Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [227]
Redford had recently discovered analyst James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code, with its theory of benevolent destiny. According to Jamie, Bagger Vance—the fictional story of a gifted golfer who loses his swing—“echoed” Hillman. “It was obvious Dad was crossing a bridge, in terms of his self-definition,” says Jamie. “And Bagger Vance was an expression of that.”
In keeping with his desire to explore new collaborations, Redford commissioned former psychiatrist Jeremy Leven to draft the screenplay and assigned design to Stuart Craig, whose work on movies like Gandhi and Mary Reilly impressed him. With Leven, he emphasized that this was a movie of metaphors; when he met Craig, he told him, “I want an exaggerated sense of reality. I want the golfing greens to be greener and the 1920s setting to be fairy-tale.” His casting notions swung like a pendulum. First, wildly, he thought of playing the title role himself or costarring with golf adepts like Jack Nicholson or Sean Connery. But Connery and Nicholson, like himself, were past sixty and far from the youthful presences in Pressfield’s novel. He switched to the idea of Morgan Freeman as Bagger, the golfing mystic, and Brad Pitt as the story’s troubled hero, Rannulph Junuh. Both men turned him down. Eberts landed DreamWorks as the funder, and though Redford found enthusiasm and support from Katzenberg, the studio nudged the movie toward the casting of Matt Damon as Junuh and Will Smith as a younger, racier Bagger Vance. (Damon had never held a golf club, but a tutor took care of that.)
Superficially, Leven’s Bagger Vance became a romance. Set in the Depression-era Deep South, it tells the tale of war-traumatized Junuh trying to break a perennial bender by helping his former sweetheart, Adele, who is striving to save the town’s economy. She has inherited her father’s golf course and wants to stage a tournament hosting golf legends Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones. For the tournament to go ahead, Junuh, once the district’s great sports hope, must participate, but he cannot recapture the rhythm of his famous swing. The mysterious caddie Bagger Vance arrives from nowhere and, with Adele’s loving coaching, guides Junuh back into the zone.
But the romance, says Redford, was merely the hook. Of most value was the morality fable. For Pressfield, the original inspiration was mysticism in the form of the Mahabharata, as summarized in the Bhagavad Gita: Rannulph Junuh, or R. Junuh, is Arjuna, the mythical character who refuses to fight for possession of the kingdom that is rightfully his, since he believes war is wasteful. Lord Krishna lectures him on duty, explaining who Arjuna truly is, who God is, and how one finds peace and meaning in conflict.
In Redford’s interpretation the mysticism was secondary to a hero’s story. It was, says Redford, drawn from the Jungian well, and from elements of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which illuminates the interweaving of all cultural mythologies and proposes the importance of the retelling of tales to reinforce our sense of common spiritual purpose. “Given that we have abandoned myth in our culture,” says Redford, “it seemed like the right time to offer this compendium. I had a sense that the way we receive information is faulty. Too much that comes into our heads—from the daily media, mostly—is redundant. Do we really need to know such a huge amount of detail about the minutiae of every event in every country? Bagger Vance was about remembering who we are and this shared spiritual journey we’re on.”
As with so many script developments over the years, Redford’s perfectionist vision slowed the process. Leven drafted and redrafted but was replaced by LaGravenese, since his divided