FOR DECADES, ROBERT DE NIRO AND THE MEN BEHIND MAFIA DRAMA THE A LTO KNIGHTS HAVE MADE LEGENDARY FILMS TOGETHER. NOW, WITH THE ACTOR TAKING BOTH LEAD ROLES, HE AND THE TEAM DISCUSS HISTORY AND LEGACY

WORDS ALEX GODFREY

Crime boss Frank Costello (Robert De Niro);

“YOU KNOW WHAT ? I’LL TELL YOU A STOR Y. ”

Irwin Winkler has a lot of stories. To some extent because he’s 93. That’ll rack up some tales. But so will being a legendary Hollywood producer, who started in 1967 with Elvis Presley’s Double Trouble, then brought us Point Blank, Rocky, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Creed… Yes, he has stories. His latest film is Barry Levinson’s Mob drama The Alto Knights, starring Robert De Niro, twice (more on that later), and Empire has just asked Winkler how hands-on the actor is. So, here’s a story.

“Back in 1971, I was doing a movie called The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” he says of James Goldstone’s gangster comedy. “Al Pacino was the leading actor, and I got a call from his agent. We were in rehearsal, three weeks from shooting, and the agent said to me, ‘Al is not going to do your movie. He’s going to do The

Godfather instead.’ So I said, ‘Oh, really?’, and we sued him and all that, and I was looking around for an actor to replace him.” Winkler had liked De Niro in a couple of Brian De Palma films, and hired the 27-year-old up-and-comer to play small-time thief Mario Trantino. “And he came to me and said, ‘You know, Irwin, I’d like to go to Italy for three or four days to research this character, to find out who he is, where he comes from, how he lived.’ I said, ‘Look, Bob, that’s very nice, but I don’t have a budget to send you to Italy for a week.’ He said, ‘That’s okay, I’ll pay for it myself.’ He spent his own money. And he came back with all the hand props, the costumes and everything. That’s Bob De Niro.”

Winkler has worked with De Niro many times, and The Alto Knights marks the producer’s third collaboration with screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi (after GoodFellas, which Pileggi co-wrote with Martin Scorsese, and The Irishman, on which he did some uncredited writing). The blood runs deep. For the Manhattan-set The Alto Knights, De Niro was the first person Winkler thought of to play real-life Mafia boss Frank Costello, and the first person he thought of to play real-life Mafia boss Vito Genovese (again, more later). The gangsters had grown up together, then ran an empire together, but after Genovese went to lay low in Italy in 1937 and got stuck there for years because of World War II, things changed.