Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [3]
The paradoxical nature of his relationship with the past resurfaced after the events of 9/11. He was always active in the political shadows with the League of Conservation Voters, and his direct comments about the attacks on New York were few, but pointed. The crisis, he opined, was the result of America’s failure to fully understand the world it shared. He stated that America, being a young country, was just spoiled enough not to have to think about the big picture. “We’re sort of shallow.… We don’t look to the past for any clues about our future; we don’t look to history. If you look at the Bush administration’s way of operating and thinking, you’d be led to believe they’ve no use for history. It’s probably one of the reasons they’ve bungled everything so badly. What they’ve set in motion really has a horrible future.”
By the time of 9/11 I had been working on the project for more than five years, pursuing Carl Jung’s dictum that the truth is only available from the concert of many voices; I attempted to interview all and anyone who knew him. I was close to Redford, regularly lunching and supping with him in Ireland and America, but I felt his spirit was still evasive, and I still had uncertainties about the core philosophy of Sundance.
Reading his reflections on American foreign policy, I remembered a conversation I’d had with his daughter Shauna. Everything of value that she learned about her father, she told me, came in transit: in cars, while skiing, trail riding, on long walks. That reminded me of a key moment in The Horse Whisperer. He is courting Kristin Scott Thomas, the East Coast interloper, and she cannot come to grips with him. She is verbally dexterous; he is silent in the Native American way. He leads her on horseback to a high precipice above Big Sky Montana and shows her the land. The moment nudged me, because I’d shared that view precisely in my first experience of Redford out west. The location was different. It was Sundance, Utah, not Montana. But all else was the same: he was expressing himself in a view of America.
Very shortly afterward, I opened another bundle of files sent by Sundance. These included reams of his own notes and sketches over the years, together with his copious correspondence with luminaries in the arts and politics. One letter that got my attention came from the humorist Mort Sahl. Having enjoyed Havana, a movie in which many who knew Redford saw encoded autobiographical references, Sahl felt compelled to express his admiration. After a lifetime of bewilderment about the real Robert Redford, wrote Sahl, “I finally get it. America is the Girl.”
To all who know the quotidian Robert Redford, there’s no surprise in his fixation with the land. He fell in love with America, he says, when he first encountered Yosemite as a teenager in the company of his mother. The “sacredness” of the pristine environment overwhelmed him, and in the years that followed, with successive epiphanies in Texas and on Navajo reservations, he committed himself to some type of stewardship. When he found Provo Canyon in the fifties, he felt a call to set down permanent roots. Once he settled there, he bought up as much of the surrounding land as he could to block development and used it as a base for his activism against what he saw as the mismanagement of the national park system and such legislative loopholes as the 1872 mining act that effectively allowed the devastation of lands bordering the parks.
Recognizing this unconditional determination to protect land became the first key to a fruitful understanding of Redford. Then came the arts labs. One project from the very first Sundance lab, Gregory Nava’s El Norte, made it to the big screen. In El Norte, a Mayan brother and