Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [141]
As the cameras rolled on All the President’s Men, late in the spring of 1975, Redford had the comfort of working with a team of top-notch creative technicians molded over several years by Pakula in his various executive and directing functions. Among them were production designer George Jenkins and cinematographer Gordon Willis. Both had worked on Klute and The Parallax View and here, with Pakula and Redford, conceptualized a visually unusual world, where the overlit, all-revealing glare of the newspaper office jars alongside the silent alleys and half-lit underground garages where the secrets unfold. Spatial design, said Pakula, was everything. “I believed this colossal story needed attention to size. We were dealing with something that could alter our view of investigative journalism and political office, so it had to feel big. It was therefore decided to use a lot of panorama shots, and when the journalists leave the cradle of the newsroom and go into municipal buildings, they are dwarfed by their surroundings. Gordon had a very novel approach to his lenses based on the notion that a good cinematographer always surprises the eye, and we were all of one mind that, since the information to be related was often complex, even tedious, we needed a very stylized look and, of course, dynamic performances.”
For Redford, “finding” Woodward became the fun of the film. “I decided he wasn’t who he said he was. He tried very hard to present himself as the most boring man in the universe, but I didn’t buy it. The outward appearance was that Bernstein was the personality and Woodward the quiet one. That’s how they presented themselves. But in fact Carl was the fuzzy, warm guy who tap-danced with his ego, while Bob was the hard man who went for the throat. The more I listened to them, the more I saw how they operated. Carl was the one who’d get angry and then he’d open the door for Bob, the reassuring good cop. But the secret was that the good guy was as hard—harder—than the other fellow. I was constantly trying to get Woodward to talk candidly, and what I did learn, from a story he told me about his misreading of a test at Yale, was that he was a workaholic. He’d taken a two-day exam and believed he’d studied appropriately, but got it wrong. He then told me, ‘I realized I didn’t know what good work was, and the rest of my life I’ve been redoubling my efforts to try to do good work.’ ” A key discovery for Redford also came in a chat with Woodward’s assistant, Scott Armstrong. “Scott told me, ‘He hides a lot within him, he’s a hard worker, a workaholic, and, oh yes, he has this thing about fires. He’s always poking at fires, always burning stuff.’ Maybe, I reckoned, that had something to do with the nefarious process he’s been through. Here’s a guy, I decided, who is forever covering his tracks because he has to, to keep moving safely.” At one point, Redford suggested adding some fire scenes to the movie. Pakula demurred. “It didn’t matter,” Redford says, “because those little observation handles were all I personally needed.”
Hoffman, says Redford, had less trouble finding Bernstein: “Carl and Dustin had a lot in common. Both were radicals, uptight and loose at the same time. And, like Carl, Dustin had a very, very healthy ego. He required a lot of hand-holding, which is anathema to me. I don’t need reassurance. But I loved Dustin’s professionalism and the gifts he brought to a film that required committed intellect to steer it away from becoming a Mickey Spillane. Of the two of us, Dustin probably got closer