Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [211]
The story line was unashamed Hitchcockian MacGuffin territory, involving National Security Agency infiltration that recalled Three Days of the Condor. Redford’s role was computer genius Martin Bishop (a name that references two of the CIA men listed as victims in Condor), whose electronic analysis team is tricked into stealing a mysterious black box that they subsequently learn has the power to breach all encrypted national security systems worldwide. What appears to be a story of NSA perfidy emerges as a grudge war between Redford’s Bishop and his college-days competitor, the devious Cosmo, played by Ben Kingsley.
“My way of enjoying the role was hooking in to the whole issue of privacy in this information age,” says Redford. “Bishop’s team can get into anyone’s files. Not long before, I learned I’d been investigated by the Treasury Department and the LAPD. That blew me away. Treasury checked me out for six months because I went to Cuba to visit García Márquez for the Sundance Latin American program. In the case of the LAPD investigation, the best bet is they saw the Leonard Peltier film [Apted’s Incident at Oglala] and figured I was undercover with American Indian Movement radicals. All of it was paranoid nonsense, of course, but it made me think: this is Orwell’s Big Brother in the making. We are in a society now that has hidden cameras in malls, at banks, at drugstores. We have computers on our desks that are as much windows into our lives as windows on the world. People can hack into our personal information. Our credit cards are routinely stolen. Our Social Security numbers are traded. Sneakers reminds us to pay attention to all this new technology.”
Redford worked from October through February, with breaks to wrap the edit of A River Runs Through It and ski with the family at Christmas. Frustrated as he was by the lightness of the subject, he was thankful for a movie that felt effortlessly sweet, especially because of Robinson’s humor and the kinship of ensemble acting. He found River Phoenix a gentle, respectful student; Dan Aykroyd (playing the gadgets wizard Mother) “all mischief and treason”; Poitier, Kingsley and Mary McDonnell, playing the love interest, stimulating dinner companions. The best moments, though, were the days in San Francisco when he found time to visit with Amy, who was attending San Francisco State University, studying film. In the last five years Amy’s interest in movies had grown through internships at the June labs. She had also spent time in London, where she’d started acting. Of the Redford children, friends say, Amy was most effusive in either applauding or criticizing her father. “She wasn’t good at phony politeness,” says a Sundance staffer. “In fact, she went punk, adopting a punk look with a punk attitude. When she addressed you directly, you tended to listen.” When Redford visited, says Amy, she was unimpressed by his description of Sneakers: “I told him he should be acting more and starring less.”
Universal’s summer testing of a rough cut of Sneakers yielded such positive results that the release planned for Christmas was moved up to September. Decent reviews followed, and a satisfying gross: $51.5 million in the United States alone, a return doubled worldwide.
The success did not dissuade Redford from breaking with Ovitz. “From the beginning I never really trusted him,” says Redford. “But I thought he was smart and shrewd in a tough business. I also thought that having someone represent you in so savage an environment who actually loves to do what you hate doing—that is, deal chasing—was a boon.” But, as he had told Lourd, he had grown uncomfortable with the direction in which Ovitz was nudging him.
A number of projects Redford liked had died on the vine: a George Washington biopic; a morality tale about the rain forest that he discussed with Spielberg, who “got the visuals, but couldn’t get the subtext of the story”; a romantic comedy, The President Elopes, which Penny Marshall developed.