Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [185]
During the first days of filming at Mbogani, Blixen’s first home near the Ngong Hills, Pollack took Redford aside. Redford recalls him saying, “Bob, I’ve just had a call from Frank Price [Universal’s studio head], who says you won’t be accepted as an Englishman, that it will confuse audiences. So we have to drop it.” Redford pleaded his case, but was overruled. “From that point on, I began to struggle with the part,” says Redford. “It’s basic psychology. You have your approach. It works. You’re on your way. And then the rug is pulled from under you. It damaged the process.”
Though some crew members claimed Streep and Redford didn’t get along, Redford is adamant that, in fact, their chemistry bore him up when some frustration with Pollack affected him. “She and I hit it off big time. Not only did we get along, we probably got along too well. It caused ripples. We liked to talk. We’d be off camera, between takes, taking it easy. We had a sense of humor in common. But Sydney didn’t like that. He would break it up. It bothered him that I was connecting with her in some way that didn’t fit his picture of me, or of us as a team. That wasn’t easy to deal with, because I felt I was in a vise and I became resentful.”
After Tootsie, says Redford, he believed that, if anything, their relationship might improve. “Till then, all his successes were movies in which I starred. I felt good that he’d got some important individual success. I thought our friendship would be the better for it. But it wasn’t. He seemed to want more control than ever, and I wanted to be controlled less.”
Pollack denied that. He claimed instead that the logistics of this, the most unwieldy production he’d ever attempted, diverted him from his usual close collaboration with Redford. “It was $31 million of pure hell,” Pollack recalled. “We were very far from home, very reliant on the good offices of people we didn’t know. We were importing animals, importing fake bone-stretched ears for the natives, marshaling giraffes, buffaloes, you name it.” Peace Corps volunteers, expat students and tourists beefed up the legions of extras. “We had so many people problems, because the white extras were harder to find in big numbers. But it was worse than that. There was also a lot of local misunderstanding, that we were shooting a colonial story about two people who, today, would be judged as racist. With all those nuisances, I gave Bob my best.”
Still, some cast members observed Redford retract. He avoided social contact, buried himself in books and newspapers, disappeared for days on end. “I was making this romantic movie, which required the most delicate emotions,” says Redford, “and at the same time I was on the phone negotiating a divorce settlement and the dissolution of my former life with lawyers.”
He was also beginning to have serious second thoughts about how Sydney wanted Finch Hatton portrayed. A number of memorable scenes, paramount among them the famous hair washing beside the hippo watering hole, conveyed the best of Hollywood magic. “As an actor inside that moment, there is an awareness of specialness,” says Redford. “But there were issues. Sydney, I always felt, was afraid to express sex in an open, liberal way. He wanted to stay inside the safety boundary. But I always wanted to push it. I felt that a great electrical sexuality can be achieved in touch, in looks, in the caress. Meryl, of course, got that. She was nervous of the hippos, because they’re territorial and we were