Robert De Niro is being called “condescending” after he shut down an interview with a female reporter when she asked him a question he didn’t like.
Emma Brockes was interviewing De Niro for Radio Times about his latest movie film “The Intern. ” Brockes asked De Niro if he is ever tempted to go on “autopilot” while filming, and how he feels about the Tribeca district of New York being overtaken by bankers.
Then De Niro asked Brockes to pause her recorder, and according to her then he “pops up out of his chair, starts pacing madly and says he’s cutting short the interview because of the ‘negative inference’ of what I just said.” (RELATED: Robert Downey Jr. Walks Out)
(Photo: Getty Images)
From Brockes’s story, which wasn’t published online:
“‘What, about the bankers?!’ I am amazed. ‘All the way through,’ says De Niro. ‘All the way through. Negative inference.’ ‘Er, like where else?’ ‘The whole way through and I’m not doing it. I’m not doing it, darling.'”
“You’re probably not even aware that you’re doing it. The negative inference,” De Niro reportedly told her.
“I have to say, now that you’re going on about it, it makes me think you were on auto-pilot and you’re super-sensitive about it,” Brockes said.
“I’m not doing this, darling,” De Niro told her. “I think you’re very condescending. Oh, you think ‘darling’ is condescending?”
Brockes later said she felt sympathetic toward De Niro. (RELATED: Robert Downey On Being Pestered About Being Not Liberal: ‘I Wish I Had Left Sooner’)