Robert De Niro Explains How Richard Dreyfuss Took His Part in The Goodbye Girl

Robert De Niro looks back on his career.

De Niro, 80, and Quentin Tarantino, 61, appeared at Tribeca’s De Niro Con 2024 on Friday, June 14, for a screening of their 1997 film. Jackie Brown. After the screening, the veteran actor talked about being fired from the project in the 1970s.

“I shot for about two weeks. It was the worst,” De Niro said of his time on the set of the 1977 romantic comedy. The Goodbye Girl — only then was the production titled Bogart slept here.

Robert De Niro, Tribeca Festival 2024.

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He was replaced by Richard Dreyfuss, and the script was rewritten. After the title change, the rom-com became the film that fans know it by today.

The story of how De Niro left the project has been reported in the past, including in Shawn Levy’s 2014 biography. De Niro: Life.

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On Friday, the actor said that only “maybe three times in my life have I had such an experience with [a] director,” referring to working with director Mike Nichols.

He explained that even in those past cases there were performances, and he never had such an experience on a film set.

Robert de Niro, May 2023.

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“I was sitting in my camper and you feel this fear that you’re just, you’re just not working,” De Niro recalled. He said he overheard some of the crew walking past his trailer saying, “He’s just not funny.”

“It’s electric. I couldn’t feel worse at that moment,” said De Niro.

The Good guys Talent said he got a call from Nichols about three days later with the director telling him he was going in a different direction for the production.

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“He kind of said, ‘I think we’re going to end it,'” De Niro recalled.

According to De Niro, the decision was not easy for Nichols. “He said he felt terrible. He was really upset,” he said.

The Irishman talent was also willing to try to resolve the situation before it got to the point of finding a new actor and rewriting the script.

“I was even going to offer part of my salary to keep us in rehearsals for another week to try to keep going,” De Niro said. “I don’t know if I told him that.”

Richard Dreyfuss plays Elliot Garfield in the romantic comedy The Goodbye Girl.

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“That never happened,” he continued. “They took Richard Dreyfuss, rewrote the script and changed the title.”

Still, De Niro seems to be a fan of the finished film, directed by Herbert Ross and nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.

“Richard was great, wonderful in it. And he actually won an Oscar for that role,” he told the audience.

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Regarding Jackie Brown, De Niro starred alongside Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Bridget Fonda, Michael Keaton, Michael Bowen and Chris Tucker. The film follows a flight attendant named Jackie Brown (Grier, 75) who is drawn into a federal investigation into illegal arms sales by Jackson’s character Ordell; De Niro plays one of Ordell’s accomplices, Louis.

De Niro Con runs from now until June 16 during the Tribeca Festival.

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Source: HIS Education