The movie that almost reunited Paul Newman and Robert Redford: “Who do you have in mind?”
Everybody in Hollywood would have loved to reunite Paul Newman and Robert Redford for a third movie based on the impeccable track record of their two onscreen collaborations.
They’d never met before the former suggested the latter as the perfect candidate to be the Sundance to his Butch in George Roy Hill’s classic western, an inspired decision that elevated Redford’s career to the next level and left the film showered in critical, commercial, and awards season glory.
Re-teaming with the same director yielded even better results when The Sting scooped seven Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’, and earned even more at the box office than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The superstars would remain firm friends until Newman’s passing, but that third picture never materialised.
It wasn’t for lack of trying, though, with Redford initially developing the literary adaptation A Walk in the Woods as the perfect vehicle to get the band back together, only for Nick Nolte to step into the breach after Newman’s death. However, around the same time, there was an idea in place that could have made it a reality, and it came from their anointed spiritual successors, no less.
George Clooney and Brad Pitt have regularly been branded as the Newman and Redford of their generation, and their chemistry in Ocean’s Eleven was hardly a million miles away from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. The franchise was predicated on gathering as many big names together as possible, and during its development, a lightbulb went off in screenwriter Ted Griffin’s head.
“You had Brad and George having an espresso in some square in Europe and having a conversation similar to the one they have at Musso and Frank’s, like, ‘What, you think we need one more?’ and Brad puts up two fingers,” he explained on the Script Apart podcast. “‘Two more’. George says, ‘Who do you have in mind?’ And Brad points, and you see, crossing the square towards them, Paul Newman and Robert Redford.'”
Ocean’s Eleven conceived of flirting with metatextuality by drafting in Newman and Redford to play the respective fathers of Clooney’s Danny Ocean and Pitt’s Rusty Ryan, embracing the comparisons between the quartet of A-listers from different generations. While it’s unclear how far those conversations got, it would have been a moment for audiences to remember.
Having Newman and Redford cameo in Ocean’s Eleven would have skirted the line of winking at the audience while still stopping short, a lesson the sequel refused to learn when it offered up one of the smuggest scenes in recent memory by having Julia Roberts’ Tess Ocean pretending to be Julia Roberts and encountering Bruce Willis playing himself in a cameo.
Redford and Pitt were friends and worked together on Spy Game, which started shooting five months after Ocean’s Eleven wrapped, but convincing him and Newman to swing by the heist caper was too tall an order.
