Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [233]
Forbearance required an emotional adjustment by Redford. A decade before, he had effectively started Brad Pitt’s career. Now it was Pitt in the spotlight, and it was Pitt’s minders and agents who dictated scheduling and the mood on the set. Redford could grin and bear it, though he did chafe at Pitt’s insistence on a closed set, with no interruptions or visitors. Pitt himself was courteous, announcing to the media that he’d committed to the picture “basically because Bob was aboard” and expressing warm friendship to Redford throughout. “I wasn’t, obviously, resentful,” says Redford. “I fully understood the rules of the game and I acknowledged how hard it is to retain balance in the kind of promotional frenzy Brad was experiencing. I’d been there. I knew the territory. Now it was his moment. So I sat it out when I had to.”
Shooting shifted to Casablanca. For Redford, this was the best news. Just the previous year he had promised Bylle a long vacation in Morocco. As he expected, he felt an affinity for the local culture and threw himself into learning as much as he could about it. “We can’t bury our heads in the ground about foreign cultures,” he says, “and I took this opportunity to observe and learn with enthusiasm.” The urge to understand Arab life, says Redford, was exactly equal to the drive to experience Europe in the fifties. “I found I connected comfortably with the setting,” says Redford, “the same way I connected with the Hispanic people, or the people of the Celtic Isles.”
A surprising ebullience about moviemaking returned to Redford during Spy Game. The breakneck speed of the movie gave him energy. He lamented the fact that, because he was sixty-four, the insurance underwriters limited the helicopter battle sequences in which he could appear. “I did some stuff regardless,” he says, “and it was new to me, a real adrenaline blast. The insurers were pulling their hair out, because it was all dangerous, low-level flying, with explosions going off right and left. I loved it.”
Redford fit in easily with this new, teen-targeted movie dynamic that demanded texturally variant story lines, an astonishing array of visuals and an average shot duration of 2.6 seconds. “It was a new film language, but it was also a case of the more things change, the more they remain the same. You can set off a million firecrackers, but if you don’t have a story to tell and capable actors to relate it, you have nothing but smoke.”
Redford’s effortless command was highlighted because of its juxtaposition to Pitt’s hip, crinkly eyed posturings. “Robert Redford has been around for so long,” wrote Edward Guthmann in the San Francisco Chronicle, “and has diversified his talents to such an extent—director, environmentalist, indie film guru—that one forgets what a strong and persuasive actor he can be.… There’s a texture, a dimension to him now that wasn’t there before—not only in his weather-beaten face and lumpy hands, but in the way he holds himself and regards the world; in the way he commits himself to this role and doesn’t balk at playing the cynical, callous and dishonest aspects of his character.”
Spy Game may not have been Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Jamie observed, but the central device of the mentor-protégé—what Scott called “the father-son story”—provided what he sought: a chance to essay the bonds of fractured kinship and the difficult business of fixing things.
A career