Robert De Niro is opening up about what exactly happened to his speech at this year’s Gotham Awards. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, De Niro said that the script that he had worked up with writer Lewis Friedman had been altered without his knowledge. “They gave me the script, and I looked at the prompter, and I asked after, ‘What happened?’ And they assumed that I had spoken to Marty or somebody about it, but I hadn’t. They assumed that I would be OK with it, and maybe I’m still getting it wrong, and I wasn’t,” De Niro explained.
He continued: “Marty and I spoke about it the next day and he said, ‘Yeah, I had sent you a text and [Apple] asked if you could dial it down, respectfully.’” That’s right – Apple, the studio behind “Killers of the Flower Moon,” were behind the disruption.
When the interviewer brought up Apple striking down Jon Stewart’s show because the company felt he was criticizing China too frequently, De Niro said that he was cautious to place too much emphasis on the tech giant. “I didn’t even want to blame them, but I was annoyed in the moment with whoever did it. If Marty had called me and said, ‘Apple asked me to do this and that,’ then we would’ve gone over it,” De Niro explained. “But I told Marty, ‘Everything in that speech is leading up to what this movie is about. And I don’t want to take away from the movie. It’s not a rant about Trump. It’s appropriate.’”
De Niro starred in “Killers of the Flower Moon” earlier this year from his longtime collaborator Martin Scorsese. He was on stage to introduce the film, which is when he found out that he had been edited.
Martin Scorsese has responded to De Niro’s comments and released the following statement about the speech: “The Gotham Awards honored the filmmakers and cast with The Historical Icon & Creator tribute, which recognizes significant moments in history and for bringing a story to life in an authentic way on screen. We all wanted to make sure that in the limited time available, the acceptance speech had space to acknowledge our Osage collaborators on-stage and at home, as well as our entire cast and filmmaking team. Apple has been a tremendous partner and there was no censorship. There was an unfortunate miscommunication regarding the final version of the speech. The event was a beautiful moment for our cast and collaborators to be reunited for the first time since the strikes. It was an incredible honor to receive this recognition.”
