The “assholing, chauvinistic” executive who almost ruined Robert De Niro’s passion project
It’s not unreasonable to think that because Robert De Niro is one of cinema’s greatest-ever actors who delivered some of the finest performances ever committed to celluloid, he gets more leeway than most when he wants to make a long-gestating dream project a reality.
Unfortunately, even the best of the best need to deal with the suits in the boardroom, which left the two-time Academy Award winner fighting an uphill battle to realise his vision. He got there in the end, though, but it wasn’t without a few behind-the-scenes barneys and some scathing words from one of De Niro’s most trusted collaborators.
Eric Roth’s screenplay for The Good Shepherd was originally written in 1994, and it shows how long De Niro persevered with the elegiac espionage drama that he was still the only name credited on the script when it finally hit cinemas in December 2006. Francis Ford Coppola and John Frankenheimer were both attached, but when they dropped out, the icon made it his first directorial effort since 1993’s A Bronx Tale.
As had been the case since the late 1980s when she first became his producing partner, De Niro’s Tribeca Film Festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal was involved in The Good Shepherd as an executive producer, where she quickly ran into trouble when she found herself in opposition to one of the film’s financial backers.
When asked to name the worst person she ever worked with, Rosenthal didn’t even hesitate. “James Robinson of Morgan Creek,” she told Variety. “They were awful to deal with. There was a lot of assholing, chauvinistic things that were said to me over the course of the project. It was unprofessional. Not nice.”
De Niro had already agreed to cut the budget by $30 million so that The Good Shepherd would get the all-clear from Morgan Creek, which previously suffered a huge blow when Leonardo DiCaprio dropped out of the lead role. Undeterred, the director, producer, and supporting player recruited Matt Damon as a replacement, which still wasn’t enough to keep the production company off his back.
“Stupid stuff like, ‘We have to cut the budget of this movie, so you’re not going to have a trailer anymore,'” Rosenthal explained of the demands the outfit was making. “OK, I’m not going to have a trailer. And he’d come on set and go, ‘I don’t know why you’re using this fabric’. And he wanted to take the movie away from Bob, who directed it. It was just a constant fight. But it was Bob’s passion project, and I’m proud of the movie.”
It was an ambitious undertaking, especially for a sophomore director who hadn’t helmed a feature in almost a decade and a half, but The Good Shepherd underperformed. The reaction from critics was lukewarm at best, and not even a star-studded cast boasting De Niro, Damon, Angelina Jolie, Joe Pesci, William Hurt, John Turturro, and more could stop it from losing money.
De Niro poured his heart and soul into the picture, and he even wanted to make sequels, but he should probably thank his lucky stars he even got to make the film the way he envisioned when Robinson was trying his damndest to cut his legs out from underneath him.
