Strictly Hush-Hush

The money was eventually found nesting in the pocket of the Baltimore producer James G. Robinson, whose boutique company, Morgan Creek, has dabbled in films since 1988. Of the 55 movies it has produced, only four have been major hits. Many were forgettable. It's been a kind of production company of last resort for big-star projects: John Travolta turned to Morgan Creek to finance "Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000," Kevin Costner for "3000 Miles to Graceland" and Jody Foster for "Anna and the King."

"At the end of the day," says De Niro, "he [Robinson] came across when nobody else did."

Doesn't all this sound reasonable? A reporter is having a nice conversation with an important star-director about his important new film.

However, the truth is De Niro doesn't really want to be here. For whatever reason, he is not one of those voluble men, an eye-contact warrior with the gift of gab, a salesman's pitch, a hunger to fill the voids in conversation with more words.

You can see this in his tension, which never really leaves him, and in answers to questions that seem to go nowhere, then pop like a soap bubble into nothingness, leaving silence. He's extremely comfortable in the silence, even as his interrogator fumbles to fill it with hardballs like, " So, what kind of movies did you see when you were a kid?" (Answer: "You know, double features.")

Try as I can, and try as he does (he seems to be trying very hard; he's quite decent, friendly and seems to have no agenda, no secret grudges), I can never really get a satisfactory answer to the key question, which is why, Robert De Niro, were you so interested in making a movie about the CIA?

Perhaps his inability to express is itself expressive. Maybe that's why he became an actor and a great one, so that he could speak the words of others, bury the self in the personalities of others.

So it is, in its way, with "The Good Shepherd." It is the film of a man who believes in the importance, as an esthetic principle, of reticence, of hiding the self. You can see the correspondence between spy and actor; each professionally hides the self, expresses another self, follows a script and triumphs to the degree by which he persuades others to believe in the illusion. But with both, a question becomes: At what cost? The thrust of the film is that reticence is pathological and that the CIA agent and counter-espionage executive Edward Wilson (Damon) indeed hurts those around him, both professionally and privately, with that reticence. In the movie, we see him acting expressively only once, and that's when he's glimpsed at Yale in 1939 in drag as a chorus member in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta: Then -- in disguise, made up -- only then do his eyes burn with fire, is his body liberated to grace, is there a sense of freedom and pleasure to his psyche.

But De Niro is not reticent as a director.

"I feel when I'm directing, I'm clear about stuff. Not that I do it one way. I might do it two or three ways, but when I'm editing, I see it. I'm clear. I know what I don't want. You make your own mistakes. You make the final decision. I was obligated to use my brain more. I enjoyed that. I liked that. And you're committed. You're on it forever. It's not the same as acting, where you fly in, do your part, then leave. So it was important to me to find something I could live with."

As one of the world's great actors, he is asked if he had trouble giving direction to other actors, if his reputation might get in the way.

"After a while, you're focused on the path at hand. They want to make sure I'm happy, I want to make sure they're happy. Directors who are actors usually get good performances out of actors. They understand the shorthand."