Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  The men first met in Redford’s hotel suite in London shortly before Christmas. “All we talked about was All the President’s Men,” says Lurie. “And then he agreed to a second meeting on the next day, and on the next day all we talked about was Quiz Show.” They exchanged views on national politics and Hollywood politics. Lurie had, he told Redford, wrestled with DreamWorks over a project to follow The Contender, a dilemma Redford well related to. His intention was to film only his own stories, but then DreamWorks gave him “The Castle,” the script by David Scarpa and Graham Yost that interested Redford. Redford overcame a personal momentary hesitation. The experience with DreamWorks on Bagger Vance rankled, but an undamaged admiration for Katzenberg still existed.

  Redford’s fascination was with the role of Lieutenant General Irwin, a disgraced career soldier who tackles institutional evil wrought by the governor of the jail to which he’s confined. “I thought the role was a little like Brubaker,” says Lurie, “and a little of many of the idealist roles he’d played. But it was also new ground. It was taxing because it required him to face new situations he’d never depicted on-screen, like playing the family man.”

  Redford found the script’s metaphor engrossing. “I liked that it analyzed the relationship between honor and leadership,” he says. He also had fresh ground to explore as an actor: “In the movie Irwin dies. I’d never portrayed death on-screen in a movie, and the actor in me said, It’s about time!”

  In February 2001 shooting commenced at the movie’s sole location, the disused Tennessee state penitentiary that had once housed James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr. By now the movie was retitled The Last Castle, to avoid confusion with a low-budget Australian comedy just released. Lurie felt “privileged,” he says, to have Redford walk out into the prison yard on that freezing winter’s morning. He wasn’t the only one enamored of Redford. On the day he arrived, says Lurie, the assembled cast and crew, numbering a hundred, “fell into a kind of reverential awe.” James Gandolfini of television’s The Sopranos was cast as Colonel Winter, the prison governor who first welcomes the once-esteemed Irwin, then, after months of provocative challenge to his authority, grows to hate him. “Jim was critical,” says Lurie, “because the story needed a huge character to stand up to Irwin, who I knew would assume even greater weight with Redford in charge.” Redford enjoyed the heavyweight opposition: “Years before, I remember sensing my game rise when I faced Jason Robards in The Iceman Cometh. Great actors move you. The Last Castle had moments of the great two-hander, moments when you looked at Jim and didn’t know what was coming. Those are the moments that excite the actor.”

  Chess framed The Last Castle. “It was really very precise,” says Lurie, “because it’s evenhanded. Irwin arrives in a dignified glory, his battlefield reputation preceding him. The inmates bow to his status. But they’re scared of Winter. Little by little Winter’s jealousy of Irwin changes the attitude of the inmates. He bullies them, and he makes mistakes humiliating Irwin in front of them, and finally the inmates’ loyalty to Irwin transforms to a frenzy of revolt, the object of which is to capture the prison flag and fly it in the upside-down position that signals distress, meaning that Winter is the monster and injustice rules the prison. So the movie becomes, literally, ‘Your move, my move,’ to capture the king.”

  The Last Castle brought out Redford’s most ambitious acting performance in thirty years. Lurie felt all Redford’s history—the activism, the rebelliousness, the independence—pour out of him. “Bob never ceased to remind us how much he despised institutional thuggery,” says Lurie. In one sequence, Irwin pulls a young inmate, Aguilar, played by Clifton Collins, in line, showing him how to properly salute. “It took fifteen takes to get a decent salute out of Bob,” says Lurie. The best he could muster, preserved on film, seems more an act of offense than any three-star gesture. “In all those little details he was giving us who he was, what he stood for, how he regards misused authority.”

  During April, Redford got to play his big death scene. He’d done it before on television, and died offscreen in Out of Africa and The Great Waldo Pepper, but he says, “when I squared up, it was tougher and more emotionally draining than I’d imagined.” The unease arose from the recent deaths of close friends like Margaret Owings and Pakula; on his mind, too, were the recent close shaves he’d personally experienced. Not long before, he’d survived a motorcycle skid on a bend of the Alpine Loop that sent him off the precipice, a genuine brush with death. Later, a chartered Learjet he took with Bylle and her dog, Max, back to Santa Rosa from New Mexico lost both of its engines for nine minutes. The plane lost twenty-one thousand feet in altitude. Redford recalls the panic in the cockpit and the mechanical process of locking his seat belt “with the absolute certainty it was all over. What I felt was the inevitable: Shit, how simple! Someone fits a plug wrong and—pow!—we end like this. And then I felt the strangest thing: a mix of anger, fear, resolve … and optimism. We were heading toward the ground and it all dispelled in, Hell, I’m not ready to go! There’s too much to do!” At eighteen thousand feet, the engines kicked in and the pilots brought the jet down safely in Las Vegas. When everyone hit the bar for a whiskey, says Redford, the atmosphere was strangely serene. “Because you are so humbled by the enormousness of chance, and by your fragility. You are drinking whiskey with your boots on the good earth solely because destiny says so. You personally did nothing to alter the situation. Destiny made its mind up.”

  Playing the death scene, where Winter snatches a pistol and shoots Irwin in a riot, Redford employed a Method-like sense memory: “That one little scene exhausted me. So many thoughts—indeed, a lifetime’s personal losses—crammed into two minutes. Irwin raises the flag, takes the bullet, slumps, pushes away the doctor who rushes to help him and just blinks to acknowledge the moment, that he has done his duty, he has liberated the men and delivered the whole point of the story, which is that great moral leadership cannot be quashed. So much to say in one flash of time.”

  In the first drafts, there were no women in The Last Castle. Then Lurie’s script doctor, Bill Nicholson, introduced a scene where Rosalie, Irwin’s daughter, visits him in prison, and the family dimension opens. Robin Wright Penn was cast as Rosalie. “A couple of years before,” says Lurie, “Robin would have been Redford’s love interest. Now she was his kid, sitting opposite him, reminding him of his vintage.” Lurie found Redford’s sudden acceptance of the scene deeply moving. “I think it was the best-acted scene in the movie, maybe one of his best-ever acting moments. So much was going down in that scene. It was a ritual exchange, the termination of one kind of history, the beginning of another.”

  With an October 2001 release planned, David Sameth, the marketer at DreamWorks, prepared artwork for trade ads showing the upside-down distress flag. The movie tested well, and in September, Lurie was in Hollywood, working with composer Jerry Goldsmith on the sound track theme for Irwin. During the second week in September, Redford was in New York for important Sundance Channel meetings, which ended earlier than scheduled, allowing him to fly back west on September 10. On September 11, United 93, the early morning flight from Newark to San Francisco that he normally favored, was hijacked by al-Qaida and crashed in Pennsylvania within an hour of the World Trade Center attack. Amy, now an off-Broadway actress living on the Lower East Side, a mile and a half from the towers, was in New York that day, as was Shauna and her family, who lived on the Upper East Side. Neither could be reached. It took a full day of frantic calls to confirm their safety.

  One could argue that a movie about the anatomizing of truth, morality, honor and leadership never seemed so vital but, given the heightened emotion of the nation in crisis, muddled responses seemed inevitable. The Washington Post, reviewing the film a month after 9/11, complained of a movie that “hits us over the head with symbolism” without probing that symbolism, a manifestly self-canceling criticism, in the eyes of some. Michael Atkinson in The Village Voice excoriated the film for fudging t
he issue of freedom and employing “the Cool Hand Luke paradigm [reshaped as] an inane recruitment ad.”

  On the phone to Terry Lawson of the Detroit Free Press, Redford wondered about the appropriateness of releasing the movie at that time, but found himself reconciled. Driving from Los Angeles to Utah, he said, he’d encountered a billboard with the defiant flag—DreamWorks had abandoned the upside-down flag in its marketing and put the flag right side up, in a show of support and defiance triggered by 9/11—and questioned its use in promotion. “But, on the other hand, you think, What could be more relevant?”

  Redford’s antipathy toward the government, however, remained clear in letters he wrote to the Los Angeles Times and interviews conducted on National Public Radio, a forum he much admired. On the surface he appeared conciliatory: “We have to hope there are some smart minds holding court right now, and we have to support them and believe in ourselves as a country and a people and as an idea.” But he was still, as Rolling Stone had labeled him just twelve days before 9/11, a “hot dissident”; if the Bush administration had a list of enemies, said Rolling Stone, Redford hovered near the top of it. Wary of appearing unpatriotic, he was still cautioning about the risk of public manipulation in crises: “As the country pulls together we can run dangerously close to a kind of jingoism that eliminates other aspects of democracy, like free speech.” He opposed the extension of the war from Afghanistan into Iraq, he said, but was keen that the challanges at home were not forgotten. “Another symbol of patriotism is the land and how we feel about it. Preservation of the environment should be part of our national defense. We can develop alternative energy measures, including conservation, to end our dependence on oil.”

  As for all thinking people, 9/11 prompted a self-evaluation in which politics played merely a part. Hollywood’s response, Redford felt, was critical. In the Sundance spring catalog, for which he still wrote introductory notes, he’d advised against apathy toward Hollywood, lobbying his readers “to demand something from our communications outlets other than values of entertainment and cosmetics.” In an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune he expanded: “My gut says that, for a period of time, there will be a reaction that will have Hollywood minding its business, because it doesn’t want to get on the wrong side. But that’s not to say that, once the dust clears, [it won’t] come back, because violence sells. Hollywood has been lax in accepting some social responsibility for its product. It’s not that we should all be making church films, but when you’re going to make a film that [will] have a harsh impact and is going to touch on a negative part of our society, you have to be prepared to take responsibility.” The Boston Globe’s Sam Allis asked Redford to assess the distance between himself and blockbuster Hollywood. His truth, said Redford, was different: “It is the plight of the individual who has come up against the effects of the current state of things. What has always driven [my truth] is the humane side of the problems that society forces on us, the struggle to remain humane against the tide of crushing elements.”

  Time magazine, though, summed up an identity dilemma Redford still faced. While he was keen to redefine essences, it was happy to keep judging him by the iconography he had once embraced. Its focus was less on political relevance than The Last Castle’s disastrous box office performance. “Most critics have declared it a stinker,” wrote Jess Cagle, who then promptly cited Redford’s failure to win over the youth market, as Michael Douglas and Harrison Ford had so resoundingly done.

  In spite of the naysayers there was joyful reorientation the following March, in 2002, when Redford’s peers bestowed on him an honorary Academy Award, marking a lifetime contribution to cinema. Sidney Poitier was honored the same evening. Redford’s citation noted his achievements as “actor, director, producer, creator of Sundance and inspiration to independent and innovative filmmakers everywhere.” Redford took great pride in this moment “because it reconciled my two worlds—the independent cinema and my acting.”

  Though Sundance celebrated the indie movie, his career had mostly been a thing apart. In its day, Downhill Racer exemplified the glory of experiment with a Bolex camera and duct tape, but he had steered clear of small movies. Now there seemed a need to pare back the indulgences and remember what it was to be starting out with a script, and not a marketer, calling the shots. To this end, Michael Nozik found The Clearing, a modest effort being mounted by a small production company, to be directed by Pieter Jan Brugge, a friend of Alan Pakula’s who had been nominated for an Academy Award for producing the tobacco industry exposé The Insider. The Dutch-born Brugge, who had earned his fine arts degree at the American Film Institute, where he was sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Culture, had no experience of directing. Funded by Thousand Words Productions, he’d written a script with novelist Justin Haythe, based on the true story of the abduction of an industrialist in Holland in the eighties, which he’d then brought to Sundance. With Redford’s commitment, Fox Searchlight, a specialist division of Twentieth Century–Fox pledged to new filmmakers, which had developed close links with the institute, underwrote the budget of $9.5 million, allowing Redford a nominal fee.

  Redford’s long-stated preference was for “the gray area of human experience” in characters who were restrained, not extreme. But The Clearing postulated the most extreme situation. The story centers on Wayne Hayes, a wealthy car tycoon, married with two grown children, who is abducted from the suburban Pittsburgh estate of his seemingly tranquil American dream and dragged by his abductor, a disgruntled former employee named Arnold Mack, into the woods. As the narrative follows Hayes’s attempts to rationalize with and calm his abductor, his wife, Eileen, is simultaneously learning that her husband has a mistress and a secret life.

  “Personally it was a horrendous shoot,” says Redford, “because I am claustrophobic, and I spent almost all that film climbing hills in the woods of North Carolina in handcuffs. There was so little money, ergo so little time, and therefore I was always wearing those damned cuffs. It freaked me out, which made achieving the tension easy.” Redford liked working with Willem Dafoe (the abductor), and especially Helen Mirren (Eileen), whom he regards as one of the greatest women performers around. “And [the writers] made a good go of that script—good lines, a good reality.” The best of it, said Redford, was its warm morality. Eileen truly loves her husband. “He is a man who needs to be appreciated, and that gets harder as he gets older,” she says. That line resonates when Wayne escapes Mack but, succumbing to guilt and the moral order, willfully allows himself to be shot.

  Redford had never presented any of his own movies at the Sundance Film Festival. But Geoff Gilmore knew The Clearing was perfect for a screening in January 2003. It felt right. Redford resisted, says Gilmore, telling Nozik, “They’ll [the critics] rip me apart. They’ll call it incest.” Gilmore confronted Redford and told him, “Look, I want it for the festival because I think it’s the kind of film we should have, and the fact that you’re in it basically says you’re contributing to the very thing you created. It’s as simple as that.”

  Ruthe Stein, writing about the film in the San Francisco Chronicle, welcomed Redford’s stretch: “In his late 60s, with the effect of his time outdoors etched on his face, he’s no longer the pretty boy he once was. Far from hiding this, he seems to relish it, as if it’s liberated him as an actor.… With ageism a constant issue in Hollywood, Redford should be applauded for his attitude as well as for hitting a bull’s-eye.” Stephen Hunter in The Washington Post noted “an anti-vanity film,” and doffed his hat to the marker Redford had set down: “This spirit of honesty extends to the character himself,” wrote Hunter, “which, far from being the heroic Redford of yore, is shown to have been inadequate and far from heroic.”

  There was an unquestionable maturation, a coming-to-terms quality, about Redford’s work since The Last Castle. His next choice made clear a consolidation. The project was An Unfinished Life, a Miramax movie to be directed by Lasse Hallström, whose wife, Lena Olin, Redford had remained
friendly with since Havana. Hallström was known for his work with the Swedish pop group Abba, but his transfer to American film introduced a unique talent who could straddle art house and pop cinema appeal. The screenplay for An Unfinished Life, written by Mark and Virginia Spragg, was developed by Kelliann Ladd’s company as a project for Paul Newman but inherited by Disney in its acquisition of Miramax. Its first director, Redford learned, was Mark Rydell. When he dropped out, Walter Salles, the Brazilian director, and Robert Altman vied, but Hallström won out. Miramax’s choice of female lead was Jennifer Lopez, a singer they believed was destined for movie stardom.

  Redford loved the role on offer because, he says, it was unlike anything he’d ever played. He was to be down-at-the-heels, ornery, bitter and “rich in overt desperation”—another role of extremes. He would play Einar Gilkyson, a farmer in his mid-sixties living off the land in remote Wyoming, where he tends to his lifelong friend, Mitch, played by Morgan Freeman, who is incapacitated following a bear attack. Einar’s spiritual crisis is his inability to recover from the death of his son, whose widow, Jean, played by Lopez, seeks refuge with him from an abusive boyfriend. Einar’s world is upended. As Mitch wrestles with his hatred of the bear who destroyed his life, Einar faces the reality of what he has become—that his existence is numbed by the stultifying effect of blaming Jean for his son’s loss. For Hallström the film was “about things going wrong in the universe, and how the universe has to right itself.” For Redford it was about forgiveness and personal evolution.