00:00Tributes have been pouring in for Robert Redford, one of the biggest film stars of all time,
00:05who's died at the age of 89.
00:08The Hollywood icon rose to global fame with blockbusters like Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid
00:13and All the President's Men.
00:15President Donald Trump has hailed the actor as great,
00:18while Meryl Streep, one of his former co-stars, said,
00:21one of the lions has passed. Rest in peace, my lovely friend.
00:25Karis Garland has more.
00:26With his blonde, tussled hair and charming smile,
00:32it didn't take long for Robert Redford to make a name for himself in Hollywood.
00:36After making his breakthrough as an affable outlaw in the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid,
00:42the California native went on to be one of the industry's most bankable leading man for decades.
00:49He starred opposite Barbara Streisand in The Way We Were and Meryl Streep in Out of Africa.
00:54But it wasn't just romance.
00:57Redford also liked to tackle serious topics like politics.
01:01He starred in the critically acclaimed All the President's Men in 1976
01:05about the journalistic pursuit of President Nixon in the Watergate era.
01:10The 1973 movie The Sting about Depression-era grifters gave Redford his first and only Oscar nomination as an actor.
01:18Later, he transitioned into directing and won an Academy Award for his first effort for the film Ordinary People,
01:25which also won Best Picture.
01:28I was able to take storytelling further and become a director so I could tell my own stories about how I saw the world.
01:33So for me, storytelling is a huge, important element in society.
01:39In the 80s, Redford founded the Sundance Institute and Film Festival dedicated to cultivating fresh cinematic voices.
01:49It helped give a leg up to directors like Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh.
01:54There were other stories to be told that were maybe more risky.
01:58They were more under the heading of independence, but they weren't being given a chance.
02:03The Sundance Institute also gave a voice to rural America and climate activism,
02:09though Redford later complained about the commercial whirlwind the festival created,
02:13saying he wanted the ambush marketers to go away forever.
02:17A committed environmental activist, Redford also fought to preserve the natural landscape and resources of Utah, where he lived.
02:24Preferring life on his ranch, he created the image of a reluctant star.
02:28He also often insisted that his good looks hindered rather than helped him as an actor.
02:36Well, we can talk more on this and bring in Robert Redford's biographer, Michael Callan Finney.
02:42Thank you so much for joining us on the programme, Michael.
02:45It's really great to have you.
02:46I'd love for you to first of all talk to us about where your and when your love for Robert Redford began.
02:52When did your admiration for him begin?
02:55Well, I'm talking to you today from Le Castellet in the south of France.
03:02Ironically, in my publisher, Adécile La Trasse, in their house in the French edition,
03:08in France, being here is so resonant for me of how my journey began.
03:19I was a kid.
03:20As a kid, I liked to travel.
03:22I liked to explore other cultures.
03:24I was an Irish writer, an Irish kid who wanted to be a writer.
03:30And I started writing about America.
03:35I was a dramatist originally.
03:38Redford was an artist who appealed to me because of the variety of his films,
03:45the amount of stuff he did and the strangeness of the choices he made in the movies he made.
03:52He started off in theatre in the 50s and the golden age of television when movie or TV series like The Twilight Zone and The Virginian and all those great series were going on.
04:04When he was cast in them, he didn't intend to be an actor in the beginning, he wanted to be a painter, but he very quickly became successful as a television and stage actor and then was very fortunate.
04:17He was cast in the end of the 60s to be cast by George Roy Hill in Butch Casting the Sundance Kid with Paul Newman, who became a lifelong friend.
04:27And then he was identified as this romantic, iconic figure.
04:33And he went on to have, in a sense, three careers.
04:36He was the romantic icon pinup.
04:40He was the auteur making his own films like Ordinary People and A River Runs Through It and Bagger Vance.
04:46And he was in the middle of all that.
04:49He was this person who went off to the hills of Utah and started an independent promoting film group, the Sundance Institute,
04:59and started promoting dispossessed or new filmmakers and ethnic voices to try and promote a new way of presenting film apart from the Hollywood way.
05:12He definitely was very much champion of independent filmmakers, and he really felt that Hollywood needed a different voice, didn't he?
05:24He did, yeah.
05:26I mean, that was a big deal for him.
05:28He didn't like the way, today, in recent years, television has become about streaming and about, you know, there's the Netflix, Disney Plus kind of generation.
05:38He saw cinema as being a kind of sacred theatrical kind of thing.
05:44And he felt a lot of Hollywood, especially in the period from about 1990 onwards, became just kind of almost making films by rogue to just one film, sequels copying each other and all that kind of stuff.
05:59And that was the absolute opposite to what he saw as being the core of cinema and what cinema should and could be.
06:08So he stayed faithful to the idea of making, as far as he could, original and educational films.
06:16If you look at his auteur films, Ordinary People, Quiz Show, River Ons Truitt, Bagger Vance, Lions for Lambs,
06:23there was always an element in them that was educational and had a value beyond just a good story.
06:32That was a very big thing for him.
06:34Also, I spent so many years with him.
06:37I mean, our work together spanned nearly 20 years.
06:41And so I would spend a lot of time with him at Sundance at his home.
06:44He would come and stay with me in Dublin.
06:46And, you know, you get into his psychology, you understand how an artist is inspired and how they work.
06:53And what I learned was that he was he was he was a poet, essentially.
06:58He was like Walt Whitman, who spent his whole life writing one poem, Leaves of Grass, which was every aspect of the human condition.
07:05And Bob's films kind of amassed to a series of essays about what it was to be American or indeed what it was to be human.
07:13Michael, in your time that you spent with him, did you ever feel and get the sentiment that he was a reluctant star?
07:20I mean, when he's been asked about how he was a heartthrob, he very much says that that actually hindered his career.
07:26He didn't like the fact that he was seen as a sex symbol.
07:29Did you get the idea that he was a reluctant actor?
07:32No, I think, Bob, I once made some comment about vanity.
07:40He was saying we'd rented a house for him close to my house on Dublin Bay.
07:44And I went up and we were going out to dinner or something and he was spending an extraordinary amount of time getting himself coiffed up to go to dinner.
07:54And I said something about vanity and he said, for God's sake, of course, I'm vain.
07:59You know, that's that's what I'm paid to be.
08:02And no, I think he embraced the aspect of the iconic romantic figure that he was largely for the power it gave him.
08:11And the money it gave him to invest in making his own films like Ordinary People or River Runs Through It and underwriting the independent films that gave a voice to ethnic voices otherwise unheard.
08:29I mean, it's not just Steven Soderbergh or Lindlake, other directors like that.
08:39It's a lot of ethnicities were involved in the other films that he promoted.
08:45He believed really he saw this left right division in American life and he wanted to be someone who contributed to bringing things together.
08:54People often described him as being politically left.
08:57He wasn't. He was a centrist and he was keen to kind of cure the gap in American, the binary nature of American society.
09:08Let's talk about his environmental campaigning.
09:11He very much became an avid campaigner in his later years.
09:15Talk to us about how much he cared about the environment.
09:18Well, this is a passionate issue.
09:22He was earlier today.
09:24Someone was talking to me about him, asking me, was he a genuine activist?
09:29He was absolutely an activist.
09:31I mean, he was someone who felt that, as I say, he started out wanting to be a painter and then ended up becoming an actor.
09:39He said there was a kind of sense of randomness about life.
09:43If it was a lottery, you never knew when your number would come up, but he was driven to want to do good things.
09:50And the environment meant an enormous amount to him.
09:54He was interested in we are going through in terms of human history, the epicene era, which is the first era where it's the epicene era.
10:06It's defined as an extinction event where species kind of die very quickly.
10:12And this is the first one that's ever been caused entirely by human activity with carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere.
10:19He was very acutely aware.
10:22This is where his interest in science was and his involvement with the National Resources Defense Council.
10:27He was very acutely aware of the threat of severe climate change and how we would imperil the entire species, our own species and most of the planet, unless we did something.
10:42He was active in Native American rights.
10:44He believed that Americans had never really come to terms with the fact that they'd stolen the land from the Native American Indians.
10:52And he wanted to make he wanted reparations in some way for that.
10:55He fought for dispossessed people everywhere.
11:01He was he was a person with an acute social conscience and a desire to to contribute.
11:08He was active in democratic politics.
11:11And till the end of his life, he was interested in bringing together the two Americas, as he called it.
11:20Michael, it's really great to speak to you.
11:22Thank you so much for joining us on the program, telling us about the remarkable life that Robert Redford lived.
11:27And also my condolences to you as well, because you spend a lot of time with him.
11:31And yeah, this must be a sad day for you as well.
11:33Thank you so much for joining us.
11:35He was a friend.
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