Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [232]
How painful was this surrender for Redford? “It cut him up because of the unavoidable suggestion that a key component was gone,” said one longtime staffer. “Sundance had been growing its branches over the years. This was the first to truly go.” Redford insists, “It was a necessary reordering, that’s all. Over the years, Shauna, myself and others built a very individual and unique western profile in the retail trade, and we continue to take pride in that. It’s out there, it goes on, and I am still a part of the Sundance catalog and always will be, so the ‘acorn’ pertains.”
What lay ahead was a continuing erosion and a fight that he knew could only be engaged in by maintaining the high public profile that launched Sundance in the first place. Reasoning the importance of his mission, he decided, was easy. Emerson spoke of a nation in terms of “conscience keepers,” and that was a concept that still sat well with him. Bob Woodward, who had stayed in touch with him, believes that “conscience” is the word that underlies All the President’s Men and so many of Redford’s other ambitious works. It also, Woodward believes, lies at the heart of his Sundance experimentation and, further back, at the heart of his decision in the sixties to acquire and preserve the Sundance canyon: “He had a problem about profligate use of land and indifference, and that never stopped.” Though he was most comfortable domestically now in northern California, the canyon—and the colony it bred—continued to embody his raison d’être. “I hated this continual firefighting. But then what worthwhile cause is easy?” says Redford. “I knew I had to persevere in order to finance Sundance, and that came down to persevering as an actor and an artist.”
Out of the threatened bankruptcy came renewed vigor to experiment and extend. The next film he took on, Spy Game, seemed at first a backward step. It was originally developed by Dutch director Mike van Diem and producer Douglas Wick and inherited by Enemy of the State director Tony Scott. The attraction for Redford was Scott’s dazzling son et lumière reputation and by Michael Frost Beckner’s electric script, which bore distinct tones of Wick’s all-time favorite movie, Three Days of the Condor. Markedly in the stylized contemporary thriller fashion, which borrowed an MTV sensibility of equal emphasis on rock music and flash editing, the movie represented a distinct step into the youth market, a pleasing act of appeasement to Lourd and CAA.
Beckner’s script, revised with David Arata, was set in 1991 and dealt with two generations of CIA field operatives, moving forward and backward over sixteen years of subterfuge in Vietnam, Berlin, Beirut and China. Superficially a buddy story, Spy Game distinguished itself as a condensed history of recent American foreign policy, enshrining a critique of institutional amorality. That naturally pleased the man who had created All the President’s Men. Redford’s role was CIA veteran Nathan Muir, who, on his last day at Langley, learns that his protégé, “Boy Scout” Bishop, played by Brad Pitt, has been incarcerated in a Chinese prison under sentence of death. Intercut with long Redford monologues that unveil the sacrificing of his friend, the movie ticks down toward Bishop’s hour of execution.
Filming Spy Game presented substantial logistical problems. To convey the variations of time and place, Scott used archive black-and-white reversal film stock that intensifies colors, digital video, differing gauges of standard film and vintage cameras. Redford’s work, from late November through January 2001, mainly involved location shooting in Morocco, followed by the Langley CIA interiors staged at Shepperton Studios,