Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [201]
Pollack had fallen in love with Cuba when he first visited with Mary Hemingway in 1978. “I was struck by every aspect of it,” said Pollack. “The architecture. The climate. The people. The danger. The hope. I saw immediately what Hemingway got out of it, and I imagined what it must have been like while he was there and the future was up for grabs.” The script, originally commissioned from Judith Rascoe, grew in fits and starts over the next ten years and was finished by David Rayfiel. “Think 1950s, an all-American fast-talking gambler falling in love with a Communist gangster’s moll in the political turmoil of the Caribbean, with Sydney directing,” says Rayfiel. “It had to be Bob.” Carlin Glynn, still a regular participant in the Sundance labs, doubted that Redford and Pollack could patch up their differences. Pollack’s commitment to Sundance, beyond his ownership of a house in the canyon tract, had now diminished to nothing. His life was fully absorbed in mainstream Hollywood, with the offices of his development company, Mirage, shifting from one studio lot to another. “It became quite a mysterious alliance [between Redford and Pollack],” says Glynn. “And the kind of films each wanted to make were just different. To attempt another collaboration at that point seemed like the craziest folly.”
Redford’s desire to repair the friendship equaled his need to rebuild his career—and his need to fortify Sundance. “I had an affection for Sydney that never waned. I also admired his creative skills and appreciated what he gave to me in those twenty years of good collaboration.” At the end of the eighties, the gift Pollack bore was an intriguing demi-hero called Jack Weil in a psychologically involving romance. In Rascoe’s plot, inveterate, expert gambler Weil heads for Cuba in the last days of the Batista regime, befriending Roberta (Lena Olin), the wife of rebel leader Dr. Arturo Duran (Raul Julia), on the Key West ferry. The country is about to fall to the revolutionaries, and Weil’s guess is that the high rollers will hit the casinos for one last big game. This, he reckons, is his last chance for a big score. His efforts are compromised by his passion for Roberta, which becomes a dangerous involvement when Duran mysteriously disappears. The love story evolves into suspense, building to a bittersweet finale that echoes Cuba’s fate.
For Pollack (and, later, several critics) Weil was a quasi Finch Hatton, another adventurer inured to true human engagement—perhaps, indeed, an opportunity to “correct” Finch Hatton. Redford saw something entirely different. His identification with Weil, he says, was his strongest since the Jeremiah Johnson character. “No role is strictly autobiographical, but you transfer your ethos and experience. Weil was one of my more interesting characters because I related to his personal journey. He goes to Cuba looking out only for himself. Then he meets Roberta and attachment comes into it. One learns that there is no true state of independence. You can be as rebellious as you like, but finally you conform in order to survive, or to help those you love survive. Weil was fascinating because he made a snap decision to adjust his belief system. He was a man at the end of a long journey acknowledging the limits of his dream and facing up. It resonated personally.”
Little of the old-style collaboration accompanied this, their seventh movie together, but Redford threw himself heartily into it, believing that the movie also had “something to say about the tragedy of Cuba.” Pollack said, “We were bound by a belief that a huge part of Latin culture is lost to Americans. This movie isn’t overt social commentary in any way, but I like to think most of my movies shot against political events stimulate productive discussion. I think Bob and I liked where we started on Havana.”
The movie was filmed partly in Key West, mostly in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Redford loved the foreign location for its richness,