(C) David Bailey for GQ

Chris Heath does a fantastic interview/profile of Robert DeNiro for GQ’s January, 2007 issue.

SECOND INTERVIEW: 1 HOUR 48 MINUTES 49 SECONDS

It is eight days after our first meeting that Robert De Niro next finds time to talk. We meet in the same room—his Tribeca office—and sit in exactly the same places.

We begin by talking a little more about The Good Shepherd. The film is a mesmerizing spectacle, precisely because it doesn’t seem to obey many of the rules of either populist or “serious” cinema of this current era. Though the story is full of the kind of material habitually milked for melodrama—betrayals, moral crises, deaths—it almost always refuses to take easy advantage of these opportunities. In refusing to do so, what might seem on the surface a simple tale of espionage and its consequences becomes something altogether else: something imbued with a deliberately stiffer, more constrained poetry, one that doesn’t imagine that truth, freedom, wild horses, and the wind always flow together. One in which, maybe, the fewer words a man says and the less his face gives away, the better he describes the box that surrounds and imprisons him.

See it all (page by page) here.