Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [235]
Chess framed The Last Castle. “It was really very precise,” says Lurie, “because it’s evenhanded. Irwin arrives in a dignified glory, his battlefield reputation preceding him. The inmates bow to his status. But they’re scared of Winter. Little by little Winter’s jealousy of Irwin changes the attitude of the inmates. He bullies them, and he makes mistakes humiliating Irwin in front of them, and finally the inmates’ loyalty to Irwin transforms to a frenzy of revolt, the object of which is to capture the prison flag and fly it in the upside-down position that signals distress, meaning that Winter is the monster and injustice rules the prison. So the movie becomes, literally, ‘Your move, my move,’ to capture the king.”
The Last Castle brought out Redford’s most ambitious acting performance in thirty years. Lurie felt all Redford’s history—the activism, the rebelliousness, the independence—pour out of him. “Bob never ceased to remind us how much he despised institutional thuggery,” says Lurie. In one sequence, Irwin pulls a young inmate, Aguilar, played by Clifton Collins, in line, showing him how to properly salute. “It took fifteen takes to get a decent salute out of Bob,” says Lurie. The best he could muster, preserved on film, seems more an act of offense than any three-star gesture. “In all those little details he was giving us who he was, what he stood for, how he regards misused authority.”
During April, Redford got to play his big death scene. He’d done it before on television, and died offscreen in Out of Africa and The Great Waldo Pepper, but he says, “when I squared up, it was tougher and more emotionally draining than I’d imagined.” The unease arose from the recent deaths of close friends like Margaret Owings and Pakula; on his mind, too, were the recent close shaves he’d personally experienced. Not long before, he’d survived a motorcycle skid on a bend of the Alpine Loop that sent him off the precipice, a genuine brush with death. Later, a chartered Learjet he took with Bylle and her dog, Max, back to Santa Rosa from New Mexico lost both of its engines for nine minutes. The plane lost twenty-one thousand feet in altitude. Redford recalls the panic in the cockpit and the mechanical process of locking his seat belt “with the absolute certainty it was all over. What I felt was the inevitable: Shit, how simple! Someone fits a plug wrong and—pow!—we end like this. And then I felt the strangest thing: a mix of anger, fear, resolve … and optimism. We were heading toward the ground and it all dispelled in, Hell, I’m not ready to go! There’s too much to do!” At eighteen thousand feet, the engines kicked in and the pilots brought the jet down safely in Las Vegas. When everyone hit the bar for a whiskey, says Redford, the atmosphere was strangely serene. “Because you are so humbled by the enormousness of chance, and by your fragility. You are drinking whiskey with your boots on the good earth solely because destiny says so. You personally did nothing to alter the situation. Destiny made its mind up.”
Playing the death scene, where Winter snatches a pistol and shoots Irwin in a riot, Redford employed a Method-like sense memory: “That one little scene exhausted me. So many thoughts—indeed, a lifetime’s personal losses—crammed into two minutes. Irwin raises the flag, takes the bullet, slumps, pushes away the doctor who rushes to help him and just blinks to acknowledge the moment,