“He must have realised”: the director who once compared Robert Redford to Shaquille O’Neal
If you were to jot down a list of a thousand or so actors who could be compared to Robert Redford in one way or another, there isn’t a hope in hell that Shaquille O’Neal would appear on any of them. Or, at least, we’d hope not, because that would raise some serious questions.
The only thing they’ve got in common is that they’ve both been in movies, and that’s it. Redford sure as shit couldn’t dunk a basketball, just like Shaq couldn’t have played the Sundance Kid, or launch an independent film festival bearing the character’s name.
The NBA legend couldn’t have helmed Ordinary People to an Academy Award for ‘Best Director’, just like Redford couldn’t have played the lead role in Kazaam or made a cameo in Good Burger. Apples to oranges doesn’t come close to doing it justice, but one noted filmmaker would disagree.
JC Chandor, who displayed plenty of promise as a filmmaker by helming Margin Call, steering Redford to his best performance in decades in All Is Lost, and A Most Violent Year, before fucking it up with Netflix’s forgettable Triple Frontier and the abysmal comic book adaptation Kraven the Hunter, took it upon himself to make an analogy that does admittedly make more sense than you might think.
“For me, Robert Redford is a lot like Shaquille O’Neal,” he declared. If he’d left it at that, then everyone would be left scratching their heads and wondering what the fuck he was talking about. Fortunately, he did elaborate, and you can sort of see where he’s coming from, in a roundabout way.
“Shaquille O’Neal is 7ft 2in and 370 pounds,” Chandor explained, not exactly helping his case when those dimensions most definitely do not apply to Redford. “Even if this guy didn’t like basketball, he’d have been an idiot not to play it, right? It’s the same with Bob.” Again, confusing, but he got there in the end.
“In his 20s, he wanted to be a painter, but I think the first time he stepped on stage and saw people’s reaction to him, his face, his voice, everything, he must have realised, ‘I’ve got to be a movie star,'” the director concluded, finally illustrating why he considered the two polar opposites to be equals of sorts.
To be fair, he’s not wrong. Even if you’ve never seen a game of basketball in your life and had no idea who Shaq was, if you showed a random stranger on the street a picture of him and asked what he did for a living, most of them would guess that he played basketball because he looks like he was engineered for it.
Do the same for Redford, at least when he was in his ‘New Hollywood’ pomp, and the answer would be the same: that man is clearly a movie star. It’s not the most obvious point of comparison you could make, but in its own weird way, it makes a lot of sense.
