The roles Robert Redford only played for the money: “We can’t forget the man’s a movie star”
In 1997, Robert Redford gave a career-spanning interview to the New York Times that tried to solve the inherent mystery at the heart of one of Hollywood’s most enduring stars. Throughout his career, Redford has walked the fine line between making big, expensive, crowd-pleasing movies that audiences will gladly see in droves alongside smaller, riskier indie films that he either stars in or supports through his Sundance Film Festival. It has meant that, at times, he’s been honest about making certain movies purely for money because they help bankroll his other passion projects – but which parts were his paycheque roles?
In truth, this tension between artistic integrity and Hollywood excess has always been a defining feature of Redford. Even when he first started acting, he admitted to feeling embarrassed about his profession from time to time because he was raised in an environment that didn’t take show business seriously. However, when he began to learn the craft of acting, it unlocked something within him. He was artistically invigorated by learning theatre acting in New York because he got to immerse himself in character work.
However, Redford mused: “Thank God I got in on the end of that – the theatre of simple storytelling and bodies in space. It disappeared so quickly”.
You see, almost as soon as he started working in Hollywood, Redford noticed that the projects most people wanted to see weren’t these small stories of people talking in rooms. He was still able to make movies that fulfilled him creatively, of course, but he admitted that, after the 1970s, the push and pull between art and commerce became harder to navigate.
“The ’70s were the last time of variety in Hollywood,” Redford claimed. “When Reagan came in, you saw huge expensive cartoons being made: Popeye, Dick Tracy, and so on. I could see this industry going into a numbed-out place.”
Over the years, Redford adopted a “one for them, one for me” approach that was perhaps even more obvious than that of other actors who employed a similar tactic. The Times referred to it as “professional bipolar disorder”, wondering how the same man who practically invented the American independent movie scene could also star in films like Indecent Proposal, “as naked a schlockfest as anyone knows how to make”.
While this was a particularly harsh assessment of Redford’s popular movies, which many people love, the sentiment was clear. Redford’s agent, Michael Ovitz, even admitted to putting the hard sell on Redford to encourage him to accept Indecent Proposal, a movie he wasn’t exactly jumping for joy about.
“Sneakers and Indecent Proposal made money for Redford and for their studios,” Ovitz said with remarkable honesty. “The reality is there’s a marketplace out there, and we had to protect his position in it. We can’t forget the man’s a movie star. He had to do some movie-star roles.”
So, while he mightn’t have wanted to make certain movies, Redford recognised that he had to play the game if he wanted to retain his independence on the things that truly mattered to him. In the years after this interview, this bargain continued to reap rewards for him. To be able to direct and star in The Horse Whisperer, he made Up Close & Personal and The Last Castle. Similarly, he joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Captain America: The Winter Soldier so that he could make All is Lost and The Company You Keep.
All in all, it simply proves that even someone with legendary status like Redford is at the whims of the marketplace. It’s why he had to make his peace early on with how to balance his career, and that probably got harder and harder as the years went on and Hollywood changed right before his eyes.
As the Times noted, “It isn’t his fault that back in the ’70s, the studios’ idea of a crowd pleaser was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and nowadays it’s Indecent Proposal“. We shudder to think what that journalist must have thought when, by the 2010s, Redford’s bargain and the changing tastes of the public forced him to star in the very “expensive cartoons” he’d earlier railed against.
