A.S.: Are you going to direct more?



R.D.: I’d love to direct. I tried to get “The Good Shepherd” [De Niro’s film in 2006 about the birth of the C.I.A.] to do the second installment with Eric Roth, and now we’re doing the cable-type things. So it’s different. [Cable] gives you more time to get into things. But it’s not the way I envisioned it, because I had a grand story that could be told as a movie. I want to definitely use it in this other way, but I would rather have done it as a movie.

A.S.: Was it difficult to get the first movie made?



R.D.: It takes a long time to get it done, to get the financing, no matter who’s in it. It’s very, very arduous, a daunting, uphill battle. I have so much respect for people like Marty, or any director who only directs — all the battles over this and that, everybody giving their opinion. And you gotta listen to them. Because they paid for it. I’ve been through it, and it’s a real fight. There’s a quote: You gotta be part gangster. You’ve got to fight for what you want. You’ve got to listen to everybody’s opinion, then finally at the end of the day, you have to do what you feel is right.

A.S.: People talk a lot about how the industry’s changed, for better and worse.



R.D.: The obvious changes are the action films and all that stuff, the cartoon-character type stuff, which, for what it is, it’s O.K. The whole blockbuster type thing which I think started with “The Godfather,” the first “Godfather” and “Jaws,” and that kind of kicked off this whole other thing, and it morphed into what it is today.

A.S.: Do you think that has made it harder for more personal films to get made?



R.D.: You could probably answer that better than me. Probably in some ways. It’s a struggle. As far as producing movies, you partner up with a studio, they do the distribution, you get the money somewhere else, they carve it up in different territories. I remember back when you did a studio movie, you did a studio movie. Now it’s all over the place. Wherever you get the money, whenever, if ever you can get it, and then you’ve got to find distribution — it’s exasperating.

A.S.: Is that the same experience for actors and directors?



R.D.: Things are tighter. You’re working on tighter budgets. That’s why again, with Marty, who has to do that every time — to fight to get the way he wants it, and I have a lot of respect for him. Being able to battle it out. No matter how you do it, you gotta hold your ground at times. Other times you’ve got to compromise. But never a compromise that you can’t live with.

A.S.: It’s one of the things that gets said a lot about the ’70s — that it was this period when personal filmmaking was possible on a big scale.



R.D.: That’s what everybody says, the ’70s, that was that period. I didn’t look at it that way. We’re lucky we were able to do those movies and get some money to do them. There are more personal movies in some ways being made now, more opportunities for actors to me.

A.S.: What is your relationship to critics? Or to your own reviews?



R.D.: What I say is, if you didn’t have critics — even though they can annoy you and upset you — if you didn’t have a critic, who would tell you how it is? Because people won’t tell you. When you do a movie and you’re showing it to people or audiences or friends, they’re never going to say that they dislike it. Because they’re with you and they know what you went through. So they’ll always find a positive thing to say. So the people who you’ll get real feedback from are critics. Especially good critics.