Legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola directed a film about the fall of the Roman emperor through a modern American lens, and during a Q&A about it, Robert De Niro couldn’t seem to help himself from interjecting his unsolicited and irrelevant political opinions.
Coppola started off with a reasonable observation about the corruption that he believes paved the way for Trump’s political ascent.
“Um, today America is Rome. And we’re about to go through the same experience, for the same reasons, that Rome lost its republic and ended up with an emperor…Rome was so prosperous, Rome was making lots of money. So the senators were actually very interested in their power and their own wealth. And they weren’t managing the country. Well, the same thing has happened here. Our Senate and representatives are all manipulating their own power rather than running the country. And we’re in danger of losing it.”
Spike Lee then chimed in, “Back in Rome were they eating cats and dogs?”
De Niro lamented, “I’m worried. I see the things in Francis’ film about that, parallels and so on. To me, it’s not over until it’s over, and we have to go at this wholeheartedly to beat the Republicans — those Republicans, they’re not real Republicans. Beat Trump. It’s that simple. We cannot have that type of person running this country. Everybody has to get out there and vote, and we have to make it very clear what America is.”
Lee echoed his sentiments, adding, “This election is going to be very, very close. I’m a big sports fan and, the expression you used, it’s not over ’till it’s over. We cannot just think that the game is over when it’s no, vote and show up.”
While Coppola did use a portion of the Q&A to condemn Trump’s statements about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, he seemed much less interested than Lee or De Niro into turning it into a Kamala Harris ad, or lecturing viewers on current events.
Coppola, seemingly trying to get the conversation back on track, said, “I deliberately got people to make this who disagree. I mean, there’s actors in the movie that are moving another way, and there are people in there who have been canceled which way and right. And we in the movie, we all work together. Together. Happily and creatively. So it shows that we’re… I didn’t want them to say, ‘Oh, it’s some you know, woke movie that’s just a political thing.’ We’re above the politics in making the film I thought. And yet still we all liked each other, and make this film together. So I’m hopeful that we can work even when people disagree with us. To a higher goal.”
De Niro blurted, “Can you imagine Donald Trump directing this movie? It would never go anywhere. It’d be total craziness. He cannot do anything. He cannot do anything together. He wants to destroy the country. And he could not do this movie. He couldn’t do anything that has a structure.”
De Niro isn’t the only celebrity unable to separate his craft from his opinions.
During a performance at the iHeartRadio festival, she got uncomfortably close to the camera, and said, “Project 2025 is Donald Trump‘s playbook for controlling and punishing women, poor people, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community. It is time for all Americans to band together and to finally defeat the Trump agenda. And the only way to do that is by confronting him at the polls. Do you want to live in a dictatorship? Well show up and vote!”
Earlier this year, Zach Galifianakis warned that while celebrity endorsements can be effective to a point, they actually may end up having unintended consequences. Many voters don’t particularly enjoy being lectured by exorbitantly wealthy performers that don’t face the same challenges or burdens they do. After Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, polling found that support for the Democratic candidate actually dropped.
