C is for Cady, cuffed, singing and sinking
A-Z of Movie Deaths
I feel bad for kids these days, for so many reasons. But one stands above all others — you want to know why?
Cos they have a really shitty impression of Robert de Niro.
They don’t remember him. How he was. They don’t care how he could drive a story forward with nothing more than a narrowing of his eyebrows.
Or how he looked like he could bury you just by turning down the corners of his mouth.
He’s 81 now, and he looks like a wax model of the real Robert de Niro that started to melt.
They see him on Uber Eats ads. Berating Donald Trump on social media. Or looking like a grumpy grandfather, shifting uncomfortably in his seat at the Oscars. The reality is, he’s probably getting next to no sleep as he’s just become a father again!
This is not how I want to remember de Niro.
I want to remember him in Godfather. In Taxi Driver. In This Boy’s Life. Or even in his excellent performance in The Joker.
Most of all, I want to remember him at his most badass — as pumped-up violent serial rapist, Max Cady, in the 1991 remake of Cape Fear.
As usual, this character is so injected with his method acting lunacy, you just don’t see de Niro here at all. He’s gone.
He disappeared into a regime of chin-ups and crunches, eating brown rice and green vegetables. He even spent $5000 getting his teeth sharpened for the role (and then $20,000 getting them put back to normal after the movie)— all to fuel the illusion that he really was someone who’d been exercising throughout his entire jail term in preparation for his release.
The movie
When Cady gets released from prison, he seeks out revenge on the lawyer who defended him on a rape and battery charge of a 16 year old girl. The lawyer, Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) holds evidence back that would have seen Cady acquitted. As you can imagine, he’s a little upset about that.
The death scene
Sam Bowden spends most of the film trying to keep Cady away from his family, knowing that revenge is most certainly on his mind. The finale of the film finds both men on a houseboat in the midst of a storm.
Cady ends the film handcuffed to the boat, as it sinks. He goes down with it, singing the hymn “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand”, the whole time, creepily maintaining eye contact with Bowden, who has pulled himself to safety.
The artwork
I wanted to capture Cady’s final moments, as he’s going down with the houseboat. I added the cigar, which he obviously doesn’t have in this scene in the film, but it’s a prop that Cady’s seen with at other times. Particularly in the cinema scene, where he’s blowing smoke up towards the ceiling and laughing heartily.
I spent a while on the tattoos, trying to get them right, as I felt like this was a key part of the image. I like the effect of the water, which I tried to make look slightly transparent.
My little orange guy is looking nervously towards the water level, which is creeping ever closer. It’s intended as a comic effect to undermine the seriousness of the moment.
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