“He never got enough credit”: why Robert Redford called George Roy Hill the most overlooked director in Hollywood
Robert Redford is a true champion of independent cinema, whether it be his directorial work on classics like Ordinary People and Quiz Show or his unrivalled performances in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Way We Were and The Sting. With his all-American charm and effortless on-screen charisma, the actor began his career with a string of hits that quickly secured his place as number one at the box office for three consecutive years, eventually going on to create the Sundance Film Festival, which has remained as one of the most crucial festivals for showcasing emerging filmmakers and new talent.
Throughout his many decades of working in the industry, the director has collaborated with many legendary creatives, but he has named one director who he believes is sorely underappreciated and deserves the same level of recognition as he did.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was one of the key roles within Redford’s career, launching his career through his infamous pairing with Paul Newman in one of the most celebrated films from the golden era of Hollywood. As the studio system began to collapse and new auteurs stepped onto the scene, a wave of bold directors came into the industry and began to shake up the scene.
The film was directed by George Roy Hill and proved to be a very fruitful creative relationship, with Redford going on to work with him again in 1973 on The Sting, an unprecedented hit that won multiple Oscars for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Actor’ and ‘Best Original Screenplay’. Despite being one of the most successful films of the decade and going down in history, Hill did not have another project that reached the same heights and is perhaps less remembered compared to other directors of the time.
When asked about his work with Hill, Redford said, “It makes me sad when I see certain directors getting a lot of attention, in some cases too much attention, when Roy was one of those who should have got that attention and didn’t. If you read his biography, he rises to the top, when you think about Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid and The Sting, he never got enough credit for those films.”
After the release of both films, the director worked on projects like Slap Shot and The World According to Garp, which was one of Robin Williams’ first dramatic roles. While both performed fairly at the box office, none of his subsequent projects reached the same levels of success as his earlier features.
Perhaps this was because the competition was fiercer during this period, with directors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg bursting onto the scene with the likes of Taxi Driver, The Godfather and Jaws, which changed the infrastructure of the film industry forever.
Because of this, you could safely assume that Hill’s work during the early stages of this creative shift in Hollywood became slightly overshadowed by those that came after, with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid becoming remembered for starting a new era in the film industry, but not leading to such a notorious name for Hill. Maybe it all comes down to being a smaller fish in a big pond, and with so many changes in such a short period of time, perhaps Redford is right that his legacy became somewhat lost in the sea of success.
