I had the good fortune of meeting and interviewing Robert Redford a number of times, but none of those occasions caused quite the stir that my first encounter did. In those days, the opening night of the Sundance Film Festival (which was then the U.S. Film Festival) was held in a gigantic theater in Salt Lake City. I was there with a crew from Entertainment Tonight, but the only celebrity at the afterparty was an adolescent actress named Winona Ryder, who appeared in the opening night movie, Square Dance. (Our show didn’t value that brief interview until Ryder became a star; then they milked it for all it was worth.)
The reason ET sent me at all was that the next morning, Saturday to be exact, Robert Redford would be holding a news conference at a meeting center perched between Salt Lake City and Park City, the actual location of the festival. I, along with our director and crew, got there early to get a good spot in the small-ish room where the confab was to take place. Local press showed up a short time later, but no other media outlets were anywhere to be seen.
Thank goodness I had come prepared, and started firing questions at the actor, who didn’t seem to mind answering them—even though they had nothing to do with the festival.
He said he was grateful for the experience and exposure that his early roles on television gave him—including The Untouchables, Alfred Hitchcock Presents,Naked City. Dr. Kildare, and a memorableTwilight Zone in which he played Death. No one else in the room raised a hand so I continued. “I feel very indebted to television, as a training ground for myself. It was invaluable to me. You did not have all the time in the world. I think it put you under a kind of pressure that’s healthy, not to deliberate too much, to work more off of your instincts, to make choices more quickly that have to do with your own gut. At least, that’s the way I saw it, so I don’t disparage television the way other people do.”
He complained about the blowback he received for his activism. “For a while, an actor speaking out was seen to be synonymous with giving up citizenship papers… as though being an actor voided you of any credibility,” he said. “I ran into that a lot, particularly in this state.” He was proud of the showcase his festival was giving to young filmmakers, and was especially gratified by the work of the Sundance Institute, which gave promising talents a chance to be mentored by seasoned professionals. But first and foremost, he was proud to call himself an actor. “It’s a terrible beauty, or a pleasant agony; I mean, there’s a schizophrenic part of acting that makes it difficult. I like it; I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t.”
When it was all over, I thanked him and moved on to a press brunch.
That Monday, when ET ran the piece, our New York office got a furious phone call from the star’s powerful publicist, Lois Smith, demanding to know how I had wangled this exclusive one-on-one interview—something she had always denied us. My boss explained that it only looked like an intimate conversation. She said we should have showed the nearly-empty room so the back-and-forth would be seen in context. Meanwhile, outlets like The Today Show were complaining bitterly about missing this opportunity.
Years later I was asked if I would conduct an evening with him for the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and I readily agreed. Having just confirmed the event, Redford spotted me at the Saturday morning brunch and clapped me on the back. “This will be fun,” he enthused. “We have a history.”
Indeed we did. He was in fine spirits that night and we had a good dialogue. Then I made a rookie mistake: I posed a question, out of the blue, to which I didn’t already know the answer. I asked if he enjoyed providing the voice of Ike the Horse in the CGI-animated film of Charlotte’s Web… and he said no, he didn’t! The production was based in Australia and he felt removed from it, working alone in a California recording studio. He had been looking forward to the gig but it wound up being a disappointment. I quickly moved on to another subject.
When we discussed The Great Gatsby, I mentioned that I would be interviewing his costar Bruce Dern the following night. He took this in and said, “Ask him if he remembers me.”
That sly sense of humor revealed a facet of the matinee idol, producer, entrepreneur, and festival founder that the public rarely—if ever—got to see. More’s the pity.
