"Yes, exactly": Robert De Niro's lecture in Cannes

 JR projects a large image onto a screen: there is JR with his son straddling his shoulders and Robert De Niro with his son Elliot, the latter drawing on the work table in De Niro's father's studio. In the middle is the cameraman of this film in fieri, Roberto De Angelis. Bob shows him his father's paintings and explains that the studio is untouched since his death decades earlier. Cigarettes, brushes, everything is still in place as he left it.

"I wanted to keep everything intact for my children," De Niro, who has seven children from four different relationships, explains with effort. 'Obviously my older children knew their grandfather, but my younger children did not. So I preserved the practice, I kept it intact like that. It was important to me and to them. I also took pictures of the studio, but I also wanted the children to experience the space'.

De Niro also keeps objects from the films in which he acts.

"I realised that people sometimes took objects away on set, as if they were souvenirs, and, instead, I wanted to keep them for myself because they were part of the film. Over the years I accumulated so many papers and things that I had to hire an assistant".

The project between JR and De Niro came about a bit by chance. With the occasion of a small exhibition in Ny in honour of his father, JR had the idea of filming De Niro in his father's studio. No more than 20 minutes, a kind of social media spot, for the younger generation so that they would be more aware of an artist called Robert De Niro Sr., of Irish and Italian descent, also called Roberto De Niro. When Roberto De Angelis (on camera) and JR entered the studio, Bob also handed JR his father's diaries, which Bob had never read. So after reading Robert Senior's diaries JR returned to the studio with De Angelis and instead of 20 minutes, the shoot lasted five hours.

Thus was born this project that does not yet have a precise duration and direction.

"We don't have to worry about having a deadline," De Niro says slyly, and the audience, won over, laughs. "I did another documentary about my father, but it was for HBO. I had a deadline and did it myself, but this time I felt it had to be something more. Because it's not a painting where you have to buy brushes and canvases, but it's a much more expensive medium and we need a lot of money we don't have to worry about when it will end.

Bob's mocking smile towards Jr, general laughter from the audience.

At one point JR announces that we are going to see a part of the film and De Niro is also going to watch it with us for the first time. So JR comes down the stairs dragging Bob and brings him into the audience to watch the film.

It is indeed a charming clip in which De Niro is seen conversing with a giant picture of his father and one of him as a child, while Martin Scorsese admires them from a scaffold. And then De Niro symbolically dragging his father's gigantograph up the mountain among the sheep, or sleeping on it. Then we realise that in turn the blow-up is lying on a meadow, that he is lying on a barge sailing on the sea, as we later realise from the final shot of a drone filming everything from above.

The audience is bewitched: it is like entering De Niro's life and wounds, a kind of therapy suggests a spectator from the audience. Not only the father, but also the mother. An unconscious and unknown process that one does not know where it leads.

Both agree that the further one goes, the more painful it is. And in addition to the diaries, Bob also kept hours and hours of recordings: images of when he was young, of his mother (who painted) appear. De Niro only handed over the reels six months ago. 'I had them and they were there. I knew I had them,' De Niro shrugs.

And here begins the real ping pong of the absurd with very long questions and answers that are as short as they can be. We get to the subject of death. "Are you scared?" asks JR. 'I don't have a choice,' De Niro is amused to answer, but then returns to his father: 'I should have spent more time with him, but maybe part of me didn't want to. Children want to go out and live their own lives, experience things for themselves and they don't want to remember negative things. He was very dear, he genuinely adored me and so I adore my children. I wish I had spent more time with my children when I was young. I wish I spent more time with them now.

Then there is almost nothing left and questions from the audience begin. Some people talk about themselves and he comments: 'OK'. Some ask him questions about the danger our democracies are in, since the day before he had spoken of autarchies and fascism.

"People have to fight for their rights. People know what the right thing to do is. Those who have power and do not do it, know that they do not do the right thing and do not want to do it'.

Then a budding actor asks him for advice on how to approach his part: 'Joe Pesci says:

"When in doubt, have no doubt. If the director tells you where to go, follow him. But the most important thing is that you feel good, you have to be smart enough to follow your instincts".

We are at the end, no amarcords or anecdotes. And on the future of cinema. "I don't know where cinema is going. I just know that seeing the cinema in a hall or alone is a very different experience. Nothing is like the hall, the hall is special'.