Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [221]
Directing himself, however, proved a bigger challenge than he’d imagined. “Your judgments move to another level. There is absolutely no way you can properly balance your performance, other than by intuition.” On-location video playback was of limited help. “Yes, it was valuable to be able to try something, then go to the monitor and evaluate. But it was an experience like no other I’d had. I was not sociable during The Horse Whisperer. I cut off and was dependent on Bylle as my lifeline to the real world.”
Throughout the movie Redford was most impressed by Scott Thomas. There was just one, late problem. LaGravenese’s revision had removed the pregnancy and melodrama of Evans’s book and used Redford’s idea of restraint and redemption. Through Booker’s calm and guidance, Grace’s confidence is restored and, in the parallel story line, the slow-burning attraction between easterner and westerner turns into full-on love. At the end, Annie finally faces separation from Booker, as she must return to her family and her life in New York. “Kristin was strong,” says Redford. “She was often very poignant, and I told her how much it meant, how well she’d read Annie. But then came the goodbye, where the two of them studiously avoid the Big Love Scene. It is a heartrending moment that required Kristin to break down and weep, but she couldn’t get it. She tried. She struggled with the text and the reasons. But it wouldn’t work in her head.”
Watching her unease, Redford called her aside. “What’s going on?” he asked her.
Scott Thomas was shuffling notes in her hand. “I don’t know why I’m leaving. I mean, my character is confusing here. Why am I doing this?”
“I found myself looking her straight in the eye,” Redford recalls, “and saying, maybe a little sternly, ‘You’re doing it because it’s the end of the movie and you have to do it.’ ”
The economy of words epitomized Redford’s trust in good actors. The tears came on cue.
At one point during preproduction, walking at Bodega Bay, Jamie had queried his father’s involvement in the film, sparing any niceties. “Why are you doing this crap?” Jamie asked, reminding his father of the work he personally most admired, work like Jeremiah Johnson, which seemed courageous, encoded, loaded with worth by comparison. “I interpreted that as the biggest challenge,” says Redford, “because there’s no question about the facile nature of screen romances, or the seduction of the old Disney way. It was a bit of a minefield. But I promised him I was aiming for something more stratified and purist. I said, ‘It won’t be playful. It won’t be sexy. But it’ll try to tell a great story with feeling.’ ”
Some believe another, deeper stream fed the movie: that Redford, fully acknowledging Pollack’s skill with love stories and his contribution to Redford’s romantic iconography, wanted to demonstrate his individual worth. “If that was true,” said Hume Cronyn, “it was a big plus. The jock in Bob never died. And competition is a great incentive.”
According to Vanity Fair, Joe Roth, the new chairman of Walt Disney Studios, wept when he saw the first half hour of the movie, claiming it indicated one of the most emotional pictures he’d ever seen. Half a year later, with the movie running four months behind schedule, word came from Burbank that Roth disliked the Montana sequences and judged the film overlong and tedious. At Disney’s request, Redford engaged two extra editors, Hank Corwin and Freeman Davies, known respectively for Oliver Stone movies and MTV work, to radically recut it down from four hours.
The best part of the postproduction, says Redford, was his decision to install editing facilities in the basement at Calistoga, far from Burbank. “It saved my sanity because I could be upstairs and hit a hot idea, then run down to the basement and insert it.” Still, Tom Rolf often found Redford struggling for objectivity: “Of course, it wasn’t easy with Roth on his back, but that’s the way of Hollywood. His