‘Let’s get something straight. I don’t see myself as beautiful’: Robert Redford on being shy, his leading ladies and never watching his own films

The actor says ‘they beat the hell out of me’ to nail his latest role as a lone sailor battling the elements. It’s the performance of a lifetime – could it be the one to land him that elusive Oscar?

 

 

 

Maybe when you play Death on ‘The Twilight Zone’ at the start of your career, mortality doesn’t faze you.

‘It’s all part of the deal,’ Robert Redford deadpanned.

He didn’t think about dying while he was making his new movie about it, J.C. Chandor’s melancholy mariner’s tale, ‘All Is Lost.’ He thought about enduring.

‘I’m interested in that thing that happens where there’s a breaking point for some people and not for others,’ he said over morning coffee recently in the deserted Owl Bar at his resort here in Sundance Utah.

‘You go through such hardship, things that are almost impossibly difficult, and there’s no sign that it’s going to get any better, and that’s the point when people quit. But some don’t.’

That’s also what drew him to an earlier story: his 1972 tale about a 19th-century mountain man battling the wild, ‘Jeremiah Johnson,’ shot on Mount Timpanogos where we were sitting.

‘You just continue,’ Redford said. ‘Because that’s all there is to do.’

Like Chandor’s talky 2011 Wall Street drama, ‘Margin Call,’ set on the day a Lehman-type firm struggles not to go under, the taciturn ‘All Is Lost,’ is an existential horror story about trying to survive the worst moment of your life – in this case a crippled boat at sea – as panic rises.

Redford has made a career of playing what he calls ‘intrinsically American guys’ going up against implacable forces:

He battled the banks and Pinkertons in ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ Indians and grizzlies in ‘Jeremiah Johnson,’ a superficial political system in ‘The Candidate,’ the Irish mob in ‘The Sting,’ the CIA in ‘Three Days of the Condor’ and ‘Spy Game,’ Richard M. Nixon in ‘All the President’s Men,’ big business in ‘The Electric Horseman,’ and, his most formidable adversary, Barbra Streisand, in ‘The Way We Were.’

 

Hollywood is no country for old men.

Yet at 77, the subject of considerable Oscar talk, Redford is soaring as the solo star of a movie that evokes the elegiac spirit of ‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ by Yeats, one of his favorite poets.

Yeats wrote about sailing ‘the mackerel-crowded seas,’ coming to terms with the agony of aging and contemplating how the soul can rise above a heart ‘fastened to a dying animal.’

Redford likes to write poetic observations himself.

He recited one he had written: ‘You look up and you realize, what a beautiful day, the leaves are turning and you’re starting to feel confident. You’re feeling full of yourself until you realize you’re drooling.’

He laughed, that great Redford laugh. The thing that’s easy to forget about Redford, with his serious pursuits and perfectionist strivings, is that he can be really fun.

We talked for three hours next to the 1890s rosewood bar from Ireland commissioned by the real Hole-in-the-Wall gang.

Sitting beneath a sepia picture of him and his pal Paul Newman glowing as Sundance and Butch Cassidy, he tells a story about fame.

‘It’s right around the time where I’m beginning to think I’m a pretty big deal,’ he said.

At a curb in Beverly Hills, ‘there’s a car coming with a bunch of teenage kids in it. I see they’re freaking out inside and trying to get their windows rolled down. I step back. I’m ready for it.

‘Robert Redford!’ they scream. ‘You are such an” – here he drops in a vulgarity for jerk. He grinned. ‘That’s probably what I would have done at that age.’

Redford grew up in Los Angeles, a wild child breaking away from a remote, hard-to-please father, the real Rebel Without a Cause caught up in drinking and drag races. (He even went to the same high school as Natalie Wood.) Breaking into Bel-Air mansions, he and a friend were the Bling Ring before the word bling entered the popular lexicon.

Bob Redford was popular with girls early, winning a Charleston contest at 13, but the other boys grew jealous and ‘vicious.’

‘Pretty soon it became a regular thing where guys would pass me when I was with a girl and say ‘ARF! ARF! ARF!,’ and I could see that the girls were bothered,’ he said.

Finally one of his friends explained that ARF was the Anti-Redford Federation.

 

‘I was so hurt and shocked,’ he said.

‘From that point in my life, I retreated into a more loner place. I was then forever shy of going out and expressing myself, and I would do it in my art.”

After his mother died when he was 18, he left the University of Colorado and went off to be a starving art student in Italy and France.

The girls he met in Paris in 1957 did not find him attractive; he was mocked for knowing nothing about the Suez Canal and American politics.

‘I got kicked in the teeth by Paris,’ he said.

He started to read the newspaper, trying to see beyond American sloganeering and explore ‘the gray area that was underneath the red, white and blue.’

His longtime collaborator, Sydney Pollack, said that the actor’s allure came from the darker shades lurking beneath his golden facade.

Still, Redford has been criticized for not taking grittier roles over the years. But he demurs that he enjoyed his reign as a matinee idol.

‘I loved working with Jane, I loved working with Natalie, I loved working with Barbra,’ he said, referring to Fonda, Wood and Streisand. ‘I loved the body language, the mystery, the sexual chemistry.’

Was it hard, after decades as a top screen babe, to spend every moment with Chandor shooting so close to his weather-beaten face as it was getting more beaten by the weather?

‘Well, let’s get something straight,’ Redford replied. ‘I don’t see myself as beautiful. I was a kid who was freckle-faced, and they used to call me ‘hay head.’

‘I never had a problem with my face on screen.

‘I thought it is what it is, and I was turned off by actors and actresses that tried to keep themselves young.”

Redford has always been a minimalist, luring audiences in by seeming ‘unpossessable,’ as Pollack put it.

But in ‘All Is Lost,’ Redford takes that to new heights, speaking only a handful of words, the loudest one unprintable here.

The script was a scanty 31 pages. A character known only as Our Man is sailing on his 39-foot yacht in the Indian Ocean, when a foreign shipping container filled with children’s sneakers gashes the boat, swamping the communications devices.

Our Man spends the rest of the film improvising to save his life, learning how to desalinate water and navigate celestially.

Redford, who ended ‘Downhill Racer’ and ‘The Candidate’ with a question, likes the ambiguous ending, which has divided audiences.

 

He said that during the Sundance Kid’s silences, he would look at other men, thinking, ‘Can I kill you or not?’

But this role was different; Redford did not bother to think like someone else.

‘There was so little described of the guy that, of course, it had to be me,’ he said.

He wore his own turquoise and silver ring and displayed his own stubborn perseverance.

‘He has got a conscience,’ Redford said of his character. ‘Clearly he has a family. He’s not a bad person, but he’s failed in some way. So maybe this journey has to do with him sorting all that out.’

Films about being adrift seem to suit the national mood: ‘All Is Lost’ is one of a spate of movies this season, including ‘Gravity,’ about Americans unmoored.

Chandor, 39, got the idea when he was commuting by train to New York to edit ‘Margin Call.’

He would stare out the window at the sailboats stored for the winter and wonder about adventures never undertaken.

His parents had raced sailboats as newlyweds, and he had spent summers in Rhode Island as a junior sailing instructor. He was also thinking about end-of-life issues watching his two grandmothers die. (The film’s yacht, the Virginia Jean, is named after them.)

Then Chandor went to the Sundance Film Festival in 2011 for the premiere of ‘Margin Call’ and attended a brunch for filmmakers. Redford got up to talk, but the audio system was not plugged in.

‘When you couldn’t hear that buttery voice, it was almost like it wasn’t Redford,’ Chandor said.

‘I started thinking about a film with no dialogue, because it seemed really cool to take that tool away from him as an actor and see what he could do.”

Chandor asked Redford about the role, and the star was jolted.

‘In 30 years of supporting new artists and Sundance labs and the festival, no one ever came to me and asked me to be in a film,” Redford said.

‘Maybe they thought I was above it. And when I realized J.C. was ferocious in his focus and devotion to detail, I thought, this is a guy who I can give myself over to as an actor, which I was longing for. It was like coming full circle.”

The reserved actor with the loner tendencies said he loved working with the exuberant extrovert of a director and teased him about making a film with no chat when he’s so chatty.

They filmed on the ocean around Los Angeles and spent two months in Mexico shooting with three massive water tanks that James Cameron built for ‘Titanic.’

 

 

 

The plan called for a stunt double, ‘but we get down there and, of course, my ego kicks in,’ Redford said, grimacing.

‘I started saying: ‘I think I can try that. Let me see what I can do.’ And I realized that my doing that stuff was really a big part of the character, and that it would be much better for the film if he didn’t have to cut and slice.’

He grew up ‘a California water guy,’ as he put it, but was more of a surfer and swimmer than sailor. He’s in great shape from horseback riding, hiking, skiing and tennis.

Even spending all his time getting dunked in water in Mexico, Redford still sometimes did morning laps in the Rosarito Beach Hotel pool, an astonished Chandor reported.

Still, Redford admitted, ‘they beat the hell out of me.’

There were wave, wind and rain machines and a crew member with a giant hose spraying water at his head, leading to an infection that cost him 60 per cent of his hearing in his left ear.

Chandor said the grips were agog. ‘They were looking at me, like, ‘Am I really going to spray Robert Redford with a big power hose?”

With a tight schedule and a budget of less than $10 million to make the film, Redford said, ‘I was so tired of being wet and there was no time not to be wet except at night, and so then it was tequila.’

The New York Times critic A.O. Scott described ‘All Is Lost’ as a ‘haunting allegory of environmental and economic hubris,’ depicting unfettered global capitalism as the Chinese container gouges the sailboat and a cargo ship and oil freighter pass by, oblivious to Our Man’s plight.

But Redford, an earnest environmentalist, said he didn’t think about any allegories; his character even throws a piece of plastic into the ocean.

Chandor said he winced when he realized the environmental faux pas, but his star did not object.

‘I wasn’t thinking of symbolism when I was doing it,’ Redford said. ‘I was thinking about surviving.’

 

 

 

Though Redford has plenty to occupy him, including turns next year in ‘Captain America’ (chosen because it’s ‘so different and a little weird’) and filming ‘A Walk in the Woods,’ based on the Bill Bryson book (with Nick Nolte in the role originally envisioned for Newman), he’s still passionately interested in the world.

But he says he’s no longer sure how to critique politics, when ‘the center is not holding, when everything’s spinning and spinning, and when you can’t beat ‘Saturday Night Live.”

He seldom watches his movies. He didn’t see ‘The Sting,’ a smash hit in 1973, until 2004 when his grandson suggested it at Christmastime.

‘I thought it was a really good movie,’ Redford marveled.

And he hadn’t seen ‘All Is Lost’ until May when he and Chandor got to Cannes, where it played out of competition. Chandor said Redford never even checked the monitor during filming.

At Cannes, ‘we walk in and we sit down front and center and that made me nervous,’ Redford recalled.

‘Where do you escape? How do you get out of here? And then the film plays, and it was hard for me to watch it.’

Redford, who has never won an Oscar for acting, braced himself for boos and received a nine-minute standing ovation.

‘It just threw me completely,’ he said. ‘I felt self-conscious and awkward and shy, and I didn’t know what to do.’

He remembers saying to his wife, the German artist Sibylle Szaggars, and his director, ‘Hey, let’s go.’

He said he also told Chandor, ‘Enjoy this moment because it will probably never come again,’ acknowledging with a laugh that he might have been a damper on the party. ‘I’m a great partner to have.’

He says he has grown more comfortable in himself as he gets older, and abides by his favorite T.S. Eliot line: ‘There is only the trying. The rest is not our business.’

‘To me, it was always to climb up the hill,’ said the man sitting on his own mountain.

‘Not standing at the top.’