So you write a soul-baring memoir of your relationship with your fame-hungry, delusional, alcoholic and sometimes homeless father, and now Robert De Niro wants to play him in the movie. You figure your father will be thrilled, right?
University of Houston creative writing professor Nick Flynn had no delusion that his dad would be pleased.
"He said Dustin Hoffman should play him."
The movie, "Being Flynn," based on Nick Flynn's much-praised 2004 memoir, "Another Bull**** Night in Suck City," is now showing in San Antonio. Julianne Moore plays Flynn's mother, and Paul Dano plays young Nick in his 20s. De Niro, not Hoffman, plays his father, Jonathan Flynn.
De Niro’s performance style was informed by the two dominant mid-20th-century approaches to acting. By the mid-1950s, anyone who wanted to be somebody came through the Actors Studio, led by Lee Strasberg, who honed an approach to acting that critics were referring to as “Method acting.” Today, we think of a Method actor as one that inhabits his character to the degree that the actor literally puts himself in the shoes of his character – even when he is not on camera. However, there was another acting technique during the era being taught by Stella Adler, where Marlon Brando studied and with whom De Niro enrolled.
Adler taught that the actor does not embody the character so much as he becomes the character onstage (or film) through the actions of the play (or script). Like most actors of the time, De Niro ended up studying both at Stella’s school and the Studio. The schism between Strasberg and Adler created the greatest polemic of 20th century acting, as De Niro recalled when he sat down to discuss his earliest days as an actor and his latest film.
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