Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [220]
The one disturbance in his routine was the weekly trip to L.A.—a town he had come to loathe—for casting meetings. He met with Emma Thompson, hoping to interest her in the female lead. “The British do austerity better than any American. The concept I had was to portray Annie as a version of Tina Brown of Vanity Fair, with a little of the visible brittleness of Margaret Thatcher.” Thompson turned down the part, citing personal problems. His next choice was Kristin Scott Thomas, whom he’d first spotted as the woman secretly in love with Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Redford wanted “an actor who could instantly relate dignity” to play Annie’s husband, the romantic competitor to Booker, and chose Australian Sam Neill. Hardest to cast was Grace, the preteen accident victim. Working with casting coordinator Michelle Hartley, he finally decided on fifteen-year-old New Yorker Scarlett Johansson, who had just completed her first lead in Lisa Krueger’s modest indie film about foster home runaways, Manny and Lo.
Then Eric Roth’s script arrived. “It didn’t work at all,” says Redford. “I wanted to pull the plug. I became unsure of the story. What I was seeking was a fable about faith and redemption, not a story about a sexually frustrated woman.” He tried Roth again. “What I wanted to do was for us both to fly to Montana and check out the location because I felt it should ‘speak’ in this script, as it had in A River Runs Through It. I wanted Roth with me, to write as we went, but he wouldn’t play ball.” Disney dithered, threatening to withdraw should Redford delay any further, but, as ever, he followed his instincts, funding the development personally for the next five months and assigning Richard LaGravenese, who had contributed to Clint Eastwood’s The Bridges of Madison County, to take over the writing. LaGravenese had attended the Sundance labs as an adviser, and Redford thought highly of him.
By April 1997 Redford was racing against the melting snows in Albany, New York, to begin filming the road accident in which Grace and Pilgrim are injured. Previously, since Ordinary People, he had used his own drawings to denote scenes as he visualized them for the cinematographer. On The Horse Whisperer he spent hundreds of hours scribbling and collaborating with two storyboard artists and with cinematographer Bob Richardson, famous for his work with Oliver Stone and his inventive use of light. “For the New York part of the movie,” says Redford, “I wanted a very congested and disharmonious visual sense that reflected Annie’s heart. For Big Sky Montana I wanted Frederic Remington.” What this translated to, daringly, was a movie that would be presented in two screen aspect ratios: the New York scenes in standard 1.85:1 ratio, and the Montana sequences widened to a 2.35:1 ratio. There was also a conscious decision, shared with LaGravenese, Richardson and editor Tom Rolf—who had edited Sneakers—to create a “novelistic” pace to the drama. The notion in part came from the casting of highly lyrical actors like Dianne Wiest, who played Booker’s sister. “Actors like Wiest have extraordinary power,” says Redford. “The timbre of their voice carries meaning. I wanted this film to take its time so that the audience could find those small pleasures. I also wanted the audience to slow down to the pace of the West so that the journey made by Grace and especially Annie from Manhattan to Montana is a temporal experience.”
The filming spanned the rest of the year. Wiest and Scott Thomas were fine, as was young Ty Hillman, a local find, playing