The Good Shepherd (film) - Production

Production

Eric Roth wrote the screenplay in 1994 for Francis Ford Coppola and Columbia Pictures. Roth read Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost and became intrigued with the people who built the CIA. Coppola left the project because he could not relate to the characters due to their lack of emotion (although he retained a credit as co-executive producer). Wayne Wang was set to direct and even conducted some location scouting but management changes at Columbia ended his involvement. The new administration gave Roth a list of directors to choose from and one of them was Philip Kaufman. Kaufman felt that Roth's script, whose original structure was linear, should go back and forth in time to "give it a more contemporary feeling". Kaufman and Roth worked on the project for a year and then the management changed at the studio again. The new studio head had no interest in spy films unless they could get a movie star like Tom Cruise to appear in the film.

The project languished until John Frankenheimer signed on to make the film with MGM agreeing to purchase the rights. He wanted Robert De Niro to star, having just worked together on Ronin. De Niro had been developing his own spy story about the CIA from the Bay of Pigs Invasion to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and agreed to appear in the film. During pre-production in 2002, Frankenheimer died. According to producer Jane Rosenthal, this had been Robert De Niro's pet project for nine years, but it proved difficult to produce in a pre-9/11 world and had to compete with his busy schedule as an actor. The actor said in an interview, “I had always been interested in the Cold War. I was raised in the Cold War. All of the intelligence stuff was interesting to me”. De Niro and Roth ended up making a deal: Roth would write up De Niro's idea into a screenplay if the actor would direct his existing script. If The Good Shepherd proved to be a commercial success then their follow-up would be De Niro's pitch.

De Niro took the project to Universal Pictures where producer Graham King agreed to help finance the $110+ million budget. He had a deal with Leonardo DiCaprio, who was interested in playing the film's protagonist Edward Wilson. De Niro planned to shoot the movie in early 2005 but DiCaprio could not do it then because he was making The Departed for Martin Scorsese. At this point, King left the project, as did his backers. De Niro approached Matt Damon, who was also doing The Departed but would be done earlier than DiCaprio and De Niro would only have to wait six months to do the film with him. Initially, Damon turned De Niro down because he was scheduled to shoot Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!. Soderbergh agreed to delay filming and Damon agreed to star as Wilson. James Robinson's Morgan Creek Productions agreed to help finance the film with a budget under $90 million which meant that many of the principal actors, Damon included, would have to waive their usual salaries to keep costs down.

De Niro was not interested in making a spy movie with flashy violence and exciting car chases. “I just like it when things happen for a reason. So I want to downplay the violence, depict it in a muted way. In those days, it was a gentleman's game”. He and Roth were also interested in showing how absolute power corrupted the leaders of the CIA. Early on, De Niro said in an interview, “they tried to do what they thought was right. And then, as they went on, they became overconfident and started doing things that are not always in our best interests”. In preparation for the film, De Niro watched spy films like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, The Third Man, and Smiley's People.

He also hired retired CIA agent Milton Bearden to serve as a technical adviser on the film. They had first worked together on Meet the Parents where De Niro played a retired CIA agent. Bearden agreed to take De Niro through Afghanistan to the north-west frontier of Pakistan and into Moscow for a guided tour of intelligence gathering. Damon also spent time with Bearden as well as visiting several of the locations depicted in the film and reading several books on the CIA. Bearden also made sure that the historical aspects were correct but fictionalized to a certain degree.

Principal photography began on August 18, 2005, with shooting taking place in New York City, Washington D.C., London and the Dominican Republic. Three-time Academy Award-winning art director Jeannine Oppewall was assigned art director for The Good Shepherd, which would eventually earn Oppewall her fourth Oscar nomination for Best Art Design. She conducted a large amount of research for the film that filled ten to twelve 6-inch-thick (150 mm) three-ring binders. It took her a week to organize the number of set locations due to the large amounts of settings in the script, which included Cuba, Léopoldville, London, Guatemala, Moscow, New York and New Haven, Connecticut, among other places.

Although the vast majority of the movie was filmed in New York, the only scenes that are actually set in New York were filmed at a house in the Long Island town, Manhasset. As a result, many sets had to be constructed under Oppewall's direction, including a Skull and Bones headquarters and the Berlin set, which was built on the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The interiors of the CIA were built in the Brooklyn Armory, a large edifice built in 1901 for the United States Cavalry. She also visited the CIA's headquarters in Washington, D.C. and worked with Bearden to create sets for the CIA's offices, Technical Room and Communications Room.

Since the lead character originally aspired to be a poet, Oppewall incorporated many visual poetic symbols into the film, including a large number of mirrors to represent the duplicity of the CIA, full rigged ships as symbols of the state and eagle symbols, which were used in ironic situations such as suspect interrogations. Her team tracked down the right set dressings and also found authentic Teletype machines, reel-to-reel tape recorders and radios used in the CIA during that time.