Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [244]
In the end, bobbing on a sea of emotions, he cast away his notes and improvised. He told the gathered friends and family, “I think a part of you dies when someone you love dies.”
It was, of course, finally about film, just film. The relative failure of the recent films he most cared about, An Unfinished Life and Lions for Lambs, was, in the greater scheme of things, unimportant. His movies had cumulatively earned almost $1 billion and he was still acknowledged, as he was at the millennium when Life selected him as a symbol of grace and glamour for the twentieth century. Reflecting on his oeuvre, he decided that Jeremiah Johnson was his favorite movie, because it was all about continuing. Johnson suffers the slings and arrows, but is uncowed. In the same spirit, he would go on, choosing two new movie projects that sprang from his interests in sports and society. With Lions for Lambs coproducer Tracy Falco, a recent executive appointee at Universal, he agreed to develop a film based on the story of the first African American Major League Baseball player, Jackie Robinson, in which he would play the Brooklyn Dodgers general manager, Branch Rickey. Given the new accent on national integration that came with Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008, the subject felt timely. But superseding it came The Conspirator, a script about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln that crucially examined the role of John Wilkes Booth’s alleged collaborator Mary Surratt whose state execution, along with three other coconspirators, remains controversial. Redford’s film, finally greenlighted as a new directorial venture in the spring of 2010, was designed less as a historical piece than a polemic. Bob Woodward was thankful for his stubborn engagement with social issues in his films.“The gift he brought to me and Carl and All the President’s Men was the gift of an observer. He had a skill to hover above the project and cut to the key elements with amazing acuity,” says Woodward. “That degree of analytical skill enhances everything he does, and we need it in all divisions of our society.”
It was this observational obsession that ultimately explains his appetite for storytelling and his ongoing quest for characters to play. As with Chaucer and Dickens, who charted their worlds with scorn and affection in equal measure, his urge remained to shine a light on his own. “I could never stop acting,” he told Jamie, “because it would be like removing curiosity and, to me, that would be like removing life itself.” Acting and stardom, of course, were different matters. Acting he was compelled to; stardom was a gift, something to be grateful for, and proud of. Proud not in vainglory, but because he knew what he’d achieved in transferring its power into something concretely separate—Sundance—where others could engage and experiment with their own art. What remained, beyond the challenge of age, was the problem of how to hold on to the magical province he had created.
The Sundance Group, in its high-flight ambition, was dead. But the Sundance Institute, the arts principle, was intact—though still under threat because of the failure of the business umbrella. Redford remained committed to restoring its vitality and was heartened when Bylle’s art opened a door. IMG Artists was launching an inaugural California version of its well-established Tuscan Sun Festival. The IMG format combined concerts performed by the world’s most acclaimed musical artists with literary, culinary and visual art exhibitions. Barrett Wissman, IMG Artists’ chief executive, wanted to showcase Bylle’s work as a local artist. Wissman met Redford and told him of his plans to explore cross-cultural events globally. Already there were Sun Festivals in Asia and Europe, and Wissman saw an important new opportunity in the Middle East, where Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan of the United Arab Emirates was developing Abu Dhabi with unprecedented focus on the arts. Wissman suggested