Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [53]
When Redford read the script, the role of Endore jumped out at him. “I thought, Oh, I get it. They’ve seen me do the psychos on TV, and now I’m going to be this neurotic wild guy.” Terry Sanders, the producer, told Redford that John Saxon, the longtime Universal contract player, would be his main costar. “Given John’s status, I assumed he’d play the heroic Roy Loomis. But I was wrong. I could not believe it when Denis, who was directing, told me to learn Loomis’s lines. Saxon would be playing Endore! I could not believe that these guys saw me as a friendly face. I thought, Finally! I told Monique: ‘What a relief! I was beginning to be typecast as a loony. Now these Sanders guys are opening it up. They see the actor.’ ”
When shooting began in Topanga Canyon, Redford encountered a crew top-heavy with talent. Apart from Saxon and Pollack (cast as Owen Van Dorn), there was John Houseman as UA’s creative adviser, Francis Ford Coppola as gofer, Dean Stockwell in charge of the still photography and Ted McCord as the cameraman. “These guys were the second generation out of UCLA film school, following the so-called breakthrough guys like Stanley Kubrick, who’d just hit internationally with The Killing,” says Redford. “They were the American New Wave and people had high expectations for them. I was elated. Sydney and I thought, Whoa, this could be really inventive and great!”
Redford’s fee for three weeks’ work was to be $500, somewhat less than a comparable television fee. But Redford and Pollack were quickly concerned about the immaturity of the producers. “I looked around and saw great actors on the set,” said Pollack. “There was no question about that. But there was a studenty feel about the Sanders boys, a feeling that they had many unresolved creative issues as we went along. I was experienced enough to know you simply have to have your plot worked out before you shoot a foot of film. You can’t risk boardroom debates in the field, and that’s what they were doing.”
“Sydney and I were the kind of actors who avoided seeing the big productions like Cleopatra in favor of the new stuff the Europeans were doing,” Redford recalls. “So we were supporting all the edgy stuff. But Denis seemed less sure every day of where we were going. In my opinion, he opened a door that allowed John [Saxon] to take over the movie. John was experienced. They were not. And that might have been a mistake.”
Saxon disputes that he took over the movie but believed War Hunt was a classic in concept and execution. “In the context of the times, it was an original gem,” he says. “It was a transition film, because the studio system had just shut down, Europe was happening and no one at the executive level knew where to go next. No decisions were being made in Hollywood, and this was the first moment that the independents stood out. In later life Bob would become the patron saint of the independents with Sundance, and I choose to believe this was his baptism. Had he come to movies at any other time, in any other way, he might not have found the inspiration. The Sanders brothers helped bring in the new era. We all benefited. And I believe Bob intuited the significance of what we’d all done even if he failed to process it at the time.”
Saxon admits that he angled to “supervise” the postproduction, working closely with Denis Sanders. But when UA saw their version in the spring of 1962, a recut was ordered and effected. Saxon objected, personally confronting the senior UA executive in charge, David Picker. “I told him, ‘You have to reinstate all the original Sanderses’ footage, please. These guys have a vision of something very deep and meaningful about war and human nature, and you need to show it that way—the intimate, disturbing way.’ ” Picker wouldn’t allow it. “UA had no time for metaphysics,” says Saxon. “They cut it again and dumped War Hunt onto the market, where it was just another low-budget black-and-white war picture.”
That may have seemed the case to Saxon, but the reviews