Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [207]
The recent box office and Academy Award success of the low-key film Driving Miss Daisy, the brainchild of his old boss Richard Zanuck and his wife, Lili Fini Zanuck, gave Redford hope. But every major studio turned down the film and Redford was forced to turn to an old friend, producer Jake Eberts. For two years Friedenberg had been roughing it, living on bare expenses from Wildwood. Then Eberts dove in. “I had no trouble saying, ‘Sure,’ ” says Eberts. “I grew up fly-fishing in Quebec, I loved the story, I loved Bob’s work on Ordinary People. We had a short meeting, that’s all it took. Then I went out to look for the $10 million to get us going.” The studios were still saying no. Hume Cronyn recalled the apathy surrounding the film-in-preparation. “I met a bigwig from Paramount at the Wyndham [Hotel, Cronyn’s home in New York] who told me Redford had lost it,” said Cronyn. “ ‘He’s finished,’ the guy said. ‘The activism has burned his brain. This is a goddamn movie about trout.’ I knew what this guy meant, but I saw it the other way. A River Runs Through It was like The Old Man and the Sea. It was contemplative. It was as much an experiment as anything anyone was doing at the June labs.”
Redford wouldn’t give in. He began casting and told his Wildwood coproducer Patrick Markey to find locations to duplicate Missoula, Montana. For a moment, it seemed a deal with Sherry Lansing at Fox would work out—but Lansing withdrew. “I was going to do it one way or the other,” says Redford. “Even if that meant funding it from my own pocket. I told Markey, ‘Press on!’ ”
Redford says he conceived the movie in consultation with the Maclean family and Friedenberg “in spasms, like I painted in Paris thirty-five years before.” For the key job of cinematographer he chose forty-five-year-old Frenchman Philippe Rousselot, who had won two Césars, the French equivalent of the Academy Award. Rousselot had worked with Eric Rohmer before making his first English-language movie, the heavily stylized Diva. Redford admired his use of light, exemplified in John Boorman’s lush woodland-set The Emerald Forest. “That whole notion of interconnected nature required the most subtle control of light between sky, forest and water. Rousselot was fresh to America then, and very focused. The time was right to utilize him.”
Tom Skerritt was called on to fill the role of the Presbyterian minister father of the Maclean boys. But the boys were harder to come by. At one point, the Bridges brothers, Jeff and Beau, were considered, then a wide array of actors, including Ethan Hawke, were auditioned. Redford’s vision for the boys was rigid. “I didn’t want stars. I wanted great intelligence and sensitivity.” Late in the day Brad Pitt showed up. Pitt, then primarily a television actor, had just scored on the big screen in Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise. “I thought he looked the part, but he didn’t convince me,” says Redford. “He also carried a heavy dose of attitude, which put me off.” According to Pitt, he was rejected outright but went on to demonstrate the kind of bullish intransigence Redford himself had shown with people like Mike Nichols. “I would not accept no,” says Pitt. “I’d been tracking this project for months. I said to Bob, ‘Look, I want to have another reading.’ So I called up a buddy, Dermot Mulroney, and we decided to take the two scenes I’d auditioned with and make a minimovie, complete with sound track.” Mulroney’s wife, Catherine Keener, who had starred in Pitt’s just completed indie movie, Johnny Suede, directed by Sundance alumnus Tom DiCillo, acted in the demo. Melissa Etheridge contributed the music. Redford says, “Brad may have shown me some show reel, but I’d made my mind up