Dubai: When the godfather of the Doha Tribeca Film Festival (DTFF) arrived in the Middle East the star had plenty to say about the Arab Spring.
Having missed the official awards ceremony, the 68-year-old eventually made it to the red carpet for the closing night screening of Luc Besson's The Lady.
And Tribeca Film Festival co-founder De Niro was keen to talk about the Arab Spring, having visited Egypt's Tahrir Square. "Sure I've been there," he said.
Asked the importance of DTFF taking place at a time like this in the Middle East De Niro wasn't short of words.
"It's important of course but I'm more interested to see the movies that would come here say in a year or two after the Arab Spring," he said. "I'm very curious obviously.
"Let's see what happens with everything that unfolds historically."
Dressed in a grey suit, hands firmly clasped in front of him, he thoughtfully continued. "I think it's great. I think it's amazing what technology has done indirectly for communication in the world, so now there's a lot of… I don't wanna say anarchy but chaos, in terms of how things are going to start to focused. Everybody is very curious about how that will happen and hopefully it will happen in a good sense. The reason the Arab Spring arose was because of oppression so now we would hope that things shake down democratically. But I'm sure they'll be a lot of..." he paused. "It's not going to be easy."
