According to the Guardian, Joe Pesci is set to play (of all things) a Mafia Boss in Robert De Niro‘s The Good Shepherd. That’s the story of the life of the CIA co-founder James Jesus Angleton.
…the film will star Matt Damon in the lead role, together with William Hurt, John Turturro, Angelina Jolie and Michael Gambon.
Great cast without a doubt, but here’s the kicker. During the Q&A with Paul Schrader for Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, he was talking about the man who signed the deal for his movie and also the Exorcist III, and ended up screwing both Blatty over III and himself over his movie. He talked quite a bit about this and said how he knew that this man had screwed just about everyone he’d worked with and ruined their project, but he had that arrogance that believed this time it would be different and that this time he could be the one to make the good movie from it. Not so.
The point? He talked about how he phoned De Niro one night and went for a meal to talk of his woes, and De Niro was talking of The Good Shepherd. He said that no one was going to fund him to make it, but the very man that had screwed Blatty and Schrader had signed the cheque. Schrader said that De Niro had the same belief that he had, that he could make the movie despite the history.
This bodes very badly for the movie already…but, he could be the first to get his movie out untouched…then again.
