“It’s stupid.” Nine minutes of applause for him and the cast of Killers of the Flower Moon

Robert De Niro, protagonist in Cannes for the film Killers of the Flower Moon by Martin Scorsese and for a series of statements against Donald Trump which he also blames for a certain racist drift in the United States. The actor, a new father at 79, is certainly not new in criticizing the former president of the United States: «There are people who think he could do a good job. He imagines how crazy they are.’

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Robert De Niro, the attack on Trump

“A stupid man” is how Robert De Niro defined former US president Donald Trump today during the press conference at the Cannes Film Festival for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, almost an inspiration for the powerful character he plays in the detective epic about the crimes committed by whites in an attempt to eliminate Native Americans to take over the 1920s Oklahoma Great Plains under which oil had just been discovered. In the film, based on the homonymous novel by David Grann, on the Osage nation, De Niro plays William Hale, a powerful local sheriff, loved by the natives unaware of what he is committing against them. De Niro admitted that he struggled to connect with boss Hale: «I don’t understand much about my character. Part of him is sincere. The other part, the one in which he betrays the tribes, has an attitude of entitlement, as if he had the right to do so as a white man. The fact is that we have become much more aware of this ambivalence after what happened to George Floyd – he said, referring to the police killing that sparked the Black Lives Matter protests during the Trump presidency – we live with a systemic racism and still today with Nazism trying to re-emerge from various parts».

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Robert De Niro and Scorsese’s film

Applauded at last night’s premiere – 9 very long minutes of applause at the end and all the excited cast with some Native Americans with the ritual screams of happiness – De Niro spoke of the film as something that deals with «the banality of evil, the thing which we must be careful of more than all the others. I won’t say who I’m talking about », he initially said, later failing to hold back: « it’s like with Trump, that’s what I said ». With him at the meeting Scorsese, the protagonists Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone, actress of the indigent tribe of Blackfoot and Perforated Noses, beautiful in her traditional clothes and grateful to Scorsese “for having told the drama of her people”.

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