The Two Hollywoods; Robert Redford Has This Problem
Walter Kirn
Interview with Robert Redford on his high-road, low-road strategy of starring in gold-plated studio movies while strenuously supporting, and sometimes making, edgier, smaller independent films; photos (M)
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Tucked in the lower right-hand corner of Robert Redford's dressing-room mirror is a black-and-white photo of Samuel Beckett. The great Irish playwright of existential despair looks wintery and hawklike, his visage a crumbling tombstone of deep cracks. It's not the face one would think a Hollywood superstar known for playing sunny romantic leads would want staring back at him every time his hair is brushed. At least not while working on Redford's current project, ''The Horse Whisperer,'' a big-budget, big-emotions melodrama based on the shamelessly corny best-selling novel by Nicholas Evans. ''The Horse Whisperer'' -- which Redford is being paid about $20 million by Touchstone Pictures to produce, direct and star in -- isn't Beckett, or even close, and Redford's role as a kind Montana rancher with a gift for soothing traumatized animals is frankly heroic and warmly optimistic. It's a movie about ''healing,'' according to Redford, a movie about the ''textures of the West.''

So why the glowering old pessimist in the mirror?

I made a note to come back to the Beckett question. There wasn't time to ask it then. It was the next to last day of shooting, getting on toward evening, and Redford was in costume and half in character, wolfing a meal in his trailer between scenes and exuding the peculiar aura of a laid-back control freak. On his plate was the best sashimi in Montana (the only sashimi in Montana, that is), and his face showed the strain of months of overtime, overbudget movie making. It had been raining all summer, a storm a day drenching the foothills of the Engles ranch, home to the movie's main set. Everyone seemed tense and tuckered out, like flood relief workers weary from heaving sandbags.

Redford, 60, was gamely answering questions about his career despite interruptions by headset-wearing crew members. ''My first ambition was to be a painter and live in Europe,'' he said. At issue was why he has split himself in two, pursuing a high-road, low-road strategy of starring in gold-plated studio movies while strenuously supporting, and sometimes making, edgier, smaller independent films. Because by now it's a question of who's more famous: Redford the idol or Redford the impresario, the headliner with the million-dollar smile or the behind-the-scenes guiding spirit of the Sundance Film Festival, the Sundance Institute, the Sundance Channel and -- in a deal only recently finalized -- a nationwide chain of Sundance movie theaters.

''Anyway,'' Redford went on, still eating fish, ignoring the growing knot of anxious crew members in his trailer door, ''when I started becoming an actor I felt this pull. I felt embarrassed. Conflicted. I'd been raised in a pretty cynical West Coast climate, see, and I didn't take show biz seriously at all. I mean, in high school it used to make me cringe watching my classmates up on stage with shoe polish in their hair.''