The movie that almost broke Robert Redford: “Don’t fuck me around”
Once an actor crosses the fabled threshold to become a movie star, doors that had been locked shut for their entire careers suddenly open. While many of them use their newfound status to seek the biggest paycheques, Robert Redford always had a different plan in mind for himself.
He was handsome, charming, charismatic, and a box office draw, which meant that studios were constantly fluttering their eyelashes at him in an attempt to convince Redford to play a handsome, charming, and charismatic character in a production designed to earn the maximum amount of money.
There were a few of those, without a doubt, but despite his position as one of the ‘New Hollywood’ era’s definitive leading men, Redford always treated himself more like a character actor. Sure, it would have been easy for him to coast by on screen presence, star wattage, and good looks, but it wasn’t what he wanted to do.
Still, just because he was an A-lister, he couldn’t click his fingers and wish a passion project into existence just because of who he was. With his star burning brighter than ever before after the all-conquering success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he set his sights on Jeremiah Johnson.
Redford signed on after Clint Eastwood and Sam Peckinpah’s creative disagreements ruled them out, but there still wasn’t a director attached. The actor decided the easiest way to fill the vacancy was to reach out to a friend and re-unite with his This Property Is Condemned filmmaker, Sydney Pollack.
The $200,000 Warner Bros paid Redford in advance was already gone, and the Jeremiah Johnson director’s chair continued sitting empty, with Pollack agreeing based largely on loyalty rather than anything else. “It wasn’t an easy decision for me to accept because I was only just establishing myself and my company,” he said. “I thought about getting out at that point.”
While weighing the pros and cons, Pollack decided to stop answering his phone. “I was pissed,” Redford revealed of his failed attempts to get in touch. “It was clear this wasn’t going to be an easy film to make, and he was getting cold feet. But we had made promises to each other. I got him on the phone and told him, ‘Don’t fuck me around, Sydney. You know we have to do this picture.'”
Even with Pollack finally on board, Jeremiah Johnson was a nightmare. It took three months of auditions to round out the supporting cast, Redford constantly battled with the studio over the budget, inclement weather threatened to derail the entire shoot, and the footage captured on location led to a painstaking post-production process that saw the film spend seven and a half months in the editing room.
When it was finally finished and released to the cinemagoing public, almost two years had passed between Redford’s first day on set and the day Jeremiah Johnson hit cinemas. Nobody wanted to make it, Pollack was hesitant to direct, and adverse conditions almost torpedoed the period piece completely, only for the star to be vindicated when it recouped those production costs a dozen times over.
