Redford portrays Bank robber in final role
At 82, Robert Redford goes back to robbing banks in what he says is his final role
In The Old Man & the NEW YORK Gun, the elderly bank robber Forrest Tucker, played by Robert Redford, walks up to a bank teller, smiles, says a few words in a kindly manner, and collects a heap of money. Later when the teller is interviewed by the police, she’ll sound a little bewildered describing the encounter.
“He was a gentleman.” Redford, 82, has for six decades been leaving us similarly charmed. Who wouldn’t hand over whatever Robert Redford asked for?
But David Lowery ’s The Old Man & the Gun may be his last heist. Redford has said the movie will be his final one as an actor. The news, with palpable affection, ricocheted around the world.
“I didn’t expect that kind of response,” Redford chuckles, speaking from his home in Santa Fe. “Now I can’t say I was just kidding!”
“But I did say ‘Never say never,’” he adds, giving himself an out.
“I just figure that I’ve had a long career that I’m very pleased with. It’s been so long, ever since I was 21. I figure now, as I’m getting into my 80s, it’s maybe time to move toward retirement and spend more time with my wife and family.”
That Redford might be hanging it up has the unmistakable feel of an era passing. For many, his face — from sandy haired California boy to weathered mountain man — has charted half a century of something intrinsically American.
His Sundance Kid, his Jeremiah Johnson, his Bob Woodward are figures of rigorous self-determination. From the young CIA agent in Three Days of the Condor to the aged sailor in All Is Lost, they are smooth-sailing romantics whose quiet ways are violently capsized.
“For me, the word to be underscored is ‘independence,’” says Redford.
“I’ve always believed in that word. That’s what led to me eventually wanting to create a category that supported independent artists who weren’t given a chance to be heard. The industry was pretty well controlled by the mainstream, which I was a part of. But I saw other stories out there that weren’t having a chance to be told and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can commit my energies to giving those people a chance.’ As I look back on it, I feel very good about that.”
It was through the Sundance Institute, the non-profit organization he founded in 1981 for independent filmmaking that puts on the Sundance Film Festival, that Redford met Lowery, the 37-yearold director.
Shortly after Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints premièred at Sundance, he met with Redford, who expressed his interest in making a movie based on Tucker, a lifelong stickup man and prison escapee who David Grann had profiled in The New Yorker.
Lowery then wrote a script that became The Old Man & the Gun. It wasn’t until shortly before shooting that his phone lit up after Redford, in an interview, suggested this might be his last movie.
“My first thought was, boy, pressure’s on. My second thought was that I needed to completely ignore that pressure and not let it influence the movie. I actively worked against it feeling like grand summation,” Lowery says.
“But I did want to tap into what makes Robert Redford a movie star and acknowledge where he came from and what he’s done. It wasn’t meant to be a swan song, but if it winds up being a bookend, hopefully it’s a fitting one.”
And as a capstone for Redford, the 1970s-set Old Man & the Gun is indeed poignant. It bears much of the spirit and twinkle of some Redford classics, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, only as filtered through Lowery’s lyrical naturalism.
And Redford is again on the other side of the law.
“The idea of the outlaw has always been very appealing to me. If you look at some of the films, it’s usually having to do with the outlaw sensibility, which I think has probably been my sensibility. I think I was just born with it,” says Redford.
“From the time I was just a kid, I was always trying to break free of the bounds that I was stuck with, and always wanted to go outside.”
In the film, Redford’s partners are played by Danny Glover and Tom Waits. Sissy Spacek plays the love interest of the smitten Tucker. And Casey Affleck plays the police detective pursuing Tucker even as his esteem for the bank robber grows.
Redford still has hopes of directing one or two more films, but he likes the idea of going out as an actor in an upbeat movie.
Many have compared the current Mueller investigation of the White House to Watergate, which Redford so memorably chronicled in All the President’s Men.
But as to any relation to today, he demurs.
“I try not to think about today’s politics,” Redford says. “Otherwise you get too depressed.”
“We’re living in such dark times right now,” he says. “The hope is that The Old Man & the Gun will put a smile on an audience’s face. That’s something I think we could sure use right now.”