NEW YORK -- Like Crosby and Hope, Laurel and Hardy, Gibson and Glover or even Pinky and The Brain, they're together again.
Who? Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal.
Huh? The co-stars of the silly but hugely successful 1999 mob comedy Analyze This are back cracking each other up in the new sequel, Analyze That.
The movie opens Friday across North America with Warner Bros. studio executives expecting another hit.
The new movie picks up more or less just after where the original left off. De Niro's mobster, Paul Vitti, is now comfortably ensconced in Sing Sing, still playing the kingpin. Crystal, as hapless Ben Sobel, is still practising psychiatry in a luxurious New York suburb.
But, when mob rivals try to murder him in prison, Vitti fakes a catatonic state of madness and is released into Sobel's custody for treatment. Naturally, all heck breaks loose again. Bullets fly, jokes zing.
"There was hesitation," De Niro offers at a press conference where he is flanked by Crystal, director Harold Ramis and co-stars Lisa Kudrow (back as Crystal's wacky wife) and Cathy Moriarty-Gentile (De Niro's Oscar-nominated Raging Bull co-star playing a blowzy Mafia widow-boss).
"But," De Niro continues, "from my standpoint I thought that there was nothing to lose and we could have some fun. And why not?"
Says Crystal, "It's hard with the second one after the first one was so successful and was such a good, I think, and well-liked movie. (The challenge was) to make the story good and the characters good in it."
Crystal says he and his colleagues asked themselves, "Why would people come again? Why would they care about us again?"
The key was the script and story. "So it took a long time before we all felt comfortable with what it was and it kept developing as we were shooting, sometimes. Keep changing it, keep making it funnier ... until we all felt satisfied with it."
It is easy to see, however, that De Niro and Crystal have a genuine rapport behind the scenes on the Analyze movies, even though they may seem as different as chalk and cheese.
De Niro, 59, is often cited as one of the greatest actors of American cinema. With credits on his resume such as Mean Streets, The Godfather: Part II, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Brazil, GoodFellas, Sleepers, Cop Land and Jackie Brown, De Niro has carved out a place in the Hollywood hall of fame for his serious work. And he is still busy on it. Having scooted back home to New York for the Analyze That press conference, De Niro is now back in Toronto working on Godsend, a thriller in the mold of The Sixth Sense.
As a comedian, however, De Niro first showed off his droll side in the terrific, off-kilter Midnight Run with Charles Grodin and later emerged as a bona fide goof in movies such as Analyze This, Meet The Parents and Showtime.
In contrast, Crystal, 55, is often cited as one of America's great jokesters, as caustic and witty and spontaneous as his pal Robin Williams. Crystal's world is the stage, however. On celluloid, his credits are light-weight, although he contributed to classics such as This Is Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride and scored hits with When Harry Met Sally, his two City Slickers flicks and Analyze This.
Still, you would naturally assume that De Niro and Crystal live and work in different worlds. Instead, they're close friends and willing comrades in front of a camera. It was Crystal who enticed De Niro to do the first Analyze movie. And he egged him on to join him for the sequel.
You can see their buddy-buddy bond in the comic outtakes which run under the Analyze That end credits. So don't leave if you want to see Crystal prodding and poking De Niro, both verbally and physically, in their various scenes together. To the point where the shoot was ruined by giggling.
Says De Niro, "I think it makes a big difference if you have a certain ..." He searches for words, typical for De Niro in front of the media. As fearless as he is in action on a movie set, he has spent 25 years fumbling in conversations with reporters. But De Niro just grins and finds a new sentence.
"If you relate to each other, it helps," he says. "It does help a lot. You can work with certain people and it just doesn't ... (another incomplete thought, but he may be conjuring memories of actors he really hated on set). It can work and it's fine. (If) the relationship is such that that kind of rapport is not needed, then it's okay and the audience will never know or notice and it doesn't matter.
"But, in our case especially, it does help that we like each other," De Niro says of Crystal. "We respect each other and we have fun. And the rhythms -- we're both from New York (De Niro was born in the city, Crystal in Long Beach, Long Island; both are based in Manhattan now). Those things help. Harold is unfortunately from Chicago, so ..."
This time, as he mocks Ramis, De Niro knows he doesn't have to finish his sentence -- and reporters laugh.
"What Bob said is very true," Crystal says, picking up the rapport theme. "What is also great is that we're very open and honest with each other when we're working. 'How about this? How about that? Was that good? Should we try something else?' And there is no ego about getting the work done the best that we can do it.
"Neither one of us -- and obviously Harold, too -- likes to leave the set until we've got every little scrap of comedy or honesty in the scene that we can get, which is terrific. No one is in a hurry to get out of there, so that also makes it fun.
"We laugh a lot and also, I think, we have very great respect for what we both do and for the chance to get to do it. I think that's what makes it fun. We all help each other out to make it the best it can be."
That said, De Niro is still struggling with his sense of comic timing and delivery. He mugs a lot, squinching up his famous face, distorting its features, exaggerating the laugh lines. What comes naturally to Crystal does not to De Niro.
"I can do comedy in a certain way," De Niro says. "Who knows, maybe I can do more stuff down the line, take more chances. But it's fun to do and I love to do it in a way that I can sense the humor in a situation -- and the irony."
He does see variations in his comic work, including when he bounced off Ben Stiller. "Meet The Parents is a little different, obviously, so that was not the character I play in (the Analyze movies). The humour was more, I felt, subtle.
"We might do a sequel to that, too. We're planning on it (it's to be called Meet The Fockers and is geared for release in 2003). That'll be sort of interesting to see how that goes."
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