ROBERT De Niro was such a big pain during the making of the 1997 movie “Jackie Brown” that then-Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein had to calm down director Quentin Tarantino.
“This is a great actor and actually a great guy, who’s going through a difficult time . . . I think he’s really having like a scratching-his-head session, you know, with his own life and his own career,” Weinstein says to Tarantino in a phone conversation leaked to Page Six. “I think he knows he can play a certain kind of role from now for the next 20 years. But I think he wants to change the course of his career.”
In the movie, a tribute to ’70s blaxploitation flicks, De Niro plays an ex-con named Louis Gara. He apparently believed he should have been paid more. “He thinks he’s going to . . . make John Travolta look like that was an amateur night in Dixie,” says Weinstein in the 11-year-old recording, referring to Travolta’s comeback in Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction.”
Responds Tarantino: “He’s still dealing with, subconsciously, the fact that he’s not going to get paid for doing the thing that he’s created after 20 years . . . He’s built his reputation on roles like Louis . . . ‘How can you not pay me?’ ”
At another point, Weinstein warns Tarantino he might get a “weird midnight phone call” from the star. Tarantino rages: “Tell Bob not to call me yelling and screaming . . . I don’t know if I’m going to be nice [if] the guy calls up yelling and screaming at me like a maniac, calling me a [bleep]er!”
Weinstein’s lawyer, David Boies, said, “We are disappointed that any member of the press is trafficking in illegal tape recordings and compounding the damage by taking them out of context,” referring to the tape that was sent anonymously to Page Six.
De Niro’s rep said, “Unless you were privy to actual conversations . . . I would draw an analogy to the blind man who picks up the tail of an elephant and exclaims, ‘This animal must be quite slender and very wiry.’ ”