reteamed with Pacino in the police drama Righteous Kill, and the following year he starred in Everybody’s Fine, portraying a widower who discovers various truths about his adult children. He later took supporting roles in the thrillers Machete (2010) and Limitless (2011), the action drama Killer Elite (2011), and the ensemble romantic comedy New Year’s Eve (2011).

In 2012 De Niro starred as a destitute writer reconnecting with his estranged son in the drama Being Flynn and played another paternal role in the seriocomic Silver Linings Playbook. The latter film earned him his first Oscar nomination in more than two decades. In The Family (2013) De Niro starred as a mobster turned informant whose family moves to France in the witness protection program. He then teamed with Morgan Freeman, Michael Douglas, and Kevin Kline in the buddy comedy Last Vegas (2013). De Niro’s later credits include Grudge Match (2013), in which he and Sylvester Stallone played superannuated boxers who reunite for one last fight, and the workplace comedy The Intern (2015), in which he featured as the title character opposite Anne Hathaway.

In addition to acting, De Niro also directed several films. In 1993 he made his directorial debut with A Bronx Tale, a movie about the Mafia set in the 1960s. He later directed the highly acclaimed The Good Shepherd (2006), which centres on the origins of the CIA and the compromises made by an agent over the span of his career. In 2009 De Niro was named a Kennedy Center honoree, and two years later he received the Cecil B. DeMille Award (a Golden Globe for lifetime achievement).