BY CHARLI BATTERSBY | The Tribeca Film Festival (now known as Tribeca Festival) began with co-founder Robert De Niro trying to help his neighborhood recover from 9/11. After 20+ years, the festival is acknowledging that this De Niro fellow seems to have made quite a few good movies over the years, and has devoted a large chunk of their venue to an immersive De Niro Con museum dedicated to “Bob” and his films.

An entire floor of Spring Studios has been turned into a museum of memorabilia from his career called De Niro is an Icon: An Exhibit & Immersive Experience. There, fans can see costumes, original scripts, even a giant replica of his actual cab driver license. Yes, the method acting De Niro got a license to drive a real taxi in order to prepare for his role in Taxi Driver. At a quick glance, it looks like a prop from the movie, but instead of saying “Travis Bickle,” it reads “Robert A. De Niro” alongside a crooked pic of the young actor.

A notable feature at the exhibit is the immersive film experience De Niro, New York, a short film that played in the ISM Hexadome—not technically a dome, but rather, six gigantic screens arranged in a hexagon around the audience, with different footage playing on each one. For this experience, the filmmakers sorted through 40 De Niro movies set in New York. The audience is surrounded by New York as seen over five decades, through the eyes of a dozen directors.

Given that De Niro has made over 100 movies, there’s a clip of him doing pretty much everything. At a panel on the afternoon of Friday, June 14, the filmmakers spoke at length about the research and editing it took to create De Niro, New York. Even though it runs just fifteen minutes, it has six screens playing different footage simultaneously; essentially, a feature-length film.

De Niro’s later movies often contain conscious references to his earlier work, or coincidentally have similar themes (not to mention his self-parody phase in the early 2000’s). At times, the younger versions of De Niro will appear on one screen and will interact with older De Niroes on another screen. The experience starts with a 69-year-old De Niro in the 2012 film Being Flynn where he plays a cab driver, then the screen dissolves to a young Travis Bickle in the 1970s. Later, Jake LaMotta from 1980’s Raging Bull gets boxing advice from an older De Niro as Ray Arcel, in 2016’s Hands of Stone.

The 40 films are only a fraction of his total work, and it’s an impressive reminder of one man’s impact on the industry.

De Niro Con attendees also had the opportunity to immerse themselves in an interactive exhibit called The Rupert Pupkin Hall of Fan Experiences (the name in the event’s title being a nod to De Niro’s in 1982’s King of Comedy). The “Hall” experience lets fans do Instagram-friendly activities based on De Niro’s movies. Given that Taxi Driver is objectively the best (fight me over it!), the “Experience” begins with several Travis Bickle photo ops. People can dress up in Travis’ army jacket and record their own version of the “Are you talkin’ ta me?” scene. But no one will stop you if you want to do the “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets,” speech.

People can also take a pic with their own face on a taxi driver license. This will even put the picture a little off-center, just like De Niro’s real cab license (an insider joke that’s extra funny for people who’ve already seen the real license in the De Niro Is An Icon exhibit). A Mugshot Room allowed attendees to get temporary prison tats like the ones De Niro’s character Max Cady had in Cape Fear. Right next to this was a tattoo artist offering to do real tattoos on people (on the day we attended, people weren’t exactly lined up for this).

Other photo ops include the Goodfellas bar, and a black and white video booth to throw some punches while wearing Jake LaMotta’s boxing gloves.

For those fans who inexcusably prefer Meet the Parents to Godfather II, there is a room that recreates the lie detector scene. A polygraph expert was on hand to interrogate people about their favorite De Niro movies (and offer up some fun photo ops). Just don’t claim that there are more than two Godfather movies.