Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [91]
Redford joined Paul Newman, Katharine Ross (again), Bill Goldman and Hill at Fox for two weeks of rehearsals in September. Hill reminded Redford of his uncle David. He was convivial, a sharp-as-a-pin military man with a perverse sense of fun. “It was easy to talk with George,” says Redford, “because it felt familiar.” In Hill’s view, “Redford had layers. He had a Celtic wildness that shone through the laid-back dude. Zanuck called him a playboy. But he made a mistake: that was just the look.”
Marcella Scott, Martha’s friend from childhood, worked as a studio secretary assigned to Hill and sat in on the earliest meetings for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. She was impressed by Hill. “He was a loudmouth in the nicest sense, a stage Irishman. He wore tennies everywhere, hated ties—just like Bob—hated rules. But he was fastidious beyond belief within his own universe. I’ve never known a man to read so much and work so hard, and he demanded, usually in a roar, that everyone around him contribute the same energy. He was the kind of man who’d suddenly realize at midnight that he had been remiss in not replying to some obscure memo, and he would think, I am not being professional, and sacrifice a night’s sleep to dictate something generous and unnecessary. Bob and he were made for each other, because Bob, too, had energy beyond everyone else.”
Erudition spilled naturally from Hill, a man who drew heavily on his Irish temperament (both sets of grandparents were Dublin Irish) while, unlike John Ford, shying away from romanticizing his Irishness. Pauline Kael viewed Hill’s work as “implacably impersonal,” which Hill manfully construed as a compliment, since “restraint” was his personal byword. But film historian Andrew Horton, later evaluating his oeuvre, concluded the director deployed “Voltaire’s traits of the master storyteller who frames a serious view of life in a comic-ironic vein, manipulating genres for his own purposes.” Redford appreciated Horton’s analysis. “George was chronically underrated on account of his eclecticism. He was not a ‘straight-line’ director, in that he did not obsess about one style or one subject. When I see directors like Marty Scorsese being so celebrated for excellence and George so ignored, it upsets me. Marty is brilliant as a stylist, but George was an immense storyteller and he had the gift to jump genres and never let you down. In my movie experience till then, George was the first real storyteller I’d met. His approach was analytical and lyrical, and consequently comprehensive.”
For Newman, Hill’s specialty was his genius with actors: “George’s preference was New York theater actors, people like Cloris Leachman, whom he loved. They were trained with improvisational skills, which he relished. Add to that his deep respect for the art of acting, which came from his being an actor in Ireland, and you got the magic. He didn’t slow you down when you were hot; he rolled with it. On the other hand, when you stumbled, he stepped in to help in the blink of an eye. That’s a very rare attribute for a director: understanding acting. In my opinion, on Butch Cassidy, Redford and I might have been any two decent actors. What George did from the rehearsals onward was allow us to run with the script, to just go nuts, then nurse the whole shebang in the direction he wanted, which was original and visionary.”
Humor, on which the simple, linear story of the demise of Butch and Sundance at the end of the outlaw era was built, also oiled the day-to-day production, which began in Durango, Colorado, on September 16. Newman, who loved auto racing, showed up in his souped-up Volkswagen and immediately taunted Redford in his cherished Porsche 904, one