films like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, The Third Man, and the Smiley's People miniseries. He also hired retired CIA officer Milton Bearden to serve as a technical adviser on the film. They had first worked together on Meet the Parents where De Niro played a retired CIA officer. Bearden agreed to take De Niro through Afghanistan to the north-west frontier of Pakistan and into Moscow for a guided tour of intelligence gathering. Damon also spent time with Bearden as well as visiting several of the locations depicted in the film and reading several books on the CIA. Bearden also made sure that the historical aspects were correct but fictionalized to a certain degree. Principal photography began on August 18, 2005, with shooting taking place in New York City, Washington D.C., London, and the Dominican Republic. Three-time Academy Award-nominated art director Jeannine Oppewall was assigned art director for The Good Shepherd, which would eventually earn Oppewall her fourth Oscar nomination for Best Art Design. She conducted a large amount of research for the film that filled ten to twelve three-ring binders. It took her a week to organize the number of set locations due to the large amounts of settings in the script, which included Cuba, Léopoldville, London, Guatemala, Moscow, New York City and New Haven, Connecticut, among other places. Although the vast majority of the movie was filmed in New York, the only scenes that are actually set in New York were filmed at the Kirby Hill Estate on Long Island. As a result, many sets had to be constructed under Oppewall's direction, including a Skull and Bones headquarters and the Berlin set, which was built on the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The interiors of the CIA were built in the Brooklyn Armory, a large edifice built in 1901 for the United States Cavalry. She also visited the CIA's headquarters in Washington, D.C. and worked with Bearden to create sets for the CIA's offices, Technical Room and Communications Room. Since the lead character originally aspired to be a poet, Oppewall incorporated many visual poetic symbols into the film, including a large number of mirrors to represent the duplicity of the CIA, full-rigged ships as symbols of the state, and eagle symbols, which were used in ironic situations such as suspect interrogations. Her team tracked down the right set dressings and also found authentic Teletype machines, reel-to-reel tape