Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [191]
The main role of Joe Mondragon remained elusive. Redford considered comedian Cheech Marin, then Edward James Olmos, a relative unknown, and rejected him because of age. Neither seemed fresh or young enough. Finally Chick Vennera, a Broadway actor hungry for a movie break, arrived at Wildwood’s Los Angeles office, recommended by producer Chuck Mulvehill. “Chuck’s reasoning,” says Vennera, “was that they’d looked everywhere else, so why not me? I wasn’t Chicano, but I had Argentinean family and a definite Spanish affinity.” Vennera read for Esparza, then went back to his motel. Four hours later he was called back to meet Redford. He read from the Ward script and knew instantly he had cracked it. “I’d done my homework, hanging out in border bars with a tape recorder to get the idiom and the accent. I was confident, fluid.”
Filming commenced on what was scheduled as a ten-week shoot in August 1986. Originally, Redford wanted to shoot at Plaza del Cerro, a neighborhood of the town of Chimayo and the location of what is reputed to be the last surviving fortified Spanish plaza in North America. Ironically, the local folk resisted, objecting to any suggestion of commercialization. So the production moved to Truchas, New Mexico, forty miles from the unit base at Santa Fe, and higher in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. “We had to rewrite the entire production schedule,” says Redford. “We were forced to forget Chimayo and shoot it all in the mountains, but that ended up an advantage because all along I’d visualized a bleak, vivid horizon throughout the movie and that was available at the higher elevation.”
Casting and location delays put pressure on Redford’s schedule. Unlike on Ordinary People, he conducted no formal rehearsals. In Vennera’s view, Redford “modeled” the movie, frame by frame, with cinematographer Robbie Greenberg. “It was the most extraordinary experience. I had a voice coach, Julie Adams, to keep the Chicano dialect straight, but beyond that artificiality Bob had us work like an improv exercise. We just did what we did as he moved the cameras around us and strategically placed this incredible natural light. A lot of directors will shoot five or six takes to cover themselves. Bob shot a very high ratio for entirely different reasons. He would say, ‘Hey, Chick, try this scene that way.’ And when I did it, he’d say, ‘D’you want to try it your own way now?’ That’s a luxury actors don’t often get. What it did was pump up the actors’ esteem. It loaded the whole thing with a new level of emotion. And confidence. I suddenly understood why Ordinary People won an Academy Award. I saw that Bob had a vision, but within that he was so at ease as to allow everybody to contribute theirs.”
The many start-up delays had pushed the shoot into December, a time of heavy seasonal snows in the mountains. The fact that many interiors scheduled for Chimayo had to be replaced with outdoor scenes intensified the problems. “Journalists started writing that there were wasteful delays,” says Redford, “that I was doing my usual late shows, all those hoary clichés. But it was garbage. We were going well until the snows stopped us. We couldn’t get continuity, we couldn’t replace some of the interiors, so we put a nine-month hold on production to wait for the weather.”
Redford planned to use the hiatus to spend time in Utah reasserting control over and streamlining Sundance. In Van Wagenen’s eyes, Redford “resumed the tiller and let us know he was driving the boat.” All production discussion was swept aside in favor of building expansion. New meeting rooms for lab students