Was it the same part De Niro ended up playing in the movie?
I’m not sure it was, I think it was another part. But in any case, John wanted Bob in the movie, but when we were preparing to make the movie, John passed away. When did De Niro step in to direct? A short time later, Bob came to me and said he’d possibly be interested in directing my script, because he himself had been developing a project similar in the sense that it was about the CIA, although in a different time period than I had written about. But he loved my script and asked how we could work it out, so we talked about it, should we do his idea or mine, and then one of us said that if Bob directs The Good Shepherd, I’ll write his script, as a second part, for him, which would pick up after the Bay of Pigs. The Good Shepherd goes from the birth of the CIA up until that point. So that was eight years ago, and there was this long gestation period. We’d work on the script when we saw each other, and talk, and at the same time Bob was trying hard to cart the costs around – these things
