Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Ovitz could find no studio backing for the project. Wildwood persisted, with Redford funding development from his own pocket. Redford had chosen as the screenwriter the relatively inexperienced Richard Friedenberg, who had written a moving script for a James Garner television movie called Promise that Redford liked. When Redford had first sent Friedenberg a copy of Maclean’s book, the screenwriter’s response was negative: “The piece was just 104 pages long, and there was no story,” says Friedenberg. “It was lyrical, with a clunky 55-page section about fly-fishing in the middle. I told Redford, ‘Jews don’t fly-fish.’ ”

  A rapid correspondence began between Friedenberg and Redford. But Friedenberg refused to sign a contract. “Because I had been in situations where promises were made, and then I, the writer, could not deliver. There were other issues. I understood this book had immense appeal for Bob, but he is primarily a visual person. His concepts seemed entirely visual. I worried about that. But then I accept, as the screenwriter, my responsibility is to find the story line. So that is how we progressed. The deal was, I would go off, meet Maclean, research and invent some film story line that reflected the book.”

  Maclean was in his eighties and ailing. But Friedenberg’s friendship with Maclean’s daughter, Jean, established the bridge of understanding between author and adapter. “The old boy was in the last days of his life, so I’d ask the questions and Jean would communicate them and then write down Norman’s answers,” says Friedenberg. “What I got in Montana was the feel for the period. But talking with Jean in Chicago, I saw the dichotomies between the book and the reality. The thing was, Norman left out a lot. It was in those gaps I found the invisible story Bob wanted.”

  A River Runs Through It is a short generational history of the Macleans leading to the rite-of-passage boyhood story of Norman and his failed attempt to save his self-destructive brother, Paul. Friedenberg discovered that Maclean’s sweetheart, later wife, Jessie, a central character in the story, was not the uptight Scot that Maclean described; in Friedenberg’s definition, she was “a flapper, more like wild boy Paul than straight-and-narrow Norman.” This liberated Friedenberg’s fictionalizing of the Maclean family story and allowed him, after three years and numerous drafts, to write a filmable narrative. “The breakthrough came on the plane to Montana,” remembers Friedenberg, “after I’d learned all about Jessie from Jean. I saw that the problem of the novella was the balance between the competing brothers who reflect different values in a changing world. In the book, Norman is in his thirties, and he describes the tussles with his father and his brother, Paul. But because he is recounting events, he himself never matures as a character. It is all told from the thirty-year-old perspective. What I realized was, I had to find a Norman who grows. What I did was fix on the moment he returns from college, intending to join the Forestry Service, and discovers his younger brother has somehow assumed seniority as the star journalist and general high achiever in his absence. So the elder became the younger and the movie dynamic of raw competitiveness was set up.”

  Friedenberg wrote a ten-page summary in longhand and mailed it to Wildwood. Redford immediately had a personal connection with Friedenberg’s blueprint: here was an essay about the interconnectedness of all things, rooted in the competitive growth of complementary boys growing into manhood under the direction of a piously misdirected father, a Montana yarn that might have been the Westwood tale of himself, Coomber and Charlie. “You only had to see the passion he put into it to know that there were private elements of Bob’s autobiography there, too,” says Friedenberg.

  The recent box office and Academy Award success of the low-key film Driving Miss Daisy, the brainchild of his old boss Richard Zanuck and his wife, Lili Fini Zanuck, gave Redford hope. But every major studio turned down the film and Redford was forced to turn to an old friend, producer Jake Eberts. For two years Friedenberg had been roughing it, living on bare expenses from Wildwood. Then Eberts dove in. “I had no trouble saying, ‘Sure,’ ” says Eberts. “I grew up fly-fishing in Quebec, I loved the story, I loved Bob’s work on Ordinary People. We had a short meeting, that’s all it took. Then I went out to look for the $10 million to get us going.” The studios were still saying no. Hume Cronyn recalled the apathy surrounding the film-in-preparation. “I met a bigwig from Paramount at the Wyndham [Hotel, Cronyn’s home in New York] who told me Redford had lost it,” said Cronyn. “ ‘He’s finished,’ the guy said. ‘The activism has burned his brain. This is a goddamn movie about trout.’ I knew what this guy meant, but I saw it the other way. A River Runs Through It was like The Old Man and the Sea. It was contemplative. It was as much an experiment as anything anyone was doing at the June labs.”

  Redford wouldn’t give in. He began casting and told his Wildwood coproducer Patrick Markey to find locations to duplicate Missoula, Montana. For a moment, it seemed a deal with Sherry Lansing at Fox would work out—but Lansing withdrew. “I was going to do it one way or the other,” says Redford. “Even if that meant funding it from my own pocket. I told Markey, ‘Press on!’ ”

  Redford says he conceived the movie in consultation with the Maclean family and Friedenberg “in spasms, like I painted in Paris thirty-five years before.” For the key job of cinematographer he chose forty-five-year-old Frenchman Philippe Rousselot, who had won two Césars, the French equivalent of the Academy Award. Rousselot had worked with Eric Rohmer before making his first English-language movie, the heavily stylized Diva. Redford admired his use of light, exemplified in John Boorman’s lush woodland-set The Emerald Forest. “That whole notion of interconnected nature required the most subtle control of light between sky, forest and water. Rousselot was fresh to America then, and very focused. The time was right to utilize him.”

  Tom Skerritt was called on to fill the role of the Presbyterian minister father of the Maclean boys. But the boys were harder to come by. At one point, the Bridges brothers, Jeff and Beau, were considered, then a wide array of actors, including Ethan Hawke, were auditioned. Redford’s vision for the boys was rigid. “I didn’t want stars. I wanted great intelligence and sensitivity.” Late in the day Brad Pitt showed up. Pitt, then primarily a television actor, had just scored on the big screen in Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise. “I thought he looked the part, but he didn’t convince me,” says Redford. “He also carried a heavy dose of attitude, which put me off.” According to Pitt, he was rejected outright but went on to demonstrate the kind of bullish intransigence Redford himself had shown with people like Mike Nichols. “I would not accept no,” says Pitt. “I’d been tracking this project for months. I said to Bob, ‘Look, I want to have another reading.’ So I called up a buddy, Dermot Mulroney, and we decided to take the two scenes I’d auditioned with and make a minimovie, complete with sound track.” Mulroney’s wife, Catherine Keener, who had starred in Pitt’s just completed indie movie, Johnny Suede, directed by Sundance alumnus Tom DiCillo, acted in the demo. Melissa Etheridge contributed the music. Redford says, “Brad may have shown me some show reel, but I’d made my mind up anyway. I cast Craig Sheffer, because he looked right and he wanted that role of Norman badly. I thought Brad would balance him well, playing Paul. There was a stance about Brad I liked. He acts tough, like he has to face down the world and all its ills. But inside I saw he is a sensitive person who craves approval, like the character Paul.” British actresses Emily Lloyd and Brenda Blethyn were cast as Norman’s sweetheart, Jessie, and Clara Maclean, the boys’ mother. Apart from admiring their individual qualities—Lloyd had just completed David Leland’s accomplished Wish You Were Here, and Blethyn was fast becoming a fixture in British art house film—Redford saw anthropological accuracy in the women’s casting: “There is a definite quality in the Britishness that rubs sharply against rural Americana, but complements it. It’s a prissy arrogance that’s part of the Puritan in the American heart. I got two contrasting aspects of that in Emily and Brenda: the teenage rebel and the convention-bound patrician.”

  On April 2, 1991, durin
g preproduction in Livingston, Montana, news came that Charlie Redford had died of heart failure in his home at Tiburon, after a long bout with Alzheimer’s. Only three months before, Redford had become a grandfather when Shauna and Eric’s daughter, Michaela, was born, “an occasion of the greatest joy,” he says. More than ever the issues of family and duty and human responsibility preoccupied him. “From our deepening conversations I knew a lot of his own life was in River,” says Friedenberg. “We talked over some key issues. Communication had always been a problem within his family, especially communication with his father. A similar separation existed with Norman and Paul and their father—though Bob said the reverend reminded him more of his grandfather, whose attitude to his son was to chastise a wrongdoing by imposing a silence. After his father’s death the issue of scripting the silences became emphatic. We started to actually create dead spaces, which made problems for the actors, particularly Craig Sheffer, who could not understand the lack of a verbalized philosophy for his Norman character. He persisted in complaining—a lot. He would sit in the wings writing his own eloquent speeches for Norman, and it was maddening for Bob because he just didn’t get it. He didn’t get Bob. It was only later, when he saw the movie finished and screened at the Toronto Film Festival, that he took us aside and said, ‘Shit! What was I trying to do? Now I get it.’ ”

  Redford had made his peace with Charlie, after a fashion. Through the late eighties they exchanged letters constantly, always barbed and full of wit, but increasingly affectionate. Redford bought his father a giant television for his new home; Charlie responded with a clever memo about his failing eyesight. Redford offered Charlie the use of his house at Trancas Beach, invited him to Utah, asked him to share Thanksgiving at a rented house in Weston, Connecticut. But Charlie was still his father’s son, still oppressed by the austerity from Westerly, still scared. Family friend Marcella Scott saw rivalry till the end.

  With Bill Coomber at his side, just like old times, Redford took the wheel of his Porsche to drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco for the funeral service in Mill Valley. Coomber found his stepbrother much changed: “I felt he was a lot edgier, maybe less in control of his temperament.” Coomber also felt “profound sadness” for Redford’s loss in never achieving insight or intimacy with Helen, Charlie’s wife. For his part, Redford found the trip “just priceless time together. That long drive allowed us to review the years, because I had seen so little of him. It was strange, driving north to my dad’s funeral, because it was a road trip into both our past lives. Lots of memories. Seminal moments. The need to escape as teenagers. The madness in Westwood. The crazy hot-rodding in the Valley. The bust-ups, the breakdowns. A lot of misunderstanding was patched up. We were brothers again, tighter than ever.”

  When River started shooting six weeks later, around Livingston and Big Timber, Montana, Redford told Patrick Markey, “The movie’s already done in my head.” Markey recalls, “He was sizzling. It was the sweetest filming experience I’ve ever had. It poured out of him, and there was no indication of the paucity of the source material. Instead, it felt like he was compressing a saga comparable with Flaubert or Proust into this immaculate vignette. Rousselot didn’t lead it visually, Bob did. He was onto every fiber of it. The sound. The costuming. The accents. The attitude of people. Everything.”

  “The absence of a studio deal didn’t slow us down,” Friedenberg says. “There was not much tension at all.” According to Friedenberg, the one errant aspect was Pitt’s and Sheffer’s tendency to drop in anachronistic improvisations and challenge Redford’s subtleties.

  Central to the book was its fishing location, the 130-mile-long Blackfoot River, which wound from the Lewis and Clark Mountains to its intersection with the Clark Fork River near Missoula. For hundreds of years the Blackfoot Indians called the waterway the River on the Road to the Buffalo, and Maclean, as a child, revered it. But Markey found it unusable. “The headwaters were orange and toxic because an old mine, the Mike Horse, had caved into it fifteen years ago. All the residue zinc, lead and cadmium poured down, year after year. It was ruined, and the fish Maclean hunted, the cutthroat, rainbow, bull and brown trout, were mostly gone. Bob was sickened by it.” Markey moved the fly-fishing scenes to the Gallatin and Yellowstone rivers. Redford was immediately receptive to the local chapter of Trout Unlimited, which sought assistance for an awareness campaign about local pollution. “Bob sidetracked once again,” says Markey. “It was, ‘How the hell do we celebrate the sanctity of heritage in this film when the Blackfoot is a cesspool?’ It came right into the middle of his agenda, and he offered to join fund-raisers for National Fish and Wildlife and the American Rivers association, which had the Blackfoot registered as one of the ten most endangered waterways. It wasn’t nostalgia. He worried all the time about what he called ‘capturing the past.’ The loss of the Blackfoot proved his point, and he worried that the movie would not articulate itself properly, that it would not be enough, ecologically speaking.”

  In the early screenplays, a voice-over narration by Norman, introducing and interspersed throughout the story, was included. But as the editing began, the voice-over caused problems, exacerbated by Redford’s temporary distraction. Strained finances dictated that he interrupt production to accept a big-budget movie, Sneakers, that Ovitz had put together. In consequence, he was in San Francisco working on the thriller when he should have been on River. Editors often cut from the director’s notes, but here the process failed. The first editor was fired, having cut the movie, says Friedenberg, “in far too modern a way.” Another editor, Bob Estrin, had been summoned to recut at the Lantana facilities in Santa Monica. “I almost lost the movie,” says Redford, “and that’s the price for not paying attention. When I saw the assembly footage, I was horrified. We had drifted too far away from what Maclean wanted. Richard had written an invented opening speech that just felt wrong. I wanted Norman’s words, because that was where the magic was. We scrapped the narration we’d started with and began a brand-new edit.” Also abandoned was Elmer Bernstein’s entire sound track, which Redford felt too “standard.” Instead, Mark Isham was recruited to create something nostalgic and evocative.

  For the new voice-overs, Redford asked Wallace Stegner, among others, to try reading the substitute lyrical narration, which was mostly Maclean’s. “I came close with Wally, but he read flat,” says Redford. In the end he opted to voice it himself, “because it felt comfortable. I knew how Norman sounded, I knew his way, I became Norman. So I introduced the story, and filled the gaps, keeping the reflective tone. Norman had died in 1990, but I sent demos to the Maclean family, who approved. It got to feel very good then, like we were pleasing the old ghost.”

  For Sheila Andrews, Redford’s friend from high school, this new movie was nothing less than encyclopedic. “I felt A River Runs Through It was his meditation on American values beyond Jeremiah Johnson or All the President’s Men or anything else,” she said. One early line of Norman’s narration—“It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us”—explained a great deal for Alan Pakula. “I read an article that said that what he and Sydney had in common was that both liked to make the kind of movies they’d enjoyed watching as they grew up. But River was unlike anything Bob saw, or anything Sydney could have made. Brad [Pitt] speculated that Bob was trying to outdo what Sydney had done with Out of Africa, that it was arty competition. But of course it wasn’t. There had been plenty of romantic biopics like Out of Africa before. There had never been a movie like River. It wasn’t autobiography, but it was a unique meditation about heartland Americanism that grew from his and Maclean’s experiences. It was also an amazingly delicate construct that deserved the award nominations, and then some. It ticked all the boxes of all-time classic.”

  Within twenty-four hours of the completion of editing of A River Runs Through It, Jake Eberts had sealed a distribution deal with Columbia. Thereafter, the movie’s marketing was cofunded by his own company, Allied Filmmakers, an affiliat
e of Pathe that had started five years before with Sean Connery’s The Name of the Rose. “The point is, we remained independent,” says Eberts. “My objective had been to preserve Bob’s vision, as Bob’s was to preserve Norman’s. It was undiluted, which is all he wanted.”

  Ovitz had made a good deal for Redford on Sneakers: $8 million against 10 percent of the gross, which was $2 million more than current hotshot Sylvester Stallone was earning. All the usual perks and sidebars were in the contract, including the critically important casting approvals. But Redford was still unhappy. He confided his unease to one of CAA’s rising stars, Bryan Lourd. “He talked to me confidentially,” says Lourd. “He didn’t want to go the direction Mike was pushing him. He said he wanted significant movies, not significant checks, as a priority. There were changes in the zeitgeist and he acknowledged that and was ready to play to that, which all intelligent performers must do, but he also wanted to keep his attention on the long term. He wanted a substantial body of work to look back on.”

  Making Sneakers for ten weeks on the Universal back lot, in Simi Valley and around San Francisco was no great strain. River had brightened him greatly. Things were going well with Kathy O’Rear. Bernie Pollack considered him “unusually cheerful.” Redford also found himself comfortable with the director, Phil Alden Robinson. There was also the element of fun. The tricky conspiracy plot helped educate Redford about the computer age. And though much play was made in the press of the fact that the story line was skewed toward the new, youthful pinup River Phoenix, Redford ignored the barbs. “You have to keep reminding yourself you are not working for the critics.”