Why Robert De Niro Never Directed Again After His Ambitious CIA Epic ‘The Good Shepherd’

Robert De Niro has built a career few actors could ever match, but Robert De Niro’s directing career tells a far quieter story. Active since 1963, the 83-year-old star is famous for his dramatic roles, and 6 of his films have been inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. Behind the camera, however, his output has been surprisingly slim.

De Niro has directed just 2 feature films in his decades-long career, and he acted in both of them. His first came in 1993 with ‘A Bronx Tale’, a coming-of-age story about a teenage boy torn between the lure of the local Mafia boss and the hardworking values of his father, played by De Niro. It was a modest box office success that was well received by critics without setting the world on fire.

It took De Niro 13 years to return to the director’s chair. His second film, ‘The Good Shepherd’, was meant to be a directing comeback, but it ended up being his last. Released on December 22, 2006, the spy drama follows Matt Damon’s Edward Wilson, a fictional counterintelligence officer, from 1939 to 1961 as the CIA takes shape around him.

Angelina Jolie plays his wife, while De Niro appears as General Bill Sullivan. The ensemble was stacked, with Alec Baldwin, Billy Crudup, William Hurt, John Turturro, Michael Gambon and Eddie Redmayne among the supporting cast. The film also marked Joe Pesci’s return to acting after 8 years away.

The project had a winding path. De Niro was originally set to star when John Frankenheimer was attached to direct, but he took over the director’s chair after Frankenheimer died during pre-production in 2002.

Eric Roth wrote the screenplay, and the film was a huge step up in scale from De Niro’s debut. Reported budgets vary, with Far Out citing $80 million compared with about $10 million for ‘A Bronx Tale’, while other estimates put the figure as high as $110 million.

The finished movie was also long, running 167 minutes. There was even talk of a 4-hour director’s cut for home release, which never materialized. Commercially, the film struggled to make an impact. It opened in 4th place with about $9.9 million, behind ‘Night at the Museum’, and went on to earn around $100.3 million worldwide.

That was roughly break-even against its reported budget, and it failed to become the major awards contender many had hoped for. Rotten Tomatoes’ critics’ consensus called it ambitious and confidently directed but ultimately tedious and overly self-serious. Still, the film has its defenders. Paste Magazine praised De Niro’s stately, methodical approach, noting that it drew more from George Smiley than Jack Ryan.

De Niro had big plans to continue the story. He and Roth agreed that if De Niro directed the script, Roth would write a sequel covering the era up to 1989, followed by a 3rd film taking the main character from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present day.

In 2008, De Niro told the press at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival that he still hoped to make both sequels. By 2012, Showtime was developing the story as a TV series instead, with Roth writing and De Niro set to direct the pilot. Neither the sequels nor the series ever arrived. Since then, the director’s chair has stayed empty, while De Niro has focused on his acting career.

Looking back, ‘The Good Shepherd’ stands as a fascinating what-if in De Niro’s filmography. Paste argued that it still holds up as a political critique years later, even if it never took Hollywood by storm. For a star so closely associated with iconic performances, his 2 directing efforts remain an underrated part of his legacy.

Have something to add? Let us know in the comments!