Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [2]
Redford’s achievement has always been shadowed by skepticism. “Opportunism” was the most commonly offered obloquy, though it was hard to see precisely what self-service beyond the enhancement of a winter vacation resort might be at play. Certainly, by the time he initiated the Sundance Institute, Redford was a made man. His stardom, which began in the sixties, was rock solid, and successes like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Way We Were and The Sting had lifted him to iconic status. And it was impossible to accuse him of stagnation in 1980. The year he planned the Sundance labs was also the year he set out as a director, winning an Academy Award for Ordinary People and establishing a determined second strand to his cinema career. What, then, were his deepest motives? And why was the voice of independence so important to him that it prompted what might accurately be described as empire building in the remotest and unlikeliest of places, the Wasatch Mountains of Utah?
Understanding the obsession that created Sundance necessitates understanding Robert Redford and his journey. Out of such an impulse—to better understand the making of this resilient new arts generator in the heartland of America—this book began.
I first met Redford at a taping for the Bravo television series Inside the Actors Studio at the New School in Manhattan in March 1995. I knew I had my work cut out. I admired him and thought much of his work was undervalued and that key thematic connections in his directorial films were unexplored. I also knew he disliked no-holds-barred interviews and that while he cherished the past in a curatorial sense as reflected in his movies like A River Runs Through It and Quiz Show, the personal past left him cold. But I asked for his cooperation, and I got it.
Once we agreed upon a biographical collaboration, the project immediately stalled. He was legendary for being late (“Call the book The Late Robert Redford,” Paul Newman advised me), and I immediately felt the full brunt of it. I flew halfway across the world for meetings that never happened or were largely unproductive because of distractions. I thought of Sartre on Alexandre Dumas’s Kean, the story of an actor: “He is his own victim, never knowing who he really is, whether he’s acting or not.” Was this Redford’s core character—a professional self-investigator, as good actors are, dulled by his skill for circumvention? Was he, like Jay Gatsby, whom he told me he so admired, lost?
Very quickly I learned that contradictions and paradoxes defined him. Throughout his movies, whether he is tackling politics, family or “the system,” there is always the prevalent dominance of one man and his actions. Even at the height of his romantic idol career in the seventies, when women were mailing him their underwear, sagacious journalists were weeding out some underlying contradictory truth. He was, for one, “a subtle blend of Owen Wister’s Trampas, a man who knows that words are deadly and final, and Sartre’s Orestes, who knows that actions are the only true description of a man.”
I labored on. I called him on his disregard for punctuality, which Sydney Pollack, his lifelong friend, had told me was anything but amusing. George Roy Hill, in the last days