As Robert De Niro prepares to hit the big screen again, he tells James Mottram about his plans to reunite with Martin Scorsese.

The title of Robert De Niro's latest film, What Just Happened?, couldn't be more apt. It's a question fans used to his more legendary performances must ask themselves as they look back on a decade that has seen him phone in performances for dreadful potboilers such as 15 Minutes, City By The Sea, Godsend, Hide and Seek and, most recently, Righteous Kill.

For an answer, they need look no further than to De Niro's character in the film itself. As Ben, a Hollywood producer who goes into meltdown after it looks like his new film, Fiercely, is going to be an offensive flop, it's arguably the closest character De Niro has played to himself.

After all, since forming Tribeca Productions with former Warner executive Jane Rosenthal almost 20 years ago, De Niro has produced several films, including the hugely successful comedy Meet the Parents (and its sequel Meet the Fockers), in which he starred.

Backing everything from Queen musical We Will Rock You to the Nobu chain of restaurants, it's little wonder that when 65-year-old De Niro enters the room, dressed in a navy jacket and dark polo shirt, he has the air of a businessman rather than the greatest living actor of his generation. Not that you would say that to him. "I don't even like to call the film business a business," he says. "I like to call it a profession."

De Niro is keen to differentiate himself from the studio executives he's forced to work with. "Even if they have good intentions, it's about money," he sighs. "It's about, How much I'm going to lose?' And you can understand that. It's not like they're being bad. That's their position. That's what they're in it for. They want to protect their investment. You have to totally understand that and make that as good for them as possible without compromising the movie, so it's a constant tightrope."

In his case, all he wants to do is "make the movie as good as it could be - to get the right actors, the right people, all the right ingredients for the movie".

You get the impression De Niro finds producing a rather thankless task, far less creatively stimulating than acting once was. A shame, then, that his attempts at directing never worked out as he'd hoped.

After making his debut with the charming 1993 film, A Bronx Tale, it took another 13 years to follow it up with CIA drama The Good Shepherd.

"It was a humbling experience," he says. "Every day I had a decision about everything imaginable - as far as making the day, then going over a day and feeling terrible about it and having to deal with that, and how to make up for that day, which I couldn't make up. The experience in doing The Good Shepherd was helpful in doing What Just Happened? It's hard."

A fictionalised account of the experiences of Art Linson, a Holly-wood producer behind several De Niro vehicles including The Untouchables, What Just Happened? is one of the actor's better films of late. Much of this can be put down to De Niro reuniting with director Barry Levinson, with whom he made the political satire Wag the Dog back in 1997. Like that, this was filmed on the hoof in under a month. "There's a certain energy and tautness when you're working this fast," says De Niro. "I think of this as having a European flavour, so it's funny but it has all the other elements - sadness, drama and struggle."

The last time he played a Holly-wood producer was 32 years ago in The Last Tycoon. An adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel, the film paired De Niro with Elia Kazan. The director of On The Waterfront, Kazan was co-founder of the Actor's Studio that taught the method-acting approach so beloved by De Niro.

"Elia was great as a director," says De Niro. "I'd always heard about him, how he was. When we were kids, he was always the best - and he was the best from my own experience with him. He was a great director for me as an actor. The movie wasthe movie."

This as close as you get to De Niro admitting that one of his films was a disappointment. It came in the middle of a remarkable period that stretched from his breakthrough in 1973's Mean Streets (the first of eight collaborations with director Martin Scorsese) to Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America 11 years later.

Two Oscars - Best Supporting Actor for his young Vito Corleone in The Godfather: Part II and Best Actor for boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull - bookended two further nominations, for playing Vietnam veterans in Taxi Driver and The Deer Hunter. Known for his intensive preparations, from learning the Sicilian dialect to play Corleone, to gaining 60lbs to become La Motta, he could do no wrong.

His recent Oscar nominations came for Awakenings in 1990 and Scorsese's Cape Fear remake a year later - both inferior to his turn as Jimmy Conway in Scorsese's 1990 classic Goodfellas. By this point, it was as if the intense, violent films De Niro excelled at were no longer in vogue, no doubt accounting for his misfires in the late 1980s, as he experimented with comedy and romance.

By the time he starred with a young Leonardo DiCaprio in 1993's This Boy's Life, it was as if the baton was being passed on to the new generation.

His complex personal life meant he needed to make films for cash. Divorced in 1988 from his first wife, Diahnne Abbott, after 12 years of marriage, they have one grown-up son, Raphael. In 1995, he and then-girlfriend Toukie Smith had twin sons, Aaron and Julian, conceived by in-vitro fertilisation. Then, in 1998, his second wife, former air hostess Grace Hightower, to whom he's still married, gave birth to their son, Elliott.

So how does he keep his personal life just that? "Well, you do," he grunts. Does he find it easy juggling family with work? "I'm still here."

I am hoping for more when I ask about his Tribeca film festival.

Set up in the wake of 9/11, to help revitalise the New York area devastated by the terror attacks, it's grown exponentially ever since.

"I have great hopes for it," he says. "It is getting bigger and better every year." From this, we move on to the presidential victory for Barack Obama. "I couldn't have imagined it any other way. It just would've been a disaster for our country and for the world if it had gone the other way."

For those who live in hope that the De Niro of old will reappear, there are some crumbs of comfort. He is lined up to reunite with both Michael Mann and Martin Scorsese. Last working with both in 1995, on Mann's Heat and Scorsese's Casino, he's now in talks to play a hitman, curiously enough, for both directors. While Mann's Frankie Machine, the story of a retired mob assassin lured back into the business, is fictional, Scorsese's project, I Heard You Paint Houses, is based on real-life Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran.

Though not the first Scorsese project De Niro has been attached to in the past 15 years - he was mooted to play Bill "The Butcher" in Gangs of New York - the idea of them teaming up to play the man reputedly responsible for the death of union leader Jimmy Hoffa is mouthwatering. "That's something Marty and I want to do very much. Steve Zaillian who penned Awakenings and Gangs of New York is, at the moment, writing the script. And we have an even more ambitious plan of doing another movie connected to it in some way, with Eric Roth who wrote The Good Shepherd hopefully writing that script. So, yeah, that's very much planned to be done."

If these get made, De Niro can retire from the business satisfied. "If we he and Scorsese make an even 10, I'll be happy," he says. "We've started some things, but over the years you get distracted."

He admits he'd like to make a sequel to The Good Shepherd, "but I don't know how realistic that is".

Time is against him and he knows he's getting on in years now.

"There are so many things I want to do, and I'm getting anxious about whether I'll be able to do them," he says. It's a rare moment of honesty from a man who only ever seems to speak through his characters.
What Just Happened? is released on November 28.