Patrick Ryan

USA TODAY

NEW YORK — In June 2009, disgraced financier Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison, after running a massive Ponzi scheme that robbed thousands of investors of billions of dollars.

It's a cautionary tale of greed and deception that still resonates eight years later, particularly in today's political climate, says Robert De Niro, who plays him in HBO's The Wizard of Lies (Saturday, 8 ET/PT).

“What amazes me is that (Donald Trump is) such a bad con artist,” he says. “Bernie Madoff was a guy who was low-key. I make no excuse for him: what he did was horrible and awful; monstrous. But Trump is in your face every day doing something that is absolutely — what word can I use? He’s just a slob. He’s a pig.”

In contrast, "Madoff seemed credible," says Lies director Barry Levinson, reuniting with De Niro after 1997's Wag the Dog for HBO's icy Madoff drama. "He wasn’t flamboyant. He was very meticulous in the sense that he didn’t give much, which drew people to him. ... (He took) the tactic of, 'I don’t know if I want to take your money.' It makes you want to give him the money."

Some viewers may see shades of Trump in De Niro's grim portrayal of Madoff, whose downfall is recounted in the movie. Michelle Pfeiffer co-stars as suffering housewife Ruth Madoff, whom the movie portrays as oblivious to her husband's crooked dealings along with their sons, Andrew (Nathan Darrow) and Mark (Alessandro Nivola), who worked alongside their father at his investment advisory business.

Reading the script and Diana Henriques' 2011 book, on which it's based, Pfeiffer found Ruth sympathetic. She not only lost her husband of 50 years when Madoff was locked up, but her two sons as well: Mark committed suicide in 2010 amid intense media scrutiny (harrowingly depicted in the film), while Andrew died of mantle cell lymphoma in 2014.

Given that Ruth is still alive, “I felt a duty to represent her accurately and to lift the veil on her story,” Pfeiffer says. As for whether it was truly possible for her to be in the dark about Madoff's fraud, "there are a lot of women of that generation who had no idea of the day-to-day workings of their husbands. It was a totally separate thing."

De Niro, who optioned Henriques' book and brought it to Levinson, studied Madoff's rare interviews and read other books about him by family members and former investors. But the two-time Oscar winner never tried to understand the Wall Street swindler's motivations, nor does Wizard want viewers to empathize with him.

“It’s not (about) humanizing, just making him a real person,” De Niro says. Through his research, “I was more convinced that the kids weren’t in on it, and Ruth wasn’t, either. He protected them, but it’s odd, because he protected them in a way that made them vulnerable, so when the (expletive) hit the fan and he finally told them, they told their lawyer and their lawyer (said), ‘You’re complicit if you don’t give him up right away,’ which they did.”

The film ends with Madoff asking Henriques whether he's a sociopath. But "really, it's not for us to (say)," Levinson says. "You answer it any way you want. It’s the question that comes from Bernie Madoff, and it's the only time in the movie he asks, 'What am I?', which is the most interesting."