NEW YORK — A quarter of a century into the Tribeca Festival, founders Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal are continually looking toward the future.

The two-time Oscar winner, 82, and 69-year-old Academy Award-nominated producer have worked together for the better part of four decades, since co-founding Tribeca Enterprises (once Tribeca Productions) in 1989. They’ve further paid homage to the neighborhood that houses their headquarters with the aptly named annual festival, co-founded with Rosenthal’s ex-husband Craig Hatkoff in the wake of 9/11 as an attempt to revitalize Lower Manhattan.

Tribeca Festival, running from June 3 to 14, spotlights “great stories from the greatest storytellers” — through film, TV, podcasts, and even gaming.

The Daily News sat down with De Niro and Rosenthal last month in a theater at their Greenwich Street offices to discuss the festival’s landmark 25th year.

When asked what’s surprised them most since the fest’s inception, Deniro replied, “That we’re still here,” to which Rosenthal agreed with a laugh.

The “diverse festival” shows “so many different points of view and so many new filmmakers as well as looking at rediscovered films,” said Rosenthal.

In addition to the festival’s own anniversary, Tribeca this year will be honoring “Bound” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” respectively turning 30 and 25, as well as “Taxi Driver,” which is celebrating 50 years.

Martin Scorsese’s best picture-nominated 1976 staple stars De Niro as Travis Bickle, a disaffected Vietnam veteran who becomes obsessed with vigilante justice as he pursues the affections of a campaign worker (Cybill Shepherd) and tries to rescue a teenager sex worker (Jodie Foster).

“I’m happy that it’s made such an impact in certain ways,” De Niro, who earned his second Academy Award nomination for the role, said. “I had no idea. I was saying before, that when you do a film, you just don’t know how much it’s gonna be received. … It can go any way, any which way you imagine. So I’m happy that it has had the impact that it has.”

The creators behind the camera are making an impact as well. Roughly half of the in-competitions films this year were made by filmmakers who are women and/or Black, Indigenous or people of color.

“We have always done that, even before the festival,” said Rosenthal. “With our production company, we were always working with new filmmakers, diverse filmmakers, and you have to just keep doing it so that it can change in other places in society. You know, we need more women in… government, more women — we just need more women. I kind of think we do it better anyway.” De Niro chuckled in apparent agreement.

Even as the world, in and beyond entertainment, changes at warp speed, De Niro and Rosenthal remain hopeful that, in another quarter century, people will still be enjoying films as they were meant to be seen.

“I hope that we’ll be sitting in a movie theater. Maybe I won’t be sitting in a movie theater, but I hope that people—” started Rosenthal.

“But I will,” De Niro laughed.

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