Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [234]
As a journalist broadcasting on KABC talk radio in Los Angeles, Lurie had a reputation as an outspoken leftist who was occasionally barred from press screenings and Republican get-togethers. Redford was flattered that Lurie credited All the President’s Men as his greatest artistic inspiration. With West Point and a career as a broadcaster behind him, Lurie had started as a filmmaker in 1998 with a half-hour short, Four Second Delay, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Deauville American Film Festival. It portrayed a radio call-in show galvanized when a listener threatens to kill hostages unless the on-air interviewee, Bob Woodward, confesses the identity of Deep Throat. Lurie followed this with his feature debut, the one-set Deterrence, a political meditation in which the president is forced to a nuclear showdown with Iraq from the isolation of a remote, snowbound diner. “He was obviously smart,” says Redford, “and he was very ballsy. He appeared to have an interesting slant on human behavior, and he also had in his hands a great script. I thought it would be good because he was a younger voice, a new-ideas man to work with.”
The men first met in Redford’s hotel suite in London shortly before Christmas. “All we talked about was All the President’s Men,” says Lurie. “And then he agreed to a second meeting on the next day, and on the next day all we talked about was Quiz Show.” They exchanged views on national politics and Hollywood politics. Lurie had, he told Redford, wrestled with DreamWorks over a project to follow The Contender, a dilemma Redford well related to. His intention was to film only his own stories, but then DreamWorks gave him “The Castle,” the script by David Scarpa and Graham Yost that interested Redford. Redford overcame a personal momentary hesitation. The experience with DreamWorks on Bagger Vance rankled, but an undamaged admiration for Katzenberg still existed.
Redford’s fascination was with the role of Lieutenant General Irwin, a disgraced career soldier who tackles institutional evil wrought by the governor of the jail to which he’s confined. “I thought the role was a little like Brubaker,” says Lurie, “and a little of many of the idealist roles he’d played. But it was also new ground. It was taxing because it required him to face new situations he’d never depicted on-screen, like playing the family man.”
Redford found the script’s metaphor engrossing. “I liked that it analyzed the relationship between honor and leadership,” he says. He also had fresh ground to explore as an actor: “In the movie Irwin dies. I’d never portrayed death on-screen in a movie, and the actor in me said, It’s about time!”
In February 2001 shooting commenced at the movie’s sole location, the disused Tennessee state penitentiary that had once housed James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr. By now the movie was retitled The Last Castle, to avoid confusion with a low-budget Australian comedy just released. Lurie felt “privileged,” he says, to have Redford walk out into the prison yard on that freezing winter’s morning. He wasn’t the only one enamored of Redford. On the day he arrived, says Lurie, the assembled cast and crew, numbering a hundred, “fell into a kind of reverential awe.” James Gandolfini of television’s The Sopranos was