Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [92]
Jamie, just settling into Dalton, was given eight weeks off, as was Shauna, who joined Lola and Joanne Woodward on location. This family camaraderie—“incessant talk, gags and laughs,” says Jamie—helped a twelve-week shoot hampered by the kind of stunt accidents and injuries that might be expected from a reenactment of the dying days of the Wild West. “There was a feeling of unusual intensity from the start,” said Feighan. “The legend of Hill’s dedication preceded him. He’d knocked Hawaii, which was a sprawling three-hour movie, into shape when Fred Zinnemann couldn’t. And he was sure as hell going to make a silk purse out of Goldman’s script. He worked sixteen hours a day from the first week in June of 1968, when he called Goldman to Fox to discuss the script, till the end of the final edit in June 1969. He even worked from a stretcher for ten days when he put his back out. And later on he got studio dispensation to sleep in a dressing-room loft beside the edit suite.” Redford says he found this degree of application inspiring. He also loved the locations—“among my favorite scenery anywhere in the world: Silverton, Colorado, Virgin and St. George in Utah, and the Mexican desert.”
From the first days of shooting there was a brotherliness in the partnership of Newman and Redford that had Hill, said his assistant, Bob Crawford, “hopping around like a four-year-old who’s finally cracked the candy jar.” Stephanie Phillips, though, remembered a nervous start. There had been controversy about Redford’s bandito mustache. Phillips disliked it, and Redford was reminded of the story of Darryl Zanuck returning from Europe halfway through the shoot for The Gunfighter, where Gregory Peck wore a mustache. “That facial hair is going to cost me $2 million,” said Zanuck. “Given Stephanie’s commercial instinct,” says Redford, “the mustache was in trouble. But I was emphatic it stayed, because that was the way those bandits looked at the turn of the century. It was authentic. And George agreed, so it stayed put.” Hill enjoyed Redford’s cheekiness. “Bob was a little rougher and less mature than Paul,” he recalled. “So there was a definite experience discrepancy. Paul played on that, which created some fine moments that weren’t in Goldman’s script. Paul was Actors Studio, Redford was ‘the other side’—that was another pretense for rivalry. That’s all good stuff, but it can slide out of control. It can become too much fun for the actors, and lose the point. At the end of the day it’s the director’s job to make a characterful relationship out of all this. I had to rein them in at times.”
“We got it up on its feet real quick,” Newman remembered. “Redford worked different to me, a bit faster. But Method fades as soon as you face the movie camera. The technology of the film set works against Stanislavski, and good film actors know it. I once asked Elia Kazan how often one should rely on sense memory, and he said sense memory never worked for him. So you take what works for you, which was what I did, and it varies with the definition of each production. Orson Welles complained that he’d made The Long, Hot Summer with Tony Franciosa and Lee Remick and Joanne [Woodward], who were all Method trained, and it was like trying to cycle a bicycle through a barrel of molasses. I was always conscious of that, so I didn’t bring Stanislavski to the set. I brought a Porsche-engined Volks.”
In real life, Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, renamed the Hole in the Wall Gang to avoid confusion with Sam Peckinpah’s movie of that name, were serial bank robbers and murderous postfrontier thugs. Harry “Sundance” Longabaugh was a dangerous Pennsylvania-born gun for hire. Goldman proposed an alternative, Robin Hood version of villainy. “I always loved Bill’s writing,