“I had to jump in the tree to save my neck”: when a bear chased Robert Redford around a movie set
One of the oldest adages in Hollywood is that it’s a bad idea to work with either children or animals, advice Robert Redford repeatedly discarded throughout his career despite staring a near-death experience straight in the face when dealing with the latter.
Of course, if he’d taken that advice to heart from the beginning, then his career would have turned out remarkably differently, considering he spent a great deal of time on horseback shooting Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the breakthrough role that both launched him onto the A-list and introduced him to lifelong friend Paul Newman.
He also directed 1998’s The Horse Whisperer, which featured both, with the combination of an equine hero and a young Scarlett Johansson, earning him ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ nominations at the Golden Globes, and it was also a box office success that earned over $100million more than any film he’s ever directed.
With that in mind, both animals and children have been very kind to Redford on either side of the camera, which helps explain why he was convinced to star in a movie that boasted a bear as a member of the supporting cast decades after another member of the same species had decided he would make for a tasty lunch. Then again, he did have other reasons.
“Why am I doing it again?” he rhetorically asked Pop Entertainment when explaining his reasons for boarding 2005’s literary adaptation An Unfinished Life. “Because I got paid to do it.” Fair enough, but at least he wasn’t required to get as up close and personal with the bear as he’d been the first time around.
More than 30 years previously, Redford led the cast of Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson as the titular mountain man. He knew going in there was a scene where he was going to be chased around by a bear, but it was supposed to be created using cinematic sleight of hand and a little movie magic. Instead, he ended up going method against his will.
“The scene called for me to be chased by a bear, and the scene got out of hand, and the camera had a malfunction, and I had to keep running around a tree,” he explained. “The bear got all excited and started really chasing me, and I had to jump in the tree to save my neck. I made it, but I said, ‘I’m never going to do this again.'”
Despite his hesitance to work with another bear – which did last more than three decades in his defence – money will always talk louder than anything else in the movie business, with the remuneration on offer doing a sterling job of getting Redford to consider his staunch anti-bear stance.
