You talkin’ to me? Well, in the new movie “The Alto Knights,” in theaters Friday, Robert De Niro is talking to himself.
For the first time in his career, the 81-year-old Oscar winner plays two leading roles in the same film: mafiosos, friends and rivals Frank Costello and Vito Genovese.
The cinematic maneuver is even more complicated than it sounds. In several scenes, Frank and Vito actually sit at a table and chat with one another.
“It was interesting!” the game actor said of the strange experience on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”
Director Barry Levinson (“Rain Man”) told The Post that the left-field idea was hatched by the film’s producer Irwin Winkler, who’s worked with De Niro on many projects throughout his career such as “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas” and “The Irishman.”
At first, the more restrained plan was for De Niro to solely play Costello, the boss of the Luciano crime family in New York from 1937 to 1957.
“Irwin Winkler one day said, ‘Well, what do you think about the idea of Bob playing both roles? Playing Frank and Vito?” Levinson recalled.
“And you go, ‘Well, this could be intriguing. I wonder what’s going to happen here. Let’s see what Bob’s reaction is.’ And then Bob responded to it a couple days later, and we proceeded from that point on.”
For Vito, who was the Luciano boss in 1936 before fleeing to Italy, De Niro lends his voice a higher pitch and speaks much faster and more aggressively. He also wears prosthetics to change the appearance of his face.
“We’re not doing a comic book character or anything like that,” Levinson said of the shape-shifting makeup. “We need a character you believe that’s the way he looks. And so, you know, we spent, I don’t know, maybe a week working on the two characters and finding the best face that seemed to work best for us.”
Now with a brand new mug, how did De Niro, an actor famed for his method approach and occasional improvisations, manage to speak with himself on-screen?
“The key to it is: How to make it seem credible and not mechanical,” Levinson said of the tricky task.
“You can’t do both sides, right? You have to do one, then you’ve got to do the other. But how do you make it seem spontaneous? As if it’s all as fluid as the other work in the film?”
First, they worked together to tweak dialogue in such a way to allow for the characters’ sentences to overlap and leave room for surprising moments. Levinson and De Niro were determined the scenes in a candy store and a booth at the Waldorf-Astoria not be robotic.
So the star picked another actor in “Alto Knights,” Joe Bacino, to stand-in for whichever role he wasn’t playing at the time. When De Niro was Vito, Bacino was Frank; when De Niro was Frank, Bacino was Vito.
“It was Bob’s idea,” Levinson said. “He said, ‘You know, I think I could work well with him, because I need an off camera voice, and I don’t want just a script supervisor just giving me the lines. I want somebody that I can really respond to.’”
Only when the film was finished could De Niro finally watch himself with … himself.
“I wasn’t sure how it would work, how well it would work or if it would not work,” he admitted to Seth Meyers. “But I thought it worked OK.”
