He's certainly busier. We've seen him this year already in Mongicagate timely ‘Wag the Dog', in Tarantino's ‘Jackie Brown' and soon in ‘Ronin'. In early 1999 he's in ‘Analyse This' a dark comedy in which he sends himself up as a deranged mobster being cared for by Billy Crystal's equally neurotic psychiatrist. He has his own Tribeca ( (Triangle Beneath the Canal) Film Centre in a century-old building in Lower Manhattan and many of the bad movies he's made in the past few years -- he will deny this -- have arguably been to finance his own film-making. ‘I'd done one side of the camera and I wanted to try the other side. I never had full responsibility for a film and I wanted that.' He made his debut as a director with ‘A Bronx Tale' six years ago and it got respectful reviews but tiny audiences. A year later he worked for Kenneth Branagh in ‘Mary Shelley's Frankenstein' -- The Method, as it were, Meets The Monster. Last year in he was co-starring with Sylvester Stallone in ‘Copland' and Gwyneth Paltrow in ‘Great Expectations.' After the grand American box office reception for ‘Ronin' there are still those for De Niro. He knows he is not infallible. He turned down Scorsese's offer of the title role in ‘The Last Temptation of Christ' explaining:' I couldn't relate to it.' What he can relate to are his roots and maybe De Niro has finally woken up in the late 1990s to the American Dream which attracted all the immigrants, the heritage which has shaped his life.He made his acting debut as The Cowardly Lion in a Little Italy school production of ‘The Wizard of Oz.' He's still hanging on to the rainbow.
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