Martin Scorsese Denies That Apple Cut Robert De Niro’s Anti-Trump Statements From His Speech: “There Was An Unfortunate Miscommunication”

Martin Scorsese addressed Robert De Niro‘s recent claims that Apple “edited” and “cut out” remarks criticizing Donald Trump from a speech he gave at the Gotham Awards in November.

On Nov. 27, De Niro took the stage at the awards ceremony to introduce Killers of the Flower Moon. Footage from that evening showed De Niro calling Apple out directly for editing his speech from the draft he had originally submitted.

“I just want to say one thing. The beginning of my speech was edited, cut out. I didn’t know about it. And I want to read it,” he told the crowd at the time. He then pulled his own phone out and read the original speech he had prepared, in which he called out the former POTUS for his “lies.”

He also refused to thank Apple — who backed the making of Killers — and the Gotham Awards, saying, ” I don’t feel like thanking them at all for what they did. How dare they do that, actually.”

However, Scorsese denied the alleged “censorship” in a joint statement with the team behind Killers of the Flower Moon.

“We all wanted to make sure that in the limited time available, the acceptance speech had space to acknowledge our Osage collaborators on-stage and at home, as well as our entire cast and filmmaking team,” their statement reads.

It continues, “Apple has been a tremendous partner and there was no censorship. There was an unfortunate miscommunication regarding the final version of the speech. The event was a beautiful moment for our cast and collaborators to be reunited for the first time since the strikes. It was an incredible honor to receive this recognition.”

In a recent conversation with Rolling Stone, De Niro said he was “annoyed in the moment” because he “didn’t hear anything” after he submitted the speech he had worked on with writer Lewis Friedman.

“They gave me the script, and I looked at the prompter, and I asked after, ‘What happened?’” De Niro recalled. “And they assumed that I had spoken to Marty or somebody about it, but I hadn’t. They assumed that I would be OK with it, and maybe I’m still getting it wrong, and I wasn’t.”

He said that he spoke to Scorsese about it the day after the ceremony. “Marty and I spoke about it the next day and he said, ‘Yeah, I had sent you a text and [Apple] asked if you could dial it down, respectfully,'” he said.

But the Oscar-winning actor maintained that the remarks cut from the speech were “appropriate” when introducing the movie.

“If Marty had called me and said, ‘Apple asked me to do this and that,’ then we would’ve gone over it,” he said. “But I told Marty, ‘Everything in that speech is leading up to what this movie is about. And I don’t want to take away from the movie. It’s not a rant about Trump. It’s appropriate.’”