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

By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 23, 2006

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.

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."

The one actor he doesn't care to direct is himself. But given his stature and fame, getting the money to direct is almost always predicated on his own appearance in the film. That was true of his first film, "A Bronx Tale," and it's true of this one.

"I don't like directing myself. It's hard. I'd have my staff do it, or Matt. I didn't even look at the video playback. I had to be in it to get the money. 'Why don't you do it?' they asked. Whatever I get from it, I put back into it."

And, of course, he's had the experience of having worked with great directors.

"I was very aware of Francis [Ford Coppola, with whom he worked memorably on 'The Godfather, Part II']. The original 'Good Shepherd' script was written for him. Then there's Marty [Scorsese]. I've worked on eight films with him. I can't even say how much I learned from him. And Marty helped get Matt out early [from Damon's performance on 'The Departed,' which De Niro couldn't appear in, because he was prepping 'The Good Shepherd.']"

Like his mentors, he acknowledges being an artistic conservative.

"We tried a couple of 'fancy' shots, and they just weren't in the same movie. You don't want to do stuff that draws attention to itself. And if I had to do any storyboard sequences [meaning action sequences], I'd just do it in the simplest way possible."

Now, Robert De Niro, you've been studying them for 12 years and finally brought your project before the public. Before the moment is lost, we must ask you: What do you make of them? Them, you know, the company, the agency, that strange ugly modern building overlooking the river and the highway in suburban McLean.

Reticent as ever, De Niro rumples his face and offers a classic non-comment: "I don't know if I have wisdom. I only have impressions. My impressions are that I have the greatest respect for them. And I understand the difficulty of their position. They can never talk about their successes."

One suspects that if "The Good Shepherd" is a success, De Niro will not be talking about it either.