as Deputy Director Richard Hayes, based on Richard Helms Eddie Redmayne as Older Edward Wilson Jr. Tommy Nelson as Edward Jr. - Age 6-7 Mark Ivanir as Valentin Mironov #2, based on Yuri Nosenko Oleg Stefan as Stas Siyanko / Ulysses Liya Kebede as Miriam Production Robert De Niro directed the film, and produced it in conjunction with James G. Robinson and Jane Rosenthal. Academy Award Winning screenwriter, Eric Roth, began work on the movie after abandoning his attempt to adapt Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost for the big screen. Just like De Niro's project, Mailer's novel, Harlot's Ghost, is a fictionalized chronicle of the CIA. Eric Roth originally wrote the screenplay in 1994 for Francis Ford Coppola, and Columbia Pictures. After reading Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost, Roth became intrigued by the inner-workings of the people who created the CIA. Coppola ultimately departed from the project, citing his inability to relate to the main characters due to their lack of emotion, but is credited as Co-Executive Producer. Following Coppola's departure, Wayne Wang was tapped to Direct, and was in the midst of Pre-Production location scouting when personnel changes in Columbia's production department ended his involvement. Columbia's new production team opted to give Roth a list of Directors to choose from; one of them being Philip Kaufman. Kaufman and Roth worked together on the project for a year overhauling the story's narrative structure that was originally linear (chronological order), adapting it to its final non-linear structure, going backward and forward in time. Kaufman, who believed this change would "give it a more contemporary feeling," helped give this complex story a more cohesive narrative context, and provided subtext for characters' motivations. However, neither this partnership nor the project would survive another dramatic shake-up at the studio, when the new studio head halted production due to his lack of interest in making a spy film that fell outside the action genre. The project languished until John Frankenheimer signed on to make the film with MGM agreeing to purchase the rights. He wanted Robert De Niro to star, having just worked together on Ronin. De Niro had been developing his own spy story about the CIA from the Bay of Pigs Invasion to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and agreed to appear in the film. During pre-production in 2002, Frankenheimer died. According to producer Jane Rosenthal, this had been Robert De Niro's