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anyway. I cast Craig Sheffer, because he looked right and he wanted that role of Norman badly. I thought Brad would balance him well, playing Paul. There was a stance about Brad I liked. He acts tough, like he has to face down the world and all its ills. But inside I saw he is a sensitive person who craves approval, like the character Paul.” British actresses Emily Lloyd and Brenda Blethyn were cast as Norman’s sweetheart, Jessie, and Clara Maclean, the boys’ mother. Apart from admiring their individual qualities—Lloyd had just completed David Leland’s accomplished Wish You Were Here, and Blethyn was fast becoming a fixture in British art house film—Redford saw anthropological accuracy in the women’s casting: “There is a definite quality in the Britishness that rubs sharply against rural Americana, but complements it. It’s a prissy arrogance that’s part of the Puritan in the American heart. I got two contrasting aspects of that in Emily and Brenda: the teenage rebel and the convention-bound patrician.”

On April 2, 1991, during preproduction in Livingston, Montana, news came that Charlie Redford had died of heart failure in his home at Tiburon, after a long bout with Alzheimer’s. Only three months before, Redford had become a grandfather when Shauna and Eric’s daughter, Michaela, was born, “an occasion of the greatest joy,” he says. More than ever the issues of family and duty and human responsibility preoccupied him. “From our deepening conversations I knew a lot of his own life was in River,” says Friedenberg. “We talked over some key issues. Communication had always been a problem within his family, especially communication with his father. A similar separation existed with Norman and Paul and their father—though Bob said the reverend reminded him more of his grandfather, whose attitude to his son was to chastise a wrongdoing by imposing a silence. After his father’s death the issue of scripting the silences became emphatic. We started to actually create dead spaces, which made problems for the actors, particularly Craig Sheffer, who could not understand the lack of a verbalized philosophy for his Norman character. He persisted in complaining—a lot. He would sit in the wings writing his own eloquent speeches for Norman, and it was maddening for Bob because he just didn’t get it. He didn’t get Bob. It was only later, when he saw the movie finished and screened at the Toronto Film Festival, that he took us aside and said, ‘Shit! What was I trying to do? Now I get it.’ ”

Redford had made his peace with Charlie, after a fashion. Through the late eighties they exchanged letters constantly, always barbed and full of wit, but increasingly affectionate. Redford bought his father a giant television for his new home; Charlie responded with a clever memo about his failing eyesight. Redford offered Charlie the use of his house at Trancas Beach, invited him to Utah, asked him to share Thanksgiving at a rented house in Weston, Connecticut. But Charlie was still his father’s son, still oppressed by the austerity from Westerly, still scared. Family friend Marcella Scott saw rivalry till the end.

With Bill Coomber at his side, just like old times, Redford took the wheel of his Porsche to drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco for the funeral service in Mill Valley. Coomber found his stepbrother much changed: “I felt he was a lot edgier, maybe less in control of his temperament.” Coomber also felt “profound sadness” for Redford’s loss in never achieving insight or intimacy with Helen, Charlie’s wife. For his part, Redford found the trip “just priceless time together. That long drive allowed us to review the years, because I had seen so little of him. It was strange, driving north to my dad’s funeral, because it was a road trip into both our past lives. Lots of memories. Seminal moments. The need to escape as teenagers. The madness in Westwood. The crazy hot-rodding in the Valley. The bust-ups, the breakdowns. A lot of misunderstanding was patched up. We were brothers again, tighter than ever.”

When River started shooting six weeks