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Robert Redford: A Remembrance
Photo: Peter Sollett On the sad occasion of Robert Redford’s passing, filmmaker Eva Vives pens this guest post on her interactions with the legendary actor, director, environmentalist, activist and Sundance Institute founder. — Editor
I first met Redford by chance.
Pete Sollett and I had gone to meet Sundance Institute’s Michelle Satter, Founding Senior Director of Sundance Institute’s Artist Programs, at the Sundance offices in New York after our short, Five Feet High and Rising, had won the festival.
There was some kind of snafu, and I was asked to wait in an office while they sorted it out. I don’t remember where Pete had gone — and I swear this isn’t some fantasy I invented — but I was sitting in this office looking around and wondering whose it was, when Redford himself opened a different door and walked in, all dressed in white.
He looked as shocked to see someone sitting in his office as I was to find myself face to face with the Sundance Kid.
“Who are you?” he asked.
I said my name and babbled about having been asked to wait there.
“Where are you from?”
When I told him I was from Spain, he immediately started telling me about all the time he had spent there, especially his stint as a painter in Mijas in the ’60s. We talked about art, movies, the Spanish Civil War, and I was deep into my family’s involvement in the conflict, when Michelle walked in wondering what the hell I was doing in Bob’s office.
Of course I had “met” Redford long before, starting with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I was about 6 and in the middle of an elaborate character game with my friend Ariadna, when her teen sister came into our room crying: “The two most beautiful men in the world are in this movie and you have to come see.”
I immediately followed her into the living room, where her mother and grandmother where glued to the TV, also crying. That movie became and still is one of my favorites ever. A perfect script by William Goldman, impeccable casting and acting and just masterful direction by George Roy Hill, also a favorite.
Over the years I met Redford a few other times at Sundance, never daring to tell him just how much he meant to me, not just as the Institute’s founder but as an actor and as a director as well.
So when I attended the Sundance Labs with my film All About Nina, I hoped and prayed he’d be there. One day, I was sitting outside on a bench on the mountain (a little piece of paradise in Utah where the Sundance Labs used to be held) when I heard a low roar — an old elegant bike. I looked up and there he was: jeans, cowboy boots and a red bandanna. Looking like he just walked out of his own movie.
The screenwriter Howard Rodman, a frequent Lab advisor, says Bob knew when people needed his help, and that sure was true for me. Bob was kind and curious and funny and I felt at home with him. He asked me all sorts of questions and told me lots of funny — and some sad — stories. Just this week I recounted to a student a piece of advice he’d given me, about letting actors have space from each other in fight scenes. He ingrained emotional beats in my brain, mostly by pointing out all the ones I’d missed in one the scenes I filmed up there.
I got to ask him about George Roy Hill, and he got really happy I did. George was one of his favorite directors to work with and he seemed annoyed that people didn’t give him the credit he deserved. We talked so much about the filming of Butch Cassidy and Newman and how much he missed his friend and how he fell in love with Utah and Native American history. I was so happy to be there, eating chicken, watching him light up as he told stories.
He understood good writing and told me the original script for Ordinary People came in at 250 pages. One of his first jobs as the director of that movie was to tell screenwriter Alvin Sargent that no matter how good his writing was, the script would have to be cut down. He taught us about shooting party scenes, and I got to tell him how much I loved that he shows a guy asleep on a chair in the middle of the famous party sequence in Ordinary People. He said there’s always someone having a terrible time at a party. Or someone who is just simply bored and would rather be home.
On Sunday night I had the pleasure of watching an old friend of mine win an Emmy. In his speech, Jeff Hiller thanked the creators of his show for writing about “connection and love in this time when compassion is seen as a weakness.” His words have been resonating with me since then, because I too have noticed that compassion, in fact, even just emotion, has generally fallen out of style. Perhaps TV is the last refuge for any kind of emotional turmoil, but “serious” movies hardly ever display it anymore, especially if they are about men.
In this way, too, Redford was a pioneer and someone who fought bravely for the ability for men to be who they are, weaknesses, flaws and all. After all, what is Butch Cassidy if not a love story between men? If you remember, Redford was often criticized for making “weepies,” for playing the shiksa in The Way We Were. But it takes courage to feel. It takes courage to act, to direct, to make movies that make us cry.
It also takes courage to be the activist he was. He made space for Indigenous voices—building Sundance’s Native & Indigenous pipeline—and stood up for them in public, from Incident at Oglala to Bears Ears. He told me about his drives from LA to Utah and the love he felt for this country. He told me about being stopped for speeding and the surprise in cops’ faces when they realized who he was. And then, in later years, the realization that he was no longer being recognized.
I’m so grateful I had that time with him. I’m so grateful for his movies. And most of all, I’m grateful he created Sundance. God knows the festival has launched a thousand careers but the labs — the labs created a space for first time filmmakers to fuck up and do so safely. He knew how hard making any film is, let alone your first. He didn’t have to create that world. But he did.
Thank you, Bob. For the art. For the laughs. And for believing in me.
