British director Kirk Jones tells Steve Pratt that his biggest worry was trying to find out how to address film star Robert De Niro.

NEVER mind directing your first US film, how do you address your leading man when he’s Robert De Niro.

British film-maker Kirk Jones, who directed Waking Ned and Nanny McPhee, was faced with the name dilemma when he first met the screen legend to talk about a project.

“I was nervous for two reasons. I’d worked on the script for a year leading up to my first meeting with him so inherently there’s nervousness and pressure because I want to convince him that this is the project for him,” he says.

“And I have to admit there was nervousness because it’s Robert De Niro, someone I’ve grown up with having had an interest in cinema for years.

He just feels like an iconic figure in world cinema.”

The nerves disappeared within a few minutes of talking to him. “He’s quite shy actually and not a man of many words initially,” says Jones.

“It literally took two minutes to get over the fact that I was talking to Robert De Niro. I thought the only thing to do is be honest and very open with him, because I suspect someone in his position has been used to encountering people who tell him everything he wants to hear. So I was pretty honest with him throughout the shoot and he was open and honest with me.

“I came out of the meeting and felt I’d really connected.

We got on very well on the shoot and are looking at other projects to work on.”

He’d taken the precaution of asking his agent in advance of the meeting what he should call De Niro. “He said start with Robert, but I think by the end of that first meeting he just said call me Bob,” says Jones.

The film, Everyone’s Fine, finds De Niro as a retired and widowed father who embarks on a road trip to pay unannounced visits to his three children (played by Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell) with inevitably surprising results.

Jones’s script is based on a 1990 film written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatorre as a follow-up to his Oscarwinning Cinema Paradiso. “I was very aware of stories from directors who’d gone to the States to make films, not just from the UK but around the world. The horror stories coming back that they were losing control or there were too many producers or they just had too little control over the production. So I waited and waited until I found the right project,” he says about Tornatorre’s film, which was hardly seen outside Italy. “I connected with the original and felt a wider audience deserved to see the film. It seemed the perfect project to write and direct and go to the US to make my first film and keep control at the same time.”

He began by taking the journey that Frank, De Niro’s character, does in the movie.

That takes him across the country and back again, although the film was shot within Connecticut for financial reasons.

“I took that journey on Greyhound buses and trains and I drove as well, took about 2,000 photographs and interviewed about 100 people.

“I was very keen not to just translate the original film.

That didn’t interest me. And having spoken to Guiseppe Tornatorre since making the film, he didn’t expect that of me either. It was really during that trip across America that I pieced together the film I wanted to make.”

Jones even found Frank’s occupation on a train journey between St Louis and Kansas City when he looked out of the window and saw all the telegraph poles and wires. He made Frank a blue collar worker who’d spent his working life coating the strings of telephone wire that criss-cross the country. “I thought what an irony that he’d spent all his life helping people communicate with each other and he had trouble communicating with his own family and kids,” he adds.

People he met on his travels also fed the script. “I’ve travelled very little. I worked as a teenager so never went off around Europe as many of my friends did. I’ve travelled through work in recent years but I’m very well looked after when I do that,” he says.

“Then, in my early Forties, I was suddenly free from family and everyone and on a bus travelling across America. I realised one of the most important things about travel is not the photographs but the people you meet. So when we started casting, a group of people with video cameras would go out into the streets and just approach people who looked like they had a story to tell or looked visually interesting.”

Some were given parts in the film. “The only criteria was that I had to be confident they could sit next to Robert De Niro and in front of a film crew and act naturally,” he says.

De Niro himself was no problem on set.

“He seems a very sensible guy who’s interested in making films. It was a real pleasure to work with him.”

■ Everybody’s Fine (12A) opens in cinemas tomorrow.