Robert Redford interview: 'They beat me up pretty badly'
culture_news culture_reviews film culture film_news oscars stars_and_stories
Telegraph Reporters Sarah Mockford Kieran Crichard Ian McCullough Sam Dean Simon Johnson David Gritten
Robert Redford talks exclusively about the physical challenge of making his new film All is Lost - and why, even as a Hollywood icon, he has always tried to stay independent
/etc.clientlibs/settings/wcm/designs/telegraph/core/clientlibs/core/resources/icons/favicon.ico
The Telegraph
Back in April, I talked to Robert Redford when he brought his Sundance Film Festival to London for a second year, and threw a cheeky question at him. As the man who founded Sundance in 1978, he has given dozens of aspiring young independent directors (including Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh and Paul Thomas Anderson) their big break by providing a showcase for their earliest films. Had any of them returned the favour by offering him an acting role in their movies?

Redford laughed ruefully, acknowledging the point. 'Yeah, 30 years plus and it never happened,’ he said. But now it had: he had finally been approached by the American director JC Chandor, whose debut film Margin Call, a clever, talky, low-budget Wall Street thriller about an investment bank in crisis, had premiered at Sundance in 2011. 'The fact JC wanted me was so appealing,’ Redford said. 'I loved doing it.’

The film in question is All Is Lost, 'about a man alone on a yacht, damaged and sinking in the Indian Ocean,’ Redford continued. 'It’s bold, experimental and it was difficult to make. There’s no dialogue, none at all. And I’m the only actor on screen in the whole movie.’

Robert Redford in his new film All is Lost (2013) Photo: Daniel Daza

In April, hearing his synopsis, it hardly sounded an appealing prospect. Who would want to watch a film featuring an elderly man alone at sea, silently struggling to survive, being thrown around his boat as he thinks of ways to prevent his vessel from sinking, slowly but inexorably, over eight days?

Six months on, I’m now sitting opposite Redford in a suite at the ultra-luxurious Georges V hotel in Paris. This time All Is Lost is the reason for our meeting. The film has exceeded my expectations: it was warmly received at Cannes in May, and at other festivals, including London, last month, along with rave reviews from critics in America.

It is widely agreed that All Is Lost marks the finest acting of Redford’s 54-year film career, even though he utters only a handful of words (including a shouted, despairing expletive) on camera throughout. Yet he is riveting. This is Redford as no one has seen him on screen before: raw, vulnerable, with emotions including fear, panic and weary resignation flickering on his lined, weather-beaten features.

Intriguingly, he is already being touted for an acting Oscar: he may be among the most celebrated film stars of the past 50 years, but it’s his screen presence and glamour that made him so, rather than his unshowy, minimalist acting style. (He has only one Oscar nomination as an actor, for The Sting in 1973.) Now here he is, one of the world’s most famous actors, playing someone without a name; the end credits list Redford’s character as simply, Our Man.

Robert Shaw, Redford and Paul Newman in The Sting (1973) Photo: Rex Features

The other noteworthy aspect of All Is Lost is that it is easily the most arduous role Redford has undertaken. 'They beat me up pretty badly,’ he says with a tight smile. He knew it would be physically tough when Chandor sent him the script: only 31 pages long, but filled with action, much of it potentially dangerous.

'I met JC and told him, “What’s in this script is pretty rough and tumble,”’ he reports. 'And he said, “I don’t plan to have you do all that. I have [stunt] doubles.” So I said, “I’d rather not have doubles if I can help it. Let’s see what happens.”’

All Is Lost was shot partly off the coast of southern California, but also employed three gigantic water tanks in Mexico that James Cameron had ordered to be constructed for Titanic. To heighten the sense of Our Man’s jeopardy, Chandor employed wave and wind machines. During shooting, Redford was often knocked off his feet by their force. An enormous hose was imported to spray heavy jets of water directly at his head; he developed an infection, and temporarily lost the hearing in his left ear.

Redford recalls, 'When we got on set I realised I could do some of the things called for in the script. And when JC realised that, he suddenly got very ambitious and wanted me to do everything. So my ego kicked in and I thought, “OK, maybe I can. Let’s see.” Next thing you know, I was being washed overboard and underwater and bounced around. But that was a challenge: could I physically do it?’

Redford with the director of All Is Lost, JC Chandor. Photo: Richard Foreman

But any old actor wouldn’t do, and Chandor thought he might be on to something if he could persuade Redford to expose his emotions fully on screen. 'I told him the third act [when it is clear the boat will sink] was all about him as an actor – here’s this guy coming to grips with his own mortality. If the film’s going to work, he stands in for all of us.’

So why did Redford do it? 'I welcomed the chance of being an actor in a film in which you’d at least have the chance to perform in a way that could make the audience come close to you. And if that happened, they’d take the journey with you.

'When I read the script, I thought to myself, either JC’s crazy or this is going to be good. So we met in New York, and 10 minutes in, I said, “Let’s go, let’s do it.” Here was a film that was independent. It cost $9 million, which is very little money. It had a vision that was unique. It was instinct, it was trust.’

The key word in his explanation is surely 'independent.’ Aside from his fabled support and nurturing for independent filmmakers via Sundance for so long, Redford has also leveraged his stardom to cajole studios into bankrolling smaller, less commercial films that he produced, and sometimes directed and acted in, but that coincided with his own taste.

These two sides of his personality and career even find expression in his dress sense: here in the palatial Georges V, Redford wears blue jeans and a long-sleeved, three-button khaki grandad undershirt of a kind favoured by 1960s hippie outdoorsmen. Yet his black shoes are so highly polished they might be patent leather; they wouldn’t look out of place if he wore them to the Oscars.

He still has matinee idol looks, and his fair skin appears less damaged and weather-beaten than on occasions when I’ve met him in Park City, Utah, where the Sundance Festival is held. 'The movies I liked making dealt with an America that was a little different from the America that was propagandised,’ he says, telling studio bosses, 'There’s a grey zone that I know, and I want to tell stories about that complex part of America.’

Redford on his estate in Utah. Photo: Kristina Loggia

'People say I’ve gone against Hollywood,’ he continues, 'but I’ve tried to be independent within Hollywood, tried to be my own person. Once my career got going and I was able to act, I tried to take parts that were offbeat. At the same time I got frustrated: there were stories I wanted to tell. I wanted to start producing my own films that I could act in. So I’d say to Warners or Columbia or Fox, OK, I’d be happy to do The Way We Were. But if I do, would you let me make The Candidate or Downhill Racer? Finally they’d say, “Yes, if it’s under $2 million.”’

Of course, neither of those two films made much money, but they revealed Redford’s true colours as a card-carrying liberal, and showed the less palatable side of the American dream. In Downhill Racer (1969) he was an arrogant skiing champ who comes to doubt the win-at-all-costs culture of his sport and his country. In The Candidate (1972) Redford played an idealistic lawyer who goes into politics and sells out his principles to win a senatorial campaign. 'The films on which I have control,’ he says, 'are critical sketches of my own society.’

Redford in Downhill Racer (1969) and in The Candidate (1972). Photo: Rex Features

All Is Lost can trace its lineage back to a third modestly budgeted movie he starred in around then, Jeremiah Johnson (1972). The connection occurred to him only when he began promoting All Is Lost. Now he refers to both films as 'existential’. 'Jeremiah Johnson is a trapper who makes a choice to head for the wilderness and live as a hermit. All the rest of the film is what he encounters: one hardship or obstacle after another. For me both films had a parallel point of view. At some stage, when things become insurmountable, some people quit, some keep going for no other reason than to continue. Because that’s all there is to do.’

Existential or not, the two films are certainly enigmatic. The meaning of their endings is open to debate. And little is known about either character. At the start of All Is Lost, Redford is heard reading a farewell letter from Our Man. To his friends? His family? It’s unclear. So is his message, which begins, 'I’m sorry. I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried. I think you know I tried.’ None of it is ever explained. It takes a truly independent-minded man to risk starring in such a film as this.

Robert Redford’s is a remarkable life. A global star who also kick-started an entire movement in American filmmaking, he still retains his mystique and lives quietly and privately. But his beginnings were unpromising. The son of a milkman, he grew up in a poor district of Los Angeles. Moody and troubled as a teen, he nevertheless showed talent at baseball and drawing.

Redford in Jeremiah Johnson (1972) Photo: Rex Features

He briefly landed a job at Disney as a trainee animator, but recalls, 'I ran out of there fast. It was like a factory.’ Instead he went to Paris and Florence for 18 months to live the bohemian life. 'I’d sit in bars and cafes, listen to people, sketch them and write down overheard conversations.’

On returning to the States, he entered the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, switching from design to acting. He immersed himself in drama, and started his career on stage with a small role in a Broadway production, before heading west to look for work in film and TV.

His all-American golden-boy aura didn’t hurt when it came to securing guest roles on such TV series as Perry Mason and Dr Kildare. But if good looks sometimes suggest an uncomplicated man, he proved anything but: he declined a lead role in another TV series, heading instead to Pennsylvania to audition for an out-of-town play, Neil Simon’s comedy Barefoot in the Park, as an uptight newly-wed lawyer with a free-spirited bride, living in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment in New York. He landed the lead, it went to Broadway, and a year later he starred opposite Jane Fonda in the 1967 film version; it became his first hit.

Still, some in Hollywood were sceptical: wasn’t he just another cute young actor? William Goldman, the screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), recalls a studio executive saying of Redford when he was being considered for the Sundance Kid role opposite Paul Newman, 'He’s just another California blond. Throw a stick out of a window in Malibu, you’ll hit six like him.’

Paul Newman (left) and Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) Photo: Rex Features

How wrong can anyone be? Playing the Sundance Kid clinched Redford’s stardom overnight, and he swiftly started using his celebrity influence to get Downhill Racer made. The genesis of his multi-faceted career is rooted in that moment.

He used the same strategy again a decade later with his directing debut, Ordinary People (1980), a sombre study of a repressed, affluent, grief-stricken suburban family starring Donald Sutherland, Timothy Hutton and Mary Tyler Moore. The studios were reluctant to take a chance on it.

'I shopped it all around,’ Redford recalls. 'They said, “No, this is a soap opera, this is depressing.” I had a hell of a time.’ Finally the head of Paramount, Barry Diller, grudgingly agreed. 'He said, “OK, make it for under $6 million. But you’re on your own.” So I had control of telling the story my way.’ Remarkably, it won him his first Academy Award (he received his other, an honorary award for his wide-ranging achievements in film, in 2002).

But Hollywood was by that time heavily courting the global youth market, and making far fewer nuanced, sophisticated films that appealed to Redford. 'So that led to me creating Sundance. I thought, maybe I can keep this alive and give artists an opportunity to have another place to go.’

It started slowly, and he could not have predicted how successful Sundance would become. In its early days it concentrated on basement-budget, earnest, uncommercial documentaries, some of them about American Indian issues. In its first year, Redford literally stood outside the Egyptian Theatre in Park City’s main street, urging people to come in.

Redford directing the Oscar-winning film Ordinary People (1980) Photo: The Kobal Collection

It has since gradually grown to become a hugely popular event, where work by independent filmmakers is screened at several venues, Hollywood studio executives jet in to check out upcoming talent, and significant directing careers are hatched. He remains a charismatic figurehead for the Sundance festival, but he’s starting to bow out of day-to-day duties. 'The thing runs without me these days,’ he shrugs.

Between films, Redford retreats to his 7,000-acre estate in Utah, where he lives with his second wife, the German artist Sibylle Szaggars, whom he married in 2009. With his first wife, the historian and environmental activist Lola Van Wagenen, he has three surviving children (a baby son died of sudden infant death syndrome) and five grandchildren. He never discusses his family, but confided in April that on landing at Heathrow he went straight to visit one of his granddaughters at Oxford, where she is a student.

Redford has been a concerned environmentalist since returning to his home town of Los Angeles in the 1960s and was dismayed that such an idyllic place was gradually becoming congested, covered in concrete, with polluted air. He does not shrink from speaking his mind on green issues: he strongly opposes destructive drilling projects on public lands, including those offshore, and recently urged President Obama to impose limits on power plant carbon pollution. He’s a board member of America’s National Resources Defence Council, which has named a building after him.

'It’s been 40 years of struggling uphill,’ he says. 'You feel like Sisyphus. You keep getting knocked back down because money’s always at the top. Ours is a sick planet because of our behaviour on it. Why don’t we correct that? You come to Chevron, Exxon, Shell. It’s all about money. Extraction is money, it’s short-term profit, so long-term thinking is of no interest to these companies.’

His recent films have not fared well in the UK. His visit to Sundance London in April was part of a trip to promote his film The Company You Keep, about a group of radical American activists from the 1960s, now growing old and living anonymous, respectable lives. He stars (with Susan Sarandon, Nick Nolte and Julie Christie) and directed it. But it has still not seen the light of day in Britain; its distribution company says it will be released sometime next year.

He also directed its predecessor, The Conspirator, about Mary Surratt, the only woman to have been indicted (and hanged) in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. It opened here in 2011, attracting sparse audiences, and disappeared rapidly from cinemas.

At last year’s Sundance London festival, The Prince of Wales introduced the pro-environment documentary Harmony, which he narrates. He and Redford got talking, and the Prince wanted to see The Conspirator; he had never heard of Mary Surratt. But it proved impossible to locate a DVD of it. 'I had to send him a disc of mine,’ Redford says, exasperated. 'The distribution seemed non-existent.’

Redford will next play Bill Bryson in an adaptation of the author’s book A Walk in the Woods, in which he hikes the Appalachian Trail with an old friend with whom he has had a long, though erratic relationship. Nick Nolte will play the friend. Could it be another surprise hit? Redford doesn’t know: all he knows is he likes the book, and he very much likes Bryson.

Still, Redford’s been around long enough to know his business has its ups and downs. For now, he’s back on top and seems quietly content about the reaction to All Is Lost. 'It was difficult, painfully difficult sometimes,’ he says of the film. 'But it was worth it.’