Strictly Hush-Hush

Robert De Niro Spills No Secrets in Talking About His Espionage Film

On directing "The Good Shepherd": "I was obligated to use my brain more. . . . It's not the same as acting, where you fly in, do your part, then leave." (By Michel Du Cille -- The Washington Post; Below: By Andrew Schwartz -- Universal Pictures Via Associated Press)

Here are two words you'd never associate with the brilliant actor -- some say the greatest of his generation -- and well-known New York guy Robert De Niro: boat shoes.

You know, Docksiders, those battered old fusions of Bass Weejun and sneakers and moccasins turned a kind of salty ochre by the sting of the spray. They look like dead rats.

And here are two more: spy movie. You know, the skitttttt! of throats being cut, the long dense chats about moles and penetrations and arcane gambits practiced by Oxford dons with fluffy eyebrows in dark London byways.

Yet all three -- the shoes, the spy movie and the very New York De Niro -- are associated in the following surprising way: Robert De Niro has made -- directed in, starred in, produced -- a spy movie. And he so believes in it that the normally reticent actor is tramping about the country to publicize it. The boat shoes come in because he spends so much time in airports going through security, he's taken to wearing ye old Docksiders, for their on-and-off ease.

And wearing those boat shoes, plus a sports coat, slacks, open-neck shirt and hair that looks like an Iowa wheat field on a windy day, the 63-year-old actor-director has come around to talk up "The Good Shepherd," his big-budget, star-studded account of the early years of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It's a bold picture for him to make. After all, nothing in his acting career -- more than 70 films, six Oscar nominations and two Oscars -- and nothing in his directing career (one movie) seems to have prepared him for it. This is a period peace, set around the world (Washington, New Haven, London, Sierra Leone, the Caribbean), but its milieu is a tight WASP world of privilege and secrecy, a kind of Skull and Bones club projection upon the world. Why would the son of artists who grew up on the East Side, a man who continues to live and thrive on Manhattan, be drawn to the bloodless, buttoned-down mandarins who invented, staffed and served the agency in its first decade? In the movie, we are not among people whose names end in vowels but among Dulleses and Helmses and Colbys and Angletons, with dull clothes and Ivy connections and knowledge of things aristocratic. Yet it's a project that has consumed him; he first read the script (a classic Hollywood unproduced script) eight years ago, and even before that he'd been obsessed with the idea of a CIA movie.

In person, he appears a bit shorter than his dynamic film presence might prepare you to expect, though not small by any means. He's compact, pleasant, soft of grip, soft of demeanor. His hair is rumpled, his face is rumpled, he's sort of rumpled himself, at least in the sense he's not an elegant, aristocratic fellow but more a schlumper, a dumper, who just launches his body into a chair. Now and then his eyes will crinkle with joy, when he laughs, and he laughs a lot -- to a point. He's trying to please, but he's also trying to hold something back, something private. The fraudulence of his bonhomie fills the room, but that's fine. No problem. That's who he is.

Settling down to address the film, he says, "I've been thinking about it seriously for the last 12 to 15 years. I wanted to do a spy movie but make it believable. I wanted to see beyond the mythology that's propelling our image of the CIA."

The gestation is important. It signifies the depth of his commitment not so much to this movie but to the concept of the realistic espionage movie. He initially had another CIA project in mind but couldn't figure out how to get it done. Then when the Eric Roth script arrived -- a script so famous within Hollywood culture that most of the actors he would later send it to had already read it -- he decided that it would be somehow possible to merge the two.

"We agreed," he said, meaning himself and Roth, another Hollywood A-lister ("Munich," "Ali," "The Insider," "Forrest Gump"), "that if I directed it, he'd rewrite it."

But who would pay for it?

Well, nobody wanted to. It is, after all, 2 1/2 hours long, and though dramatic, it boasts none of the high-tech flash that seems to propel big-screen success, namely explosions, car chases, flying dragons, science fiction and the like. Though Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie are in it, they're not particularly sexy, one a demure workaholic, the other a frustrated housewife in the frocks of the '50s. They shriek and drink highballs, like all grown-ups in the '50s. It is also dense, literate, ironic and demands the kind of attention most audiences haven't the IQ for these days. It demands that they actively, rather than passively, pay attention, store names and characters in memory, then pull them out an hour later to fit into a jigsaw puzzle.