Interview: The method of Robert de Niro's money-making

From his early classic performances to his latest appearance in `Cop Land', De Niro has gone from a method actor who gave his all for a part to a man merely cashing in on cameos. Sarah Gristwood discovers why

Unexpectedly, it's the smile you notice first when you interview De Niro. Eye-crinkling, merry, almost ... goofy? It says: "I know I'm not good at this interview game. But I'm getting better." He needs to be. He has to explain why, in Cop Land, he plays second fiddle to Sylvester Stallone.

In the days of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver every rare performance was an instant classic, every inarticulate interview a story. These days, with lesser roles in a lot more films, he's putting himself around extensively. He's more available to the press - three interviews and four press conferences is my score in the past few years. The excitement of the first time was extraordinary. These days you can't, churlishly, but wonder how much the new, chatty De Niro actually has to say. Of Cop Land: "It was fine, it was good, it was two weeks' work ..." An extended cameo. It's as if he doesn't want to carry the burden of our expectations any more. We shouldn't blame him, really.

Written and directed by James Mangold, who made the successful little independent Heavy, Cop Land postulates a group of New York City cops making their own rules in the nearby bedroom town. Stallone is the deaf (and more than a little dumb) local sheriff who has always played along with them, De Niro the internal affairs officer trying to persuade him to blow the whistle.

Stallone, who says he has been looking forward to this for 20 years, has described their first scene together, "almost like a heavyweight fight, the anticipation, the hype ... It was, like, OK - genre number one, meet genre number two." Action vs drama, with the script tilted heavily towards drama.

"Sylvester does his kind of movies. We understand that," says De Niro, whose "corner" was shared by Harvey Keitel and Ray Liotta, fellow Scorsese alumni. "As he says himself it's a choice he made. He's very honest and straight about it and that's OK. I liked some of the early things he did as a director. We first met in '77, when I was doing New York, New York, so it goes back a long way." De Niro says that Stallone is very good in the film. Certainly Stallone does better than get by. De Niro himself gives a rather low key, non-vintage performance.

Stallone piled on 38 pounds to look like a guy in the street for his part - 20 less than De Niro added for Raging Bull. He hung around hearing impaired people, talked to professionals of every kind. "I knew I had to be really prepared," he says nervously. He carried a small model turtle in his pocket to remind him of the character's ponderous qualities. Shades of De Niro, who spent a year with the real Jake La Motta for Raging Bull, and bought silk underwear from Al Capone's favourite shop for The Untouchables, and who gave research a certain mystique for a whole generation of actors today. The pace he's working now, that isn't possible. He seems to have lost his taste for it anyway. It's as if De Niro and Stallone, from opposite directions, are travelling the same road to meet each other halfway.

In Cop Land, Keitel and Liotta juggle dubious moralities, Stallone gets the conflict, and De Niro is cast as the law and order guy. "I do often get cast in darker roles - but I'm hoping to change that in some way. That's one reason I wanted to do Cop Land. Characters with a mixture of black and white are usually more interesting, but the most important thing is to get the humanity. It's not always the best situation financially - not like playing the leading good guy - but being a male ingenue is not so interesting for me."

Playing an ordinary guy, he sometimes gets it wrong. It's the psychos that live in the memory. "Psychos in pictures scare you, they take you on a ride - and then you come out at the end. They are like dreams in a way. You wake up and know it's not real. I think that has its validity." Upcoming parts include the convict Magwitch in an adaptation of Great Expectations, and perhaps Ahab in a new Moby Dick. Back to the glory days? Possibly.

But De Niro has, for some time, been talking about how he is entering "a new cycle of my life". One in which acting may no longer be a priority. Meanwhile, he is stockpiling projects against a rainy day. Does he worry about over-exposure? "Sometimes, maybe. But I spent a lot of time earlier in my career not doing anything so I'm making up for lost time. My feeling is if the movie works, if the character works, it's not bad. And - I have expenses so I can be swayed."

De Niro spent $7.5m on founding the TriBeCa Film Centre as a home for New York's film-making community. TriBeCa's list of almost a dozen big screen projects (Thunderheart, Cape Fear, Marvin's Room) include some bad pictures as well as good. But sheer survival means that, with its 10th birthday approaching, the company should be regarded as a success story. Winning the film rights to the musical Rent was a recent coup.

It was through TriBeCa that De Niro was first able to direct, and where interest seems to lie today. "I've always wanted to direct," he told me after A Bronx Tale, "and having been around a camera so long, I wasn't as terrified as if I'd never been on set; I knew it would be OK. Sometimes it was hard. But I think I am a good director. And I wanted to have that responsibility."

A Bronx Tale went over time and over budget but was critically acclaimed. He plans to direct again shortly. If there is a price to pay, he will accept it. He has, after all, already had a lion's share of the acting accolades. Been "kind of fortunate" with the critics in the past, as he puts it wryly. But De Niro has had some bad reviews in recent years. Much of his recent work, said The Daily Telegraph, "seems to have been done by an impostor hired to raise money".

"I don't dislike critics," says De Niro, "sometimes they're the only people you can trust. They do try to be supportive, contrary to what you hear. But when critics do say nasty things they do it with a vehemence. They make you angry. I'm not going to defend myself. I get paid well, I'm happy. A writer writes with a pen, an artist works with his own materials, but when you make a movie it costs money and you're lucky to be doing it. If it works, great. If it doesn't - what are you going to do? I still feel that pressure of not wanting the company actually to lose money." In the US, the $20m Cop Land is doing all right though not sensationally. "The important thing is that the movie lasts. When a scene's done right, it's always there."

Directing apart, De Niro is using his early fifties for a second crack at family life - though it's a tangled story. Perhaps it's time we pinned our sights on a new magic-maker. Gave this one a break, finally ...

`Cop Land' opens on 5 December