Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [96]
Frankfurt, Gregson, Lola and the kids moved to Wengen for the duration of the shoot, which lent it a pleasant air of a family vacation. Redford continued to work the script. “But we were under the gun,” said Ritchie. “Time was always the enemy. When I’d first met with Gregson and Bob at the Hotel Bel-Air, I was offered the deal of $30,000 in hand, no perks, which I accepted. But that meeting was it in terms of planning. There was hard work from Bob and Salter on the script, but the rest—the structuring of a production—was left to me.” Gregson’s preparation, said Ritchie, left something to be desired. The main race scenes were scheduled to be shot around the Lauberhorn, but no one mentioned that a James Bond extravaganza, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, was being filmed on the Schilthorn, the mountain opposite. Ritchie now realized getting a first-rate crew would be impossible. “The Bond people paid better; they were a big boom-time production,” said Ritchie. “So we got the leftovers.” Moreover, Redford had assumed the availability of Willy Bogner Jr., the Olympic contender turned cameraman and the only accomplished ski photographer working in film; his 1965 documentary, Fascination with Skiing, had won prizes and he knew the European slopes intimately. But Bogner had signed for the Bond picture. At the last minute, Joe Jay Jalbert, a skier from Washington University who worked on the Olympic B team contenders, signed up to shoot the ski action. “We had to train him to use the camera real fast,” said Ritchie. “It sounds simple, but this wasn’t vacation snaps. Joe Jay had to learn to handle a fifteen-pound Arriflex while skiing downhill at full speed. It took forever to get a single, steady, usable shot.”
Gene Hackman and Camilla Sparv were cast in the prominent roles of the team coach and the object of Redford’s affection. “That casting was critical,” said Ritchie, “because, firstly, Gene has no star ego and doesn’t care how you photograph him. And Camilla, like Bob, has classic beauty that you simply couldn’t shoot badly. It was so important because, with the budget we had and the style I wanted, there would be no time for complicated lighting setups. My attitude was, We are making a documentary; we are cutting for reality. There were no read-throughs, and what we were doing every day was a kind of cinema verité.”
The film followed Olympic downhill races over three seasons, as America closes in on its first big ski medals. Chappellet is seeded eighty-eighth at the start, progresses to twentieth and finally, in the third season, wins. But he is undisciplined. “Bob’s way of playing Chappellet was to push up his own nature,” said Ritchie. “Everything he’d been as a kid, the uncompromising flunk out, the reluctant jock—all of it went into Chappellet. Dialogue disappeared all over the place. Several times I asked him, ‘Where’s the goddamn line?’ And his answer was a shrug. His constant nervous mannerism of chewing gum drove me insane. I’d call a cut just to get him to spit out the gum. And then I understood this was Chappellet being Bob. This was Chappellet telling Hackman the coach to fuck off.”
Despite a directive from Paramount’s legal department to the contrary, Redford insisted on doing most of his own skiing, to Hackman’s dismay. “Gene liked Redford,” said Ritchie. “But he was appalled by the skiing. He said, ‘Does that idiot know about insurance liabilities? If he falls, we’re all on our way home.’ ” Walter Coblenz, Ritchie’s production manager, was given the unenviable task of monitoring Redford’s excesses, a nightmare task, says Coblenz, “because you really don’t tell Bob what to do. You politely request, and then hope.”
By the summer, everyone was optimistic. Side by side in separate studios, Butch Cassidy and Downhill Racer were in editing and progressing well. “From Bob’s point