SANTA FE, N.M. — Robert Redford is one of the last old-time, bona fide movie stars, yet he is more comfortable behind the camera.
A good two years of his life have been spent directing his second film, The Milagro Beanfield War. While reports in the media spoke of delays because of weather, difficulties in casting and postponement of an opening date, Redford kept fine-tuning his adaptation of John Nichols’ novel.
Last week, Redford’s work was validated at a special screening of the film, held for the people of Truchas, the small northern New Mexico town where it was shot. The director is happy.
“I take a lot of pride in depictions that I’ve done to be accurate about the culture, condition or system that I’m dealing with,” he says, “whether it’s politics (The Candidate) or being a mountain man (Jeremiah Johnson) or being a ski racer (Downhill Racer) or a particular subdivision of American culture that exists along the North Shore of Chicago (Ordinary People), which I saw as rather unique. When I got this enormous affection from the people here in the communities where we filmed, it made me feel good.”
You can feel the electricity when Redford strides up to the small group of film writers in a corner suite of the El Dorado Hotel. A hush falls, even as Redford, mundanely carrying a breakfast tray of scrambled eggs and bacon, jokes that he hopes there are no interviewers from radio present to record his munchings.
He knows better. Redford calls all the shots on the set and for this interview, which means no representatives of the electronic media among the 43 critics from the United States, Spain, Great Britain, Sweden and Australia. He also has rejected all photographers except one.
At 50, Redford needn’t worry about how he looks in anyone’s camera. Although he has the sun-lined face and neck of a rancher and more wrinkles than his friend Paul Newman, who is 63, several things make him attractive to both women and men. He has a full head of hair the color of melted butter, and his daily three-hour workouts keep him lean. He looks right in cowboy duds this Sunday morning — a salmon-colored, snap-button shirt, faded jeans and cowboy boots. A youthful vigor and intensity belie the mortal evidence. Not a big man — he stands about 5-foot-9 — he conveys a big presence.
It’s a rarity when Redford, who dislikes film critics, deigns to meet with them. He didn’t do it for Out of Africa a few years ago, leaving the publicity load to the media-shy Meryl Streep.
But he believes in The Milagro Beanfield War, the story of a poor Hispanic farmer and the rich Anglo developer with whom he battles over the right to irrigate his land. For Redford, this classic tale of the Southwest was a longtime labor of love that ties in with his own protectionist attitude toward preserving native cultures.
Although he lives in New York and Utah with his wife, Lola (they have three children — Shauna, 27, Jamie, 26, and Amy, 18), this part of the country captured his heart 15 years ago. “This is where I spend a lot of free time,” he says. “And the more time I spend, the more I became fascinated with the cultures that make up this area — the Indian: the Navajo, the Hopi; and the culture of northern New Mexico in the mountains.
“Also, I wanted to do something in contrast to Ordinary People, and this had all the elements — pathos, a very good story, humor, dramatic conflict, and most of all, it was rich in character.”
Redford has starred in some of the most respected and beloved movies of the last 25 years, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Way We Were, All the President’s Men and The Natural. He’s a romantic hero of the first order who has a kind of Western mythic quality about himself.
Still, there always is a sense that the real Redford is being withheld in his performances, which may be why much was made of his cuddly performance as a lawyer in the romantic thriller Legal Eagles.
A debunker of his own celebrity, Redford is expansive, polite and full of stories about himself, as his breakfast cools. But warmth isn’t part of the package of this man in check.
Why did it take so long to complete The Milagro Beanfield War? Reducing a 629-page novel to a 120-page screenplay “without going flat,” he says, required five drafts by three writers.
Then there was the matter of launching the Sundance Institute, a training ground in Utah for budding filmmakers, which has helped produce such fine films as El Norte, Belizaire the Cajun, Smooth Talk and Desert Bloom. “It took longer than I expected because it required fund raising and a lot of thought and creative organization.
“It’s a place for development, not production. It’s non-profit. And it provides opportunities for new filmmakers to come with their projects, so there will be more pictures of a higher quality and lower budgets that get into the marketplace.”
Meanwhile, Redford was itching to act, so he took The Natural, Out of Africa and Legal Eagles. The latter two suffered filming delays.
Luck wasn’t always with him when he did begin shooting Milagro in August 1986. “The film had a very strange karma around it,” Redford says, permitting himself a half-smile. “It was almost a mirror image of the story itself, cockeyed things going on that people said just never happened before.
“We watched this cloud over Los Alamos, drifting along over the ridge, suddenly made this mad turn and headed right for us. It was almost like a joke; we were laughing … Right at us and stopped and rained … The rain then turned to snow. And on either side of us, it was clear as a bell.”
Of paramount importance to Redford was presenting the folkways and beliefs of the mountain people. “Our culture does not accept mysticism or fable easily. From the standpoint of the other culture, it’s not mysticism or fable. It is. It’s just reality.
“These people are conversant with saints and angels. It’s not bizarre … Which means that the overall, completed result might be somewhat mystifying to our culture. It would have to succeed on the strength of its entertainment value.”
Being an actor himself gives Redford an advantage over other directors. Still, he had greater simpatico on the set with some actors — Brazilian-born actress Sonia Braga, who plays Ruby, the film’s firebrand; and Ruben Blades, the Panamanian-born singer-actor from Crossover Dreams.
“Part of the joy of this film was the mix of people and being able to communicate with Sonia, which was easy because it didn’t need words,” Redford says. “My communication with Sonia is deep.
“And Ruben is such a natural, good actor, I had very little to say to him and he got it. His instincts and rhythms were so tied together. He understood that area of mysticism.
“The crew didn’t understand a lot of what was going on. They just had fun.”
With the big to-do made over the premiere of Milagro in this sparkling, mountain-ringed town, it comes to light that Redford is giving back something to the communities of northern New Mexico. Proceeds from the movie’s premiere, where tickets went for $100 and $500 per person, went to the agricultural cooperative of Ganados del Valle and Tierra Wools in Los Ojos, La Compania de Teatro de Albuquerque, Northern New Mexico Legal Services Inc., and the New Mexico Community Foundation.
Noble deeds and Redford’s name are becoming synonymous. Yet, despite wanting to be admired for his achievements, rather than for the he-man cut of his jaw, he cannot seem to escape the misperceptions that come with being a movie star. The topic gets him more exercised than anything else in 30 minutes of talk.
“The intense spotlight on the project and on me threatened the project itself,” he says, referring to the Academy Award for Best Picture given to Ordinary People, his first film at the helm. “I was very grateful for the honors, but I also knew what might come with it — expectations. Add to that what I bring to it as an actor and it gets pretty heavy.
“It’s unavoidable, but it was a sad thing to have to deal with because it was so distracting to the work. People were hovering around, wondering whether we, as Anglos, were going to do justice to the people of New Mexico.
“I’ve heard that so many times before, from The Washington Post, from people on the North Shore of Chicago, mountain men, political advance men — seems like it has haunted me all my life.”
Redford’s voice takes on a renewed intensity. “How did I do, folks? You look at the work and you decide. I have a lot of pride in getting it right.”
