Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [170]
Alan Pakula, the eternal analyst, adamantly believed Redford was engaging in some subtle personal transference with Ordinary People. “When I read it, I said, Oh, I get it. The novel is about parental tyranny. The catalyst, the character causing the dysfunction, is the mother. Bob is moving some furniture here. He is co-opting the novel’s dysfunctional family for his father’s or his own and investigating himself at a critical time.” Redford is emphatic that both Pakula and Moore were wrong. “It had nothing to do with my father or his or my family. These were simply types of people I’d met, people whose lives were sequestered in privilege and made you wonder, What goes on beneath that veneer?”
Redford had made a decision back in 1962 as an actor never to get too caught up in the position of key lights or other technical markers during production. Now, as filming started, suddenly those technicalities were of paramount importance to him as a director. John Bailey, the young camera assistant from Downhill Racer, had graduated to cinematographer and was standing in front of him asking bewildering questions: “Do you want a Baby Junior on this, or a seventy-five …?” Redford was frustrated. In his head, he already had the movie. It had come together first on paper, then while he drove around the North Shore looking for landscapes. He had instructed Phillip Bennett and Mike Riva, the art directors, about the empty lawns, trimmed topiary and stern houses he wanted. The landscape was in his mind, physically and spiritually. “But I got frustrated talking with John and the technicians, because I couldn’t articulate it. Finally, I found myself tearing off strips of paper and drawing stick figures with light angles. Then it became easy, because I could literally ‘paint’ the movie. We went from there to the point that I created the storyboards, and John worked from them. It became a question of capturing that painted frame.”
For all the participants, the unhesitating control Redford exercised over the production was impressive. To Donald Sutherland, such “mean-ass economy in direction” was extraordinary for a first-timer, even a little discomfiting: “He didn’t say a lot but he was very specific when he did comment, and I discovered that what he said was almost always correct. Every time he suggested a different way of doing something, suddenly the words and the scene came out right.” The trick of empowerment by inviting limitless improvisation, the trick first gifted to him by Mike Nichols, was passed on to all. Mary Tyler Moore found it joyous, but exhausting. “He allowed us to improvise whenever we wanted to. We knew what each scene was. His direction was, ‘Try what feels good.’ And if I felt something was only so-so and wanted another shot at it, he’d say, ‘Try it whatever way.’ ” Moore averaged, she estimates, three or four takes per scene. “Paradoxically it felt tight, like whittling down a piece of wood to get to the point.”
The precision with which Redford “saw” the Jarretts’ world, Moore contends, is revealed in the one instance of multiple varied takes, in a solitary scene where Beth puts a cake in the refrigerator. Moore skipped over the scenes in read-throughs, but Redford had other thoughts about it. “It was about behavior,” says Redford. “I wanted to capture this woman in an unobserved moment and see her rhythm, how she copes, how she handles things. It was about her fastidious way, her uptightness, her weakness.” Moore experienced it as pure hell. “It was the bane of the production, and we tried every few days, every time we had a kitchen scene, to reshoot it. The scene had no dialogue. It was just me, as Beth, holding a cake with a circle of cherries around the top, looking at it, then adjusting the cherries and slipping the cake into the fridge. All I ever heard from Bob was, ‘Mary, maybe we can try that cake scene again.’ In the end, we shot it about twenty-five times, but still it didn’t make it through to the final cut. I felt exhausted, naked, frustrated by