On September 11 Anniversary, Robert De Niro Calls for Mamdani to Be a “Bridge” for New York City

Art helped us process 9/11 in so many ways right after the attacks. But for me the breakthrough wouldn’t come for nearly five years, at a midtown Manhattan movie theater.

The Tribeca Film Festival had decided in 2006 to open with a premiere of Paul Greengrass’ United 93, despite puzzling murmurs of “too soon.” (Is there a reverse statute of limitations for when artists can make sense of trauma?) Tribeca organizers — Robert De Niro, producing partner Jane Rosenthal and the rest of the staff of the healing-minded Manhattan film gathering — invited not only Greengrass and the many terrific workaday actors featured in the film but the family members of the victims and heroes of that titular flight’s hijacking.

Covering the event for my employer at the time, I approached the old Ziegfeld Theater with a mix of curiosity and anxiety. I had lived through 9/11 — watched the towers burn from a downtown apartment window, stood in Union Square as people streamed in soot-filled and shell-shocked. Was a movie recalling, let alone reclaiming, that day what I needed?

I couldn’t have been ready for what followed. The answer was a resounding yes, in ways impossible to anticipate.

I felt it immediately, stepping on to the red carpet, as it were, with the family members clearly eager to share with me or anyone who would listen their memories of those who died. I wouldn’t call them happy or even content, but a certain relief seemed to light their eyes as they opened themselves up, for the first time or maybe the 500th time, to talk about the men, women and children who died on that plane as a sidewalk-full of reporters eagerly listened.

The movie of course was dramatically effective, cinema at its urgent finest. Greengrass bringing us along, gently holding our hands from the early moments of Tuesday-morning banality, to the terror upon the realization of what was happening, to the activation that something had forever changed — a metaphor in celluloid for what we all went through in the lead-up to and aftermath of that incogitable day. Sitting through the film I couldn’t believe what the director and his cast had achieved — couldn’t believe that something that lived so abstractly in our minds could so viscerally be created in front of our eyes.

And then, the film’s ending —  the plane spins down, the screen goes dark, the sound stops. In any other theater the room would have fallen into a reverent silence. But the room wasn’t silent. It was filled with wailing. Waves and waves of wailing.

I was sitting in the main section of that grand 20th-century palace, the loge right behind me. The family members were mainly sitting in that loge. When the movie ended they let out the most heartfelt, soulful, painful cries, each of them with their own rhythm and cadence, all combining into a tragic cacophony that, if I’m being honest, I still hear in my nightmares. Just the loudest crying and sobbing you’ve ever heard, coming from dozens and dozens of people, cascading like a surging river, unending, unavoidable.

As the cries washed over me and everyone else who didn’t lose people on that day, they bridged a gap, between the victims and the onlookers, bringing all of us in the latter group into their grief in a way that I have never been brought into another’s grief before. It hit me then what Greengrass had done — he hadn’t just re-created a terrible event. He had given victims a chance to see their family members one last time. While we were watching a movie, they were watching their loved ones eat, talk, live, fight and, yes, die. (One compelling moment, in a darkly comic way, arrived in a crowded restroom after the screening when an actor who played a hijacker came face to face with a family member. You could feel the room bubble with tension — it was only a second of silence but it felt like an hour — until the family member put his hand gently on the actor’s shoulder and said “you were very brave.”)

And then it hit me what Tribeca had done too: Invited all of these family members to experience that last-glimpse together. To turn private mourning into public bonding.

The moment stands out as one of defining cultural experiences of my life. And it stands as a defining cultural experience of the Tribeca Film Festival, which like the tragedy that spawned it marks its 25th year in 2026.

A lot of the talk about art “helping us heal” can feel hollow. The only thing that truly makes us heal is time, and maybe therapy. But Tribeca’s stated goal of using art to ease the pain of a city and a nation landed as genuine that springtime day. And, frankly, on many other days.

Founded — as the new Matt Tyrnauer documentary Tribeca 25 dropping on Netflix Friday shows — in the months after the attacks by De Niro, Rosenthal and Rosenthal’s then-husband Craig Hatkoff, the Tribeca Film Festival soon became more than just a one-off benefit. It became, as Graydon Carter says in the film, part of the cultural calendar of the city. (You can watch an exclusive clip of the movie below.)

From the Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton appearances at the first edition to Nas, George Harrison, Aretha Franklin and other performers taking the stage in later years, Tribeca has turned into a curious kind of mainstay — like downtown itself, always changing, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the less-better, but somehow still here and strong all those planned obituaries later. (After a somewhat odd period owned by James Dolan, Tribeca for the past seven years has been owned by James Murdoch’s investment group.)

No one would accuse Tribeca of hewing closely to a single identity. Over its quarter-century it has sometimes lurched between indie films and studio movies (did a festival really need a Spider-Man 3
premiere?); between feature discoveries (the enduring gem City Island) and features you’ll never hear about again; between worthy docs and foreign films ((Taxi to the Dark Side, early Asghar Farhadi) and too many authorized-celebrity nonfiction boondoggles to count. Not to mention the cool if unruly experiments in VR, multimedia and, this year, AI.

This wasn’t all of the festival’s doing; Sundance and SXSW usually had first looks at the best of the indie film crop, forcing Tribeca to other pastures. But that kind of ecumenism, whether born of ideology or necessity, is exactly what makes Tribeca keep on, the let’s-just-try-it-what-the-hell-ism. Film people sometimes like to shade the gathering, but New Yorkers rarely do, and I find that telling: faced with tragedy, residents of this city simply want to get together and talk about something in front of them, whether that something is joyous or odd or even just re-lives the worst day of their lives. Like the city after that terrible day, simply being together is enough.

To mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and the release of the doc, I sat down this week with De Niro and Rosenthal at CBS News headquarters in midtown Manhattan (fresh off a Gayle King hit) to talk to them about 9/11, the anniversary and the festival’s place in both.

Let’s talk about that night of the United 93 premiere,  which was unlike anything I’ve ever felt in a movie theater. How did it play for you guys?

Jane Rosenthal: It was very special and one of the highlights of the past 25 years. You have to remember that the Shanksville [PA] families haven’t already felt like they were included as much as some the others. So we were just trying to give them a community, a place where they can come together and remember.

The tone of it feels so hard to strike — is this a celebration? A commemoration? A memorial? Almost, perhaps, like a microcosm of the festival itself.

JR: We had a lot of questions about how to do it. Like, would we have a red carpet? Who would we invite? It’s really uncharted territory. But I think in the end we got it right and it was one of the most special moments in the history of the festival.

Bob did that moment stand out to you? Or is there another that really embodies Tribeca in your mind?

Robert De Niro: It’s hard to pick one. But I do remember that first year, right when we started, standing on the roof [at Tribeca headquarters and De Niro offices on 375 Greenwich] and looking down and seeing thousands of people coming out and thinking “we really have something.” We had no idea if it would work. And then I’m thinking “downtown can come back.” I don’t know if anything will compare to that feeling.

Jane, creating something out of nothing seems hard for anyone with a film-festival dream, let alone in a place that was the site of a major terrorist attack with nothing but rubble and rescue workers around. What was the scale of the challenge?

JR: It really did seem impossible. I mean, we were walking into movie theaters with hazmat suits because they were telling us it was unsafe. We really didn’t know if anyone would come.  And winging it doesn’t really begin to describe it. George Lucas had a new Star Wars movie coming out. Bob walks into my office and says, “George tells me the movie won’t be ready in time.” And I said “maybe we just push the festival back? It’s not like anyone is waiting for it.” So that’s what we did. We had no rules, no business plan. We just knew we needed to do something.

RDN: New York seemed stuck. Downtown seemed dead. The only thing we could do is try to change that.

JR: It’s a feeling about being part of a community. That’s what they were trying to take away with the attacks. So that’s what we tried to bring back.

Bob you talk movingly in the film about your experiences on the day. We all had them but to think that a celebrity was basically feeling what we all were feeling brings a strange kind of comfort.

RDN: It was surreal. I was supposed to go to California later that day. I was coming back from a meeting in Midtown and my son called me in the car and said a plane hit the Twin Towers. Then he called me again and said another plane hit. I get to my office, which is nine blocks north of the Towers. I have a big picture window and saw them burning. Then they just pancaked down.

That’s one of the most striking moments in the movie, where you say that even though you watched it out the window with your own eyes you didn’t believe it. I think a lot of us felt that way.

RDN: I couldn’t believe what I was seeing — I had to watch CNN just to confirm it, as strange as that sounds. Right at the moment it felt like nothing could ever go on as usual. “We are in the middle of an apocalypse,” I kept thinking.

There’s been some stir in recent days here in New York about whether Mayor Zohran Mamdani should attend the memorial, a protest movement led by Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki, former FDNY commissioner Thomas von Essen and a few families, because — as they see it — he’s had associations with people who minimized the tragedy.  Do you think he should be there?

RDN: I don’t see why he shouldn’t come. He’s the mayor. I haven’t heard him say or do anything yet that would disqualify him from being there. Maybe I’m naive but you have to give the guy a chance. He’s not a part of what happened.

Do you understand why families of victims would find it problematic or does the logic not track for you?

RDN: [pauses to think] I understand their pain but I still think he should be there.

JR: I think this stems from tension he’s had with the fire department and the comments about 
defund the police, which I don’t think he really meant.

RDN: Well he did say it. And of course it’s ridiculous. You can’t defund the police. It’s not going to happen. But I still think he should be at the memorial.

JR: He should use it as a baton to unite the city.

RDN: As a bridge.

Speaking of partisan politics, you’ve been outspoken on Trump…

RDN: We have to stop him. It’s insane. We have to send people to voting booths and make sure they can go in. Just watch to keep them safe. It’s crazy we’re here but this is where we are. We have to protect our elections.

As we speak Alex Gibney’s Elon Musk documentary is premiering in Venice. One of the things it’s about is how Musk himself could put his thumb on the scale with the election.

RDN: He’s a monster. I don’t know how else to say it. So many of the tech barons. They were supposed to be helping us and now look at what they’ve done to us. And they’re doing things not to other countries but here, in America, to America, in our own backyard. It’s unbelievable.

You’ve actually had a very interesting relationship with tech and deepfakes as an actor; Marty used it in a groundbreaking way to de-age you in The Irishman. That was more than seven years ago. Do you like where AI has gone?

RDN: I have a lot of concerns about where it’s gone. Where it’s going. I did that thing at CAA — The Vault (a partnership between the agency and YouTube to give performers more agency over their likeness). I have control over my image now. You need my consent. If you do it right and I’m involved I don’t think I’d have a problem with it. But a lot of it is not that. It’s things I’d never say.

JR: I think The Vault is very good but we have a long way to go to get control.

RDN: You know every year Apple asks me to take a picture and then they’ll give me an iPhone if I do. And I’m never doing that; I’m not going to help them sell their technology. I always say no. I’m very polite about it. But they know.

Before we break, I have to ask: what does the future of Tribeca look like — what do you think will be said about it after the next 25 years?

RDN: Well I won’t be here for that. Maybe you will.

You’re saying you don’t think Bryan Johnson can give you immortality and you can be here that way?

RDN: Maybe as AI.