Robert Redford: Master of the Game

Seeing Robert Redford up close for the first time is something of a shock. It's hard not to stare at the lavishly wrinkled, weather-beaten planes of his face. The hollows beneath his blue eyes have deepened considerably. The sebaceous cysts that adorn his right cheek-flaws that have always protected him from being too pretty-seem to loom larger than ever. It would be impossible for Redford not to be aware of the enduring potency of his looks; a side effect of his stardom may be that he must expend a lot of energy to work against it. He constantly solicits other people's opinions and asks pointed questions about their lives. "We really had a lot of fun together but he's always the one that has to make that bridge," says Turturro. "You've got to get it out of your mind that the first time you saw him was when you were a kid." Redford at once addresses the topic and neatly detaches from it by using the second person. "When notoriety came, distortion came with it," he says. "People would see you on the screen and their behavior would be altered by who they perceived you were. Either they would bend over backward to be unimpressed-and that got to be tedious because there was distortion in that-or they were fawning. You begin to long for simple relationships where you get the truth from someone and they give it back. "By 1974 or '75, just after a number of films (including Jeremiah Johnson, The Sting, and The Way We Were) were successful back-to-back I was really just trusting my family and a very, very close circle of friends. That concerned me. So you start trying to put as many people at ease as possible so you can have more normal relationships." Redford's decision to take time off in the late '70s, at the height of his fame, was largely an effort to escape the pressures of his enormous celebrity. Oddly, it also added an emotional authenticity to the image of an actor who had become defined as the unreadable UberWASP in movies like The Candidate and The Great Gatsby. Redford wanted more out of life: He retreated with his family to Sundance, Utah, where he rode horses and built a new house. "It felt great," he says, smiling at the memory. "Our business is very seductive, a little bit like a Venus flytrap. I believe you have to move away from it from time to time to do your best work in it."

For the next decade, Redford divided his time between L.A., New York, and Utah, where he founded the Sundance Film Institute, the highly regarded workshop for independent filmmakers. Sundance has given Redford an intellectual legitimacy among his peers he might never have had as an actor. Surprisingly, Redford regrets spending so much time setting up the Institute. "I was gone too long," he says. "I got too far off the track. I went four years at a crack without acting or directing. And that was too long for me. Finally, my principal business is the artistic end, not the business end." If Redford feared that his early-'80s time-out would set him back, he was wrong; in fact, he's busier than ever. The $100 million-plus success of 1993's Indecent Proposal (on the heels of 1992's respectable Sneakers and 1990's disappointing Havana) signaled his return to the screen as an aging-but-not- fading Romantic Figure who can still open a film if paired with the right mix of new talent. And he's booked projects that will keep him busy as an actor and director for the next two years. The film that was to be the first of them, Fox's virus thriller, Crisis in the Hot Zone, fell apart last month after he and costar Jodie Foster dropped out. ("Too many elements weren't coming together for me," he says.) Instead, Redford will start work next month on Rob Reiner's romantic comedy An American President, in which he'll play the title role of a Commander-in- Chief who falls in love with a political consultant. (The female lead is open; earlier this month Emma Thompson declined the film.) He hopes to follow that next spring with Up Close and Personal, a drama loosely based on the early life of anchorwoman Jessica Savitch; Michelle Pfeiffer and Robin Wright have been rumored for the female lead, while Redford will play her mentor- turned-lover. In late 1995, he plans to direct The Education of Little $ Tree, from the "autobiography" that made the 1991 nonfiction best-seller list and was later revealed to be fictional; he'll follow that in 1996 with Time and Again, based on the 1970 time-travel novel, in which he may also star. "Going back and forth is something I quite enjoy," Redford says. "Right now, I'm anxious to start acting again. One feeds the other. As an actor, I used to resist knowing about the camera because I felt it was my job to be there and behave, and have that captured on film. Now you find you can give a better performance if you're a little more technically aware. And acting feeds the directing because your juices start to flow and you want to get back in the seat of controlling the whole picture." The phone rings again; it's Redford's assistant. Redford announces that he must go, but he keeps on talking, becoming intensely reflective. It is his birthday, after all. "I miss being able to spend more time with art. That's where I started, as a painter," he says wistfully. "When I would travel (in Europe) when I was 18 or 19, I kept a sketchbook with me at all times. On the left page would be the drawing. On the right page, a written description of what I was seeing. It was set up like an illustrated book of stories. I was so romantic, so over the top. You can see the influence of Poe, of Hemingway, of Wolfe, all coming across my path. Then of Henry Miller. Huge. I was so into how miserable everything was. You grow out of that." Robert Redford has grown out of that, and more. He seems immensely relieved that new performers are trapped in the glass box, that his place in Hollywood is now as an actor and director, not as the anointed Golden Boy. "Finally," he says, "you get old enough where you're not seen that way anymore. New people come in to occupy people's attention, so you no longer hold the same place. It makes it a little better for you."