Yes, Actors, He’s Talking to You : After a quarter-century in front of the camera, Robert De Niro turns director with a familiar demeanor: intense

When he stopped off in New York for a day between trips to the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals, Robert De Niro was within sight of a goal he has contemplated for years: a directing career.

He had just returned from Italy, where his directorial debut film, “A Bronx Tale,” had been greeted with a five-minute standing ovation and accolades in the press. The U.S. trades were also kind: Variety’s critic hailed “A Bronx Tale” as “a ‘GoodFellas’ with heart . . . a very satisfying directorial debut.” And the Hollywood Reporter described De Niro’s touch as “assured, confident, clearly his own voice . . . terrific.”

In New York, De Niro has been working at a frenetic pace before leaving for Toronto to make up for lost time. In one of the high-tech screening rooms in his Tribeca Film Center in downtown Manhattan, he consults with Technicolor technicians on last-minute color corrections to “A Bronx Tale” before 1,000 prints are struck. Then, in his spacious office atop the center, he makes good on a promise of an interview.

De Niro isn’t the only actor who made the leap into directing this year; fellow travelers include Daniel Stern (“Rookie of the Year”), Mel Gibson (“Man Without a Face”), Morgan Freeman (“Bopha!”) and Gregory Hines (“White Man’s Burden”). But De Niro, 50, who has acted in 40 films in the last quarter-century, took his time in waiting for just the right project and right combination of skills.

The actor says he learned how to direct by watching the masters he has worked with: Francis Coppola (“The Godfather, Part II”), Martin Scorsese (“Mean Streets,” “GoodFellas”) and Bernardo Bertolucci (“1900”). The one universal lesson? Don’t panic.

“I’ve been on sets so often that I always know it will work out,” he says. “It seems crazy and like everything’s going wrong. But it’ll work out, despite all the ----. Especially if you run behind schedule, you’re gettin’ pressure, people come out of places you never heard of. I was OK if people stayed away from me--for whatever reason. Sometimes they were afraid--which was good.”

But the truth is that De Niro, despite the wide array of psychopaths and malevolent characters he’s played in his career, is not physically imposing. This day, he looks rather thin in a rumpled, nondescript dark shirt and slacks, his boyish face sporting a goofy grin. He’s an actor, prey to all the insecurities that go with the vocation, not a psycho. Occasionally his eyes can exude menace, but these days he’s got more reason to be cordial, attentive, relaxed.

When he’s not relating an anecdote on how he solved a particular directing problem, his sentences are hesitant, elliptical. He may grope for a word. In ordinary social situations, you would have to use ellipses to transcribe him verbatim.

A reporter, for example, has already settled into an easy chair in the conversation area of De Niro’s office when the actor emits an invisible yet tangible signal that something is amiss.

Is it OK to sit here? the reporter asks.

“Huh? Uh . . . OK . . . yeah . . . um . . . that’s usually where I have to sit, but. . . .”

I get up and move my stuff to a sofa adjoining his usual seat.

He grins sheepishly. “You know . . . the spot where you usually . . . uh . . . sit.”

But the more De Niro talks about directing, the more authoritative he sounds.

Directing is appealing, he says, because it’s “about people. And I loved the characters in this story. The only other thing (in filmmaking) I feel strongly about is music, after the people. And structure and story, of course. But if the people don’t work, forget it.”

“A Bronx Tale” is a story about growing up Italian-American in the community at the corner of 187th Street and Belmont Avenue in the Fordham section of the Bronx during the 1960s. The hero, Calogero, is a boy (Francis Capra at age 9, Lillo Brancato at age 17) who has two rival mentors: his father, Lorenzo, an incorruptible bus driver (De Niro), and Sonny, the Machiavellian neighborhood mob boss (Chazz Palminteri). Palminteri wrote the screenplay for “A Bronx Tale” based on his one-man Off-Broadway play, and has the film’s charismatic, star-maker role. That was a contractual agreement, but it was also good judgment on De Niro’s part. He had, in “GoodFellas,” already played the similar role of a gangster mentor to a neighborhood kid.

Palminteri, 41, a former singer who makes his screen debut in “A Bronx Tale,” has only high praise for De Niro’s vision. “Bob approaches directing as he approaches acting,” he says. “Meticulous to the point of obsession. He’s never satisfied.”

And in fact, De Niro shot endless retakes and printed nearly everything he shot, so he could have lots of options during editing. That put the film somewhat behind schedule and over budget. A bullwhip hanging on a brick wall of De Niro’s office, with a Dear-Bob-you-slave-driver note attached, was a gift from a weary colleague who worked with him a few years ago.

“What he can do, which is amazing,” Palminteri says, “is concentrate harder than anybody I’ve ever seen. . . . He’s in another place, where he forces everyone to be better. It’s like a Michael Jordan. He gets on the court and Scottie Pippin becomes a better ballplayer--everyone becomes better. And that’s what Bob did.”

“A Bronx Tale” began in 1989 as a five-minute monologue, then evolved into Palminteri’s acclaimed production at Theater West in Los Angeles and then at Manhattan’s 91st Street Playhouse. Palminteri did all the voices. “I did it like a film on stage,” he says, and demonstrates, doing Lorenzo, Calogero, his African-American girlfriend Jane (played by Taral Hicks in the movie), and Sonny and his henchmen and cronies--a gallery of funny and dangerous grotesques including JoJo the Whale, Jimmy Whispers and Eddie Mush the jinx. Universal paid Palminteri $1.5 million for the screen rights and agreed he could play Sonny. Meanwhile, De Niro saw the play, at the urging of his partner, Jane Rosenthal, and immediately knew this was the film he wanted to direct. But Universal estimated that the movie De Niro planned to make would cost $22 million, instead of the $12 million it was prepared to spend, so the studio abandoned the project. Tribeca Productions stepped in and arranged for alternate financing from a new U.S. distributor, Savoy Pictures, headed by Victor Kaufman, former head of TriStar Pictures, and Louis Corman, who worked for him at TriStar, and from HBO Video and an Italian company, Penta.

“When I saw Chazz doing his one-man show I felt I could do something with it as a movie because I know about this life,” says De Niro. “You’re not doing somebody’s idea about that world. You’re doing the world.”

He willingly concedes there are similarities between “A Bronx Tale” and Martin Scorsese’s Italian-American movies, especially “Mean Streets” and “GoodFellas.” The realism and documentary-like natural feeling to the performances were intentional--some 85% of the characters are played by non-professional actors. “I had to use non-professionals, real people who knew that world,” he says. “If they don’t know the world, there’s no point in putting them in the movie.”

Other key roles were filled by well-respected pros. “You surround yourself with good people who you feel comfortable with and who are supportive, like Ray Villalobos, the cameraman. He was very helpful with the composition, for instance. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out where the stoop should be.”

The stoop in question is key as Calogero’s vantage point to observe Sonny’s bar on the corner, maybe 30 feet away. It’s where Calogero is sitting when he witnesses Sonny shoot a man dead in the street. The kid also gets a laugh when, in the opening credits, as a teen narrator, he is giving viewers a tour of the city, his borough, his neighborhood, concluding, “And this is my stoop.”

“Here’s the bar on the corner,” says De Niro. “Should the stoop be right next door? That’s too close. So we put the stoop in the next building over. We used to joke about it all the time with the production designer. Because he was waiting to know where to put the stoop. And we’d say, no, we changed our mind, we’ll put the stoop back here. Two weeks later, we said, put it over here, when they were building the street.”

No detail was too small for De Niro’s attention. Music was a particular obsession: “I wanted music to be like a character in the movie, to comment on a scene in an indirect or ironic way or to support it.” He used different versions of “I Only Have Eyes for You,” for example, as a subliminal musical motif to emotionally bond the audience to his interracial teen couple.

He also had specific ideas about certain characters’ looks. It was De Niro’s inspiration, for example, to refine the look of Sonny: “We shaved my hairline back and I gained weight,” recalls Palminteri. “This was not about looking like Joe Handsome. Just being real.”

There was also some geographical sleight-of-hand involved in the shooting. Rather surprisingly, “A Bronx Tale” was shot not in the Bronx but in Astoria, Queens; it simply wasn’t possible to shut down traffic in the busy neighborhood where the film is set.

De Niro grew up in New York, in a second-floor Bleecker Street apartment in Greenwich Village that was a salon for painters, art critics and poets. De Niro’s parents, the late Robert Sr., to whom the film is dedicated, and Virginia, were both painters. Young Bob got his Italian-American education secondhand, hanging out with kids in nearby Little Italy. He was impressed by the tough guys and he said he was able to bring his own experience to “A Bronx Tale” by emphasizing the way young kids “want to be men. They grow up acting older, dressing older . . . I was like those kids, hanging out at their little social club with the loud music on the jukebox.”

Like Woody Allen, De Niro has spent his life and career in New York, and still sees endless possibilities to explore in the city as a resident and as an artist.

“I’ve been many, many times very lonely in New York, even though I was born and raised here. But it’s a great city; it’s got an energy.”

“And the characters in the movie are so interesting to me, because I wanted to create a New York neighborhood that’s sort of a medieval village. People pass through, tourists maybe go to an Italian restaurant, but they don’t really see the life inside. And that, to me, is fascinating.”

De Niro has lived in Tribeca--which stands for Triangle Below Canal Street--since 1980, when he discovered it while shooting “Raging Bull.” In 1988, he opened the Tribeca Film Center, which houses six floors of Lucasfilm-designed editing and screening rooms, rental office space, and the trendy Tribeca Grill restaurant. His own company, Tribeca Productions, run by Rosenthal, is on the seventh floor, and the partners’ offices occupy the eighth floor.

De Niro has been acting in two films a year for six years, plowing much of his earnings (reportedly $7 million a picture) into his movie company and film center. His company has produced five other movies--the 1991 remake of “Cape Fear,” “Thunderheart,” “Mistress,” “The Night We Never Met” and “Night and the City”--and last season’s Fox TV series “Tribeca.” The company’s only box-office hit has been “Cape Fear.”

De Niro’s next project is starring in “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” directed by Kenneth Branagh. “He’s going to play the doctor,” says De Niro. “I’m playing the other guy.”