Redford saddles up for one last ride
Lovable outlaw fitting final role if screen legend sticks to his guns on retirement call
In The Old Man and the 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, now 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
and the Gun may be his last heist. Redford has said the movie, which Fox Searchlight will release next month, will be his last as an actor. The news, with palpable affection, ricocheted around the world.
“I didn’t expect that kind of response,” Redford chuckles. “Now I can’t say I was just kidding!”
“But I did say ‘Never say never,”’ he adds. “I’ve had a long career that I’m very pleased with. I figure now as I’m getting into my 80s, it’s maybe time to move toward retirement and spend more time with my [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 . . . is ‘independence,”’ says Redford.
“That’s what led to me [wanting] to create a category that supported independent artists. 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.’”
It was through the Sundance Institute, the non-profit he founded in 1981 for independent film-making that puts on the Sundance Film Festival, that Redford met Lowery, the 37-year-old director. Shortly after Lowery’s Ain’t Them
Bodies Saints premiered at Sundance, he met with Redford, who expressed his interest in making a movie based on Tucker, a lifelong stickup man and prison escapee.
Lowery then wrote a script that became The Old Man and 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,” says Lowery.
“But I did want to tap into what makes Robert Redford a movie star and acknowledge . . . 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 70s-set The Old Man and 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,” 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.”
Redford still has hopes of directing one or two more films, but he likes the idea of going out as an actor with an upbeat movie.
Many have compared today’s White House investigation to Watergate, which he so memorably chronicled in All the President’s Men.
“We’re living in such dark times right now,” says Redford. “The hope is that
The Old Man and the Gun will put a smile on an audience’s face. That’s something I think we could sure use right now.”
The Old Man and the Gun screens in NZ cinemas next month.