Robert De Niro Piles On Donald Trump At ‘Megalopolis’ NY Premiere, With Backup From Spike Lee: “He Cannot Hold Anything Together”

deadline.com:

Robert De Niro posed a hypothetical that made the audience bust out laughing even as the actor remained utterly stone-faced. “Just imagine Donald Trump directing this film,” he said at Monday’s New York premiere of Francis Ford Coppola‘s Megalopolis. “It’ll never go anywhere, from total craziness.

He cannot do anything. He cannot hold anything together … He wants to destroy the country. And he could not do this movie. He could not do anything that has a structure.” De Niro, Spike Lee and Coppola appeared together in a half-hour Q&A before the screening presented by the New York Film Festival at the AMC Lincoln Square Imax. (The festival kicks off Friday but extended itself for the Imax event given the rare chance to gather prominent guests together with the 85-year-old Coppola.) The Q&A was beamed out to 65 North American locations via the Imax Live network and followed a red carpet featuring cast members including Aubrey Plaza, Dustin Hoffman and Giancarlo Esposito.

In the latter minutes of the Q&A, De Niro and Lee made explicit one of the parallels between the film’s imagined world and America’s election-year anxiety.

Asked about his view on the future of cinema, De Niro instead took things in a political direction, motivated by Coppola’s ruminations on the decline of civilizations and the rise of dictators. “I’m worried,” De Niro said. “I see the things in Francis’ film about that, the parallels and so on.