Playboy Interview: Robert Redford

He doesn't have the Mediterranean sensuality of a Rudolph Valentino, the rakehell charm of a Clark Gable, the suave sophistication of a Cary Grant or the lady-killer reputation of an Errol Flynn. But there's no doubt that 37-year-old Robert Redford is the most powerful male sex symbol on the screen today.

That's not a label Redford particularly relishes: He dislikes all labels, in fact. An accomplished dramatic performer (with several critically acclaimed stage appearances and one Academy Award nomination, for "The Sting," under his belt), Redford is a concerned environmentalist, a fiercely independent thinker and, in the words of one of his producers, "so smart he could be the first actor to be President." (Today that may not be a compliment.)

Born in Santa Monica, California, in 1937, Redford went from Van Nuys High School to the University of Colorado, where he found himself majoring in mountain climbing, hunting and skiing, rather than in more conventional academic pursuits. He dropped out in his second year to spend 13 months studying painting in Europe. Returning to the United States, he enrolled at the Pratt Institute in New York. Vaguely motivated by some idea of becoming an art director for the stage, he followed the suggestion of an instructor and enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. The original notion was merely to obtain theatrical background, but once Redford tried acting, he was hooked.

While Redford was studying in New York, his heart was on the West Coast with young Lola Van Wagenen, a Utah girl he'd met in Los Angeles. Following a courtship conducted partly by long-distance telephone, they were married in 1958 and have since become the parents of three children: Shauna, 14; David James (Jamie), 12; and Amy, 4.

After impressing critics and directors in a series of supporting roles on stage and television, Redford landed the lead in the Broadway production of "Sunday in New York" in 1961. His first big break came in 1963, when Mike Nichols cast him as the young husband in Neil Simon's comedy hit "Barefoot in the Park." Six modestly successful motion pictures, including the screen version of "Barefoot," preceded Redford's blockbuster breakthrough, when he was teamed with Paul Newman in 1969's "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." That was the first time anybody stole a picture from Paul Newman, and it should have led to an unbroken stream of film roles. What it did provide was a chance for the unpredictable Redford to be very choosy. In the same year, he did a skiing movie, "Downhill Racer," with his own production company, and a motorcycle film, "Little Fauss and Big Halsy," and starred in "Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here." Then he holed up in his secluded Utah home, refusing all movie commitments for a two-year period. Not until 1971, when he made "Jeremiah Johnson," did he emerge from his self-imposed retirement--already the fourth such extended absence from filmwork in his career. Suddenly, there was Redford again, all over the marquees with "The Hot Rock" and "The Candidate" in 1972, "The Way We Were" and "The Sting" in 1973 and "The Great Gatsby" in 1974. In 1975, Redford will be seen in "The Great Waldo Pepper" and he'll shoot a Western about Tom Horn, the scout who tracked Geronimo in the Sierra Madres (the script to be done by William Goldman, who wrote "Butch Cassidy"); and he's bought the film rights to "All the President's Men," the Carl Bernstein-Bob Woodruard best seller (first introduced in Playboy) about the uncovering of Watergate. Despite this spurt of activity, Redford keeps talking about retreating back into his Utah mountain fastness. To find out if he really means it, Playboy assigned free-lance writer Larry DuBois to track down the elusive Redford. DuBois' report:

"Redford isn't really comfortable with any of the hoopla that goes along with his new superstar status, and so spending his time in front of a tape recorder, participating in the invasion of his own privacy, came very low on his list of preferred pastimes--somewhere down about where most of us would place going to the dentist. That may be why it took almost two years to acquire roughly eight hours of recorded conversation.

"The first time I met him, in his office in Los Angeles about four movies ago, he asked all the questions. Who was I? And why did I want to interview him? How did I feel about this and that? He likes to save his performances for the screen, and if I expected to find out about him, I was going to have to let him find out about me. The questioning was sharp and precise, his manner polite but firm and--well, suspicious. He didn't start to relax until he found out that I was a Mormon from Salt Lake and finally he said, 'Ok, what the hell.' As soon as he got out of Hollywood, a place that gives him a pinched nerve in the brain, and back home to Utah, I could meet him there to begin the interview.

"The weekend I arrived was the last of the ski season, and what he mostly wanted to do was ski. So each morning, it was straight to the lifts, straight to the top and straight down again as fast as possible, hooting and hollering all the way. You don't have to be from Utah to understand why he loves living there. His home, which he and his wife built themselves, brick by brick, looks over those spectacular Wasatch mountains where he filmed 'Jeremiah Johnson' and where he has developed a ski area called Sundance. The people in the area are pretty much unawed by celebrityhood, so it's easy for him to get away from its pressures. And those mountain roads, where there are few cars and even fewer highway patrolmen, are perfect for Redford's passion for driving his Porsche, his motorcycles, even the family station wagon, at truly immoderate speeds.

"We talked a lot that weekend--about Henry Miller and Hunter Thompson and skiing and Lola and art and self-discipline--you name it. He's a first-rate storyteller with the satirical eye of an editorial cartoonist: He loves to jump on himself, politicians, movie executives, anybody he catches indulging in any sort of phoniness or pomposity. But somehow we never got around, to turning on the tape recorder, which was just fine with him.

"The next time we arranged a meeting was on the set of 'The Great Gatsby' in Newport, Rhode Island. He was in a very different mood, not loose and high-spirited at all. He was feeling suffocated by that high-society world he was immersing himself in on the set, and the locals in that status-conscious community tended to be impressed with Robert Redford. He was getting a lot of fancy invitations to a lot of fancy tennis clubs, and he gave off the feeling of a volcano that might blow at any time. His family was with him and, whenever he wasn't working, he wanted to be with them. So we shot a few baskets on the court at his rented farm and hung around the set for a while before I left early, as anxious as he was to be out of there. Later, he laughed at how constrained he fell living in Gatsby's world. 'It was like being in a strait jacket for 18 weeks,' he said.

"Finally, last winter, we got in some serious work, sitting on two canvas chairs in the middle of a big field outside San Antonio, Texas, where he was filming 'The Great Waldo Pepper,' which was much more to his taste in lifestyle, and he was enjoying himself enormously. Waldo Pepper is a slightly zany barnstorming stunt pilot of the Twenties, and Redford felt right at home in the part. He was getting especially high doing his own stunt work--things like walking on the wing of an old biplane at 2000 feet. God, how he loved that. Anyway, in between those wild scenes, we finally got his words on tape. They won't reveal everything you've always wanted to know about Robert Redford, but I think you will like, as I did, what they do reveal: He really is a good guy."

[Q] Playboy: Why were you so reluctant to do this interview?

[A] Redford: I haven't had very good luck, with interviews. I guess the press is fallible, human like all of us, but too often I've found myself in a situation where I felt the interviewer didn't have an open mind. He came in with a prejudice, or maybe just an angle on what I was all about, or should be all about. And when the interview comes out, the angle overwhelms it and I'll read about "Redford, the mountain man," or "Redford, the loner," or "Redford, the success." They make me look so perfect, so lucky, so one-dimensional. Nobody ever gives me credit for having a nightmare, for making people unhappy, for inconveniencing them. I can be terrifically irresponsible and selfish, but I don't see that coming through in an interview.

Besides, I think a lot of my privacy. I believe in separating my work from my private life, and I'd like people to judge me by my work, not by what they read about me. Especially if they get some kind of fix on me, such as that business about being a loner. That's not true. If I were a loner, I'd be living alone, and I'm not. But after people read a lot of stories about you, they think they know you; they've made up their minds about you before you even meet them. So whatever spontaneity their reactions to you might have had is lost. You've got this image, which is never more than partly accurate, standing like some great shield between you and other people, and that makes it harder to get to know them. So at one point I got so angered with these stereotypes that I just said, "All right. The hell with that. I just won't do interviews."

[Q] Playboy: So why do this one? Do you think it will show you the way you really are?

[A] Redford: I don't know if that's possible. Maybe the problem before has been that I haven't been completely honest with the interviewer, or maybe it's because I change from the moment I give the interview to the moment it's published. This Playboy thing, I feel, is really the best of the interviews, because it's the straightest; it'll be accurate in terms of what I said. But it's true that I'm not the same person I was six months ago, or even 20 minutes ago. And if you can deal with that--like catching somebody who's riding through and grabbing a piece of that person--that's fine. As long as it's a whole piece of that person, and not a lot of fabricated phony imagery.

The real reason I originally agreed to do the interview, though, was that I had some things I wanted to say and I thought this might be a good way. An actor, after all, is a person who's capable of the same feelings that other people are. He can be just as up on issues, and just as passionate about world events, and about what's going on in the country, as anybody else.

[Q] Playboy: Has it occurred to you that if you weren't famous as an actor, few people would be interested in reading about your opinions?

[A] Redford: That's true. Fame is a two-edged sword. It gives you good leverage to do a lot of what you want to do, but at other times it feels like a plague. You can court fame like a lover, or fight it like a sparring partner. Either way, it's trouble. It's gotten so that when I meet people, I have this impression that they resent me--resent the way I look, maybe, resent my success. Sometimes it's not really justified, and that's even sadder. Let me give you an example. I went to a party the other night, which is something I seldom do. And I was feeling pretty good, looking forward to meeting some people I didn't know. So I went in and started introducing myself: "Hello. I'm Bob Redford. How are you?" and so forth. And this one guy gave me a real weird look, a sort of blank stare, like I was some scum he didn't want to be bothered dealing with. And I thought to myself, "Fuck you, then," and moved away. I found out later that he was so impressed by the fact that Robert Redford had actually come over and introduced himself that he was speechless. I misread his reaction and that's a shame. Maybe we could have talked together and come away with something.

Even with old friends, I sense a difference in attitude. One of the last outposts for me was Madison Square Garden. I used to love to go there and watch the Knicks. The Knicks are almost an art form to me, the way they operate, the moves they make. They play basketball as it's supposed to be played, as a team without any stars. Anyway, I used to be able to go to the Garden and sort of dissolve into the crowd; it was kind of like going home to me, to be able to go to the Garden and scream and yell with everybody else, and argue and piss and moan. But the last time I went, a crowd started gathering around me, and people were taking pictures, and the cops were trying to keep them back. I spotted somebody I knew sitting a few rows away, and during intermission I went over to say hello, because I hadn't seen him in several months. And the look on his face was incredible. Mixed with a certain pleasure in seeing me again was this absolute panic--pain at being brought into the spotlight and having the cameras snapping away--and that look told me: Go away. Good to see you, but go away. I understood that, certainly, but it was disturbing. That whole feeling of becoming an object rather than a person bothers me a lot. I don't mind being an object on the screen, because that's what a role is, something you've worked at creating. Off-screen, I'm not some kind of thing; I'm a human being.

[Q] Playboy: You're also a sex symbol. How does it feel to know that so many women would like a piece of you for themselves?

[A] Redford: Eh, I just wonder where they were when I needed them. Seriously, that sex-symbol business is a rather recent thing, and I just associate it with somebody who's up there on the screen, and not so much with me. So I can't admit to having a problem with it, really. But I hate being stared at, by anybody. Walking down the street, I feel like I'm in a head-on collision, that my life is getting narrower and narrower, and I wonder why I'm so uptight. Some of the reason, I think, is that I've lost the capacity to wander around anonymously--just hanging out, being loose, watching people and listening to them.

[Q] Playboy: When did people start staling at you?

[A] Redford: I think the first time I had that feeling was when that Life magazine cover story came out, back in 1970. I didn't know my picture was going to be on the cover, just that there was going to be an article inside. Well, I spent a lot of time indoors that week. I really couldn't wait for the week to be gone, because I couldn't bear walking the streets and seeing my face staring out at me from every newsstand. And sure enough, next thing, our house in Utah got robbed, and these tourists were wandering around all over the place. We put up a gate, then a fence, then a burglar alarm. Next come the machine guns and the turrets.

Mingled with that, sure, were some good feelings. You believed you'd gotten somewhere when you got on the cover of Life magazine. It meant you'd gained a certain amount of importance, a certain position in this world, so you had to be flattered. But mix that in with the problems it caused and it was a mixed bag. And the negative won out, I think. I don't know that covers on magazines aren't like Academy Awards, which I don't feel very good about, either. Never did, even before I was in the business.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Redford: Well, you know I grew up in Los Angeles, and the Academy Awards seemed to me sort of like California politics. Weird. An awful lot of extravagance for nothing, and the awards were always getting won by people who had done better work before, or did better work later. The Oscars just reflect the opinion of Academy members. The guy who wins an award for a foot race gets it because he was the fastest guy on that track at that moment. That's the only kind of award I have any real respect for.

I remember when I was in college in Colorado, there was a whole smartass attitude about Oscars. It was a camp evening, watching the Academy Awards, an evening you got together and sat around and booed and hissed. I'll never forget one time when this guy was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of me, watching the television set in the fraternity house. He was so engrossed in what was happening that I just started flipping my ashes onto his head. I used to smoke all the time then, and I must have done five cigarettes on him--he had a flattop, which made it easier--and he was getting a whole pyramid of ashes on his head. Pretty soon, everybody else jumped on the band wagon, and this guy was just weighted down with these ashes. Somehow the image of the awards sticks in my mind that way. When I first became an actor, I was so against them that I would probably have taken the same position George Scott, whom I admire tremendously, took. Or even Brando, whom I admire, too, though he kind of blew it.

[Q] Playboy: Blew it?

[A] Redford: What he wanted to do turned out messy.

[Q] Playboy: Given your attitude toward Oscars, how did you feel when you were nominated for one this year, for your performance with Paul Newman in The Sting?

[A] Redford: Flattered, actually; to a certain extent, honored, because I realize now there are people who do care about the awards. I couldn't understand why Paul wasn't nominated, though, and I was. Mostly, I guess, I was surprised.

[Q] Playboy: How did you feel when you didn't win?

[A] Redford: Sort of relieved. I didn't deserve it.

[Q] Playboy: Would you have accepted this time?

[A] Redford: I didn't attend the ceremonies, but I had someone ready to accept the award in the unlikely case that I had won.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't the people from the Academy put the heat on you to attend?

[A] Redford: Oh, yeah, you get your standard arguments about supporting the industry, and so forth. I support the industry. I give a performance, and I'm paid well for what I do. If the public enjoys it, then it makes money for the industry, and that's the way I pay the industry back.

[Q] Playboy: What do you do with all your money?

[A] Redford: I don't have a whole lapful of it. That's a fantasy that's mostly been perpetrated by the press. This past year and a half, doing four films back to back, is the longest I've ever worked since I've been in the business. I've had a lot of problems in the past: I've gone in cycles, sometimes gone two years at a time without working because I just didn't want to act, or it took that long to develop something that I really wanted to do. I'd certainly like to be very rich. Just because I like nature and I like wearing Levis and I have a disdain for certain material things doesn't mean for a second that I don't want to be the richest guy in the valley. By God, I think I could enjoy that without making myself soft. I think I could resist the temptations of success, like having an entourage of maids, butlers, things like that. But no matter how you slice it, this business of being a Jeremiah Johnson, like that character in the film--of going up to this place I have in the mountains, backpacking and living off a horse--can't be done without money. Money is the single most dominating element in our society; you can't live without it. We are, as a society, completely tied to economics. It's a damning thing, a frustrating thing, but I think it's worth the fight. I really do. I think you've got to have certain fights in your life, or you just vegetable out.

[Q] Playboy: You still haven't said what you'd do with all that money you don't have, if you had it.

[A] Redford: I'd travel, and I'd buy land and build things on it. I'd like to use the money to create a little freedom in my life, as Howard Hughes has done. I like Hughes. He's doing fine. I was glad they blew that what's-his-name, Irving, out of the saddle on his hoax, because it meant Hughes could buy some more time before he had to appear in public. There's a guy who's managed to keep his privacy.

[Q] Playboy: If you're so hooked on privacy, why continue in movies, the single art form that's most guaranteed to rob you of your immunity from curious stares?

[A] Redford: If you know the answer to that, you've solved the riddle of the Sphinx. I have only a kind of half-assed answer, which is that I suppose if the pressure gets bad, enough, I'll just pack acting in and do something else. Right now, I like to think I act because it's the thing I do best; and there are things I really want to do in films that I haven't done yet. Things like my next film, All the President's Men, which I feel strongly about because of my beliefs about the whole Watergate mess.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't there a danger that the Watergate scandal will be very old news by the time the movie comes out?

[A] Redford: The Watergate scandal itself is like being in a hotel room with a Gideon Bible. It's just there for everybody to see and know about. You're absolutely right that there would be no point in making a movie about Nixon. That's all been documented very nicely. What interests me, though--and this is what All the President's Men is really about--is how the whole thing was uncovered through the persistence of investigative reporting, which seems to be a dying art in this country. I, for one, think there ought to be more of it. As a responsible, civil rights-minded citizen, I want to see more investigative reporting that says, "Hey, Agnew, cut the shit. We've got the facts here." "Hey, Dick, how come you said this yesterday and you're doing this today?" That kind of reporting is a terrifically important part of our democratic system, and I want to know why so many papers lay back on the facts, what kind of taboos existed, what a newspaperman has to go through to get his story. Besides, I think that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post, whose story All the President's Men is, have given us one of the top suspense yarns of our generation, which nobody would believe if it weren't documented with facts.

I think, really, the newspaperman is our one hero figure at the moment. Following these guys around in Washington, as I've done a bit lately, I learned how difficult it is to be a newspaperman, because you're always a moving target. You're in the business of grabbing history on the run, and sometimes you grab lightning on the run. You're gathering so much information so quickly, so constantly, that it's very difficult to be accurate every time, so you run the risk of getting shot down by each person you refer to in print. But with all their flaws--reporters tend to be lazy and sloppy sometimes--they also tend to be honest. You can't say that about the Government.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think would have happened in this country if Watergate hadn't been uncovered?

[A] Redford: I think we were heading for some kind of Orwellian nightmare, and that it was blown apart just before it went over the line. They were getting everything so nicely stacked: Supreme Court appointments, trying to take over the FBI, the whole mentality that said dirty tricks could be equated with national security, the concessions to big-business interests. One concrete thing we should get out of Watergate is campaign-spending reform. That was one of the reasons I made The Candidate: to show how our political process, as it now stands, shapes the kind of leaders we get.

[Q] Playboy: At the time you made The Candidate, some politicians said you were being unrealistic, unduly hard on the political process.

[A] Redford: That makes me laugh, because given recent developments, The Candidate pales in comparison with reality. I mean, there's something drastically wrong with a system that can produce, as the country's leader, a man who twice in his political career had to go on national television to tell the people he is not a crook. What The Candidate showed was that power does corrupt, and that once a guy gets power he's likely to insulate himself from the people in the street. Nixon, too, is the type of man who's been screened against humanity. I have a gut-level feeling about politicians that goes way back, that there's nothing to see in their eyes. They all talk as though they're addressing a room filled with 40,000 people: there's no sense of one-to-one relationship. With few exceptions--and there are some, because I do have acquaintances in politics whom I like--I find politicians extraordinarily shallow people. Maybe it's by necessity, because they're always going to a lot of luncheons, making a lot of speeches, shaking a lot of hands; but whatever the reason, they just lose the ability to deal with individual people. I can see why so many of the 18-year-olds didn't vote. If I were 18 and I picked up a newspaper and saw that this person's been indicted, that person's been cheating, this guy's undergoing a tax audit, and everybody's living in a state of corruption, I'd turn my back and go to something else. We're still being served up the same tired old hash like Rockefeller and Jackson and Ford, and I say they're cast in the same mold. It's a mold that has to be gotten rid of. I'm not saying they're income-tax cheaters, but that they're part of the old system, and unless the system changes, just give me a backpack and I'll go live in the mountains.

[Q] Playboy: How would you want to see the system changed?

[A] Redford: I feel, as far as politics is concerned, we have all become somewhat victimized by a system that relies more on the representation of special interests than on that of all the people. So until there is a major campaign-reform move like the recent one in California, we are all going to be saddled with the consequences of party-line politics. I don't at this time believe in party-line politics; it is old-fashioned, prejudiced and too prone to the special interests. I feel that our immediate salvation is to work or vote for the person--the individual and what he or she stands for. The current party-line structure has produced a moral climate that neither party can be proud of.

[Q] Playboy: Both The Candidate and All the President's Men are topical films about political issues. Do you feel all movies should have a message?

[A] Redford: Oh, no. If a film is legitimately entertaining, and people like it, that's good enough. It's even better, for me, if I can make a film that's both entertaining and informative. And sometimes you have to make one of the former in order to be able to finance one of the latter.

[Q] Playboy: With all the films you have out now, do you worry about becoming overexposed?

[A] Redford: Sure. But it's out of my hands. I can't help it if Columbia Pictures decides to release a film I've done for them in October and Warner Bros, decides to release a film I've done for them in November, even though they may have been two years apart in the making. If I produce the film, I try to control the timing of the release, because I'm afraid I might become a drug on the market. The four films I've just done, though, have afforded a lot of variety in the roles. That interested me. They weren't always the Sundance Kid in a different situation. I mean, you can really play the Sundance Kid in a detective story; you can play the Sundance Kid in a Western; you can play the Sundance Kid in a film about business; you can be the hired gun in any kind of tough situation. I was comfortable being the Sundance Kid, because there was something simpatico there, but I wouldn't want to play that role again next time.

[Q] Playboy:Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the kind of film that looks as if the actors had fun making it. Did you?

[A] Redford: No film is a laugh a minute, because you always have problems. But for the most part, it was the most consistent fun of any film I've ever done. Paul Newman is a very generous, giving actor who was at his happiest when the whole thing was working. Not just his part, but everything. George Roy Hill, the director, is scared to death of horses, and he's the tightest man on earth. That was wonderful, because it made us charge him on our horses whenever we got a chance, try to maneuver him into paying the tab in a restaurant.

[Q] Playboy: You said you felt comfortable playing the Sundance Kid. Why?

[A] Redford: I had a strange identification with him that I can't quite put my finger on. There was a time when I was very young that I didn't think it would be so bad to be an outlaw. It sounded pretty good to me. The frontier wouldn't have been a bad place to be in the 1880s, it seemed to me. You didn't turn your back on too many people, but the atmosphere was free and you carved out of it what you could make out of it. One reason I liked Butch Cassidy was that it pointed out the fact that a lot of those people were just kids, doing what they did--robbing banks, holding up trains--as much for the sheer fun of it as for anything else.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't some of the critics take Butch Cassidy apart because of that sense of fun, saying it wasn't realistic?

[A] Redford: They were wrong about that. There are a lot of old people around, especially here in Utah where I live, who remember having met the real Butch Cassidy and his Hole in the Wall gang. And what they say is that Butch and the boys loved life so much they couldn't be contained. They robbed banks, they were wild as hell, and they had a hootin' time, and they liked each other. I've met Butch's sister, Lula, who's a buff on Westerns, and when she saw Butch Cassidy, she said it captured an honest-to-God emotion that's missing from most films on the West, that feeling of fun. Those guys got into so much trouble because they were having too much goddamn fun. When a guy just got too drunk and shot another guy's head off, he didn't necessarily mean to. The critics may not have liked Butch Cassidy, but obviously the reviews didn't make any difference, because the film was very successful.

[Q] Playboy: The critics generally, though, have been fairly kind to you, haven't they?

[A] Redford: Yes, I would say so. But I really choose not to think too much about critics. When I started acting, I was in the theater, and the success of a stage play was predicated pretty much on the reviews of the critics. So obviously I paid more attention to them then. But my feeling is that, in theater or in film, some critics can be just as power mad as politicians. I really do believe they love the idea of deciding what something is all about and perpetrating that on the public. I know what I set out to do in a film, and often the critics completely miss it. They get very emphatic and profound and say, "The real message of this film is such and such." And that's horseshit.

[Q] Playboy: Can you give an example?

[A] Redford: The most grievous error, as far as I'm concerned, was when a magazine critic misinterpreted the end of Jeremiah Johnson in a way I never thought possible. At the end of the movie, I make a gesture, which this particular critic interpreted as my giving the Indians the finger. That was absolutely mind boggling.

[Q] Playboy: What did you mean by the gesture?

[A] Redford: The gesture was an ad-lib response to the frustration of the pain and confusion the character was experiencing in just continuing. It indicated a respect for the enemy--what Rommel and Patton might have done if they had met. It was a salute of respect, but also of frustration in the knowledge that the hunt would never end. The criticism was especially painful to me because of my feelings and concern for the American Indian. The remark seemed to me farfetched and personal beyond the limits of responsible criticism.

[Q] Playboy: Who was the critic?

[A] Redford: Pauline Kael. She seems to be a very good writer who's an irresponsible critic. I met her once, and she made very little sense. It was like meeting Captain Queeg: she had everything but steel balls in her hand. She was rattling on about how she was the only one who could influence film, and how I had let her down.

[Q] Playboy: How?

[A] Redford: That is beyond me, except that in her opinion, I had only been doing crap for films in the last few years. So I thought, well, you just forget about somebody like that.

[Q] Playboy: So you never let the critics get to you?

[A] Redford: Well, I'm only human. You know it hurts when somebody says you're bad in print. It's like somebody throwing a tomato at you onstage. But if you put it all together, it averages up, like playing the tables in Las Vegas. Chances are that the majority of the raves you get as an actor are just as mistaken in their analysis of what was good about your performance as the unfavorable reviews were wrong in their analysis of what was bad. What matters to me is whether I like the film and whether the public likes it. So I can't put too much stock in critics.

[Q] Playboy: The one film you've made lately that neither public nor critics seem too enthusiastic about is The Great Gatsby. How does it feel to put so much work into a role and then find out that a lot of people think it was a failure?

[A] Redford: It's like robbing a bank and then discovering you carried the wrong bag out, and all you've got for your trouble is a sackful of old rags. But most things fall short of the mark, and that's the chance you take. The mistake, it seems to me, is to linger over it. The public will decide in the long run, and it will decide whether the critics were right or wrong.

[Q] Playboy: What's your own opinion?

[A] Redford: I think the hype on Gatsby was damaging. It was offensive to a lot of people. I'm not so sure a lot of critics would have recognized the real article, a faithful interpretation of Fitzgerald's book, if it had come down the road, but this just stacked the odds up against the picture and the performers. Which were bad enough, because the proprietary interest the public has in Gatsby is over-whelming. There was a time after we started shooting that I wished nobody had ever read the book.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Redford: Because so much of Gatsby's character is implied, which means every person has his own image of him. The clearest character in the book is that of Tom Buchanan, in my opinion. Everybody kept telling me I should be Buchanan, not Gatsby. "Why?" I'd ask. "Because you're athletic, you can ride a polo pony and you're blond." Well, so what? Why couldn't Gatsby be blond? Nowhere in the book does it say what color his hair is.

[Q] Playboy: But you dyed your hair brown for the role. Why?

[A] Redford: Partly as a concession to the opinion people have--that blonds are privileged. I wasn't happy about dyeing my hair, but in retrospect, I think it was a good idea, because it helped me feel slightly awkward, and an important part of Gatsby's character, it seems to me, was his awkwardness--and the attempts he made to conceal it. That was one of the reasons doing that film appealed to me; it was a chance to elude a stereotyped image. Some people have me labeled as a kind of upper-class Wasp all-American boy--winning, successful, intelligent, assured, born of wealth and position. Typecasting is always a curse in this profession; I once played a young Nazi, and for a short period after that, to many people, I was this guy who just came over from Munich, and I'd be fine once I learned the English language. Then I played some psychotic killers on television, and I had to light to land a comedy role. "Well, he's a great killer, but does he have a sense of humor?" So it's always a hassle. But this business of being over-privileged really makes me burn. "If you didn't look as if you had graduated from Harvard, we could believe you as a garbage collector." Well, I've got news for those people: I did collect garbage. I don't know what the inside of Harvard looks like; the closest I ever got to Harvard was getting the Harvard Lampoon's Worst Actor of the Year award. I never got through college, never got good grades. I wasn't a bastard son born in Hell's Kitchen, but I did grow up in a less than privileged neighborhood, and I did run with a grim crowd for a while. I had my share of trouble, and I was exposed to a jail cell a time or two.

[Q] Playboy: What for?

[A] Redford: Oh, just your basic Wasp juvenile delinquency. I wasn't your fair-haired boy. Never combed my hair; couldn't, because I had too many cowlicks. No one ever thought I was good-looking; I was always too messy. Someday I'd like to compare notes with these people who think they've been through more in life. I had all kinds of jobs, all kinds of stupid jobs, got tossed out of a lot of them. Now that I look back, I realize that a lot of my problem was simply that I was growing up in Los Angeles--a city that was beginning to look like the front and back end of a Hollywood set, with a great façade in front supported by stilts behind--in the Fifties, an era that somebody has described as an age in which, the bland was leading the bland. You could tell a man by the shine of his shoes, we were advised, and I just couldn't buy that.

[Q] Playboy: Tell us about some of the jobs you got fired from.

[A] Redford: Oh, had my ego been a little smaller, I probably would have gone and jumped off a bridge, thinking there wasn't anything in life I could do successfully, because I got fired from everything. I got fired from Von's supermarket in Van Nuys because I couldn't stuff groceries into a bag. Couldn't stuff groceries into a bag! I worked at the Standard Oil refinery, started as a roustabout laying pipes, and I ended up sleeping in trenches. So they canned me from that job and put me in the barrel-reconditioning department, and I started playing games with the barrels instead of just taking them off the stack and walking over to the truck with them and loading them onto the truck. I found that by spinning the barrel a certain way, I could curve it, pretty much like a howling ball, right into the slot by the truck. When I knocked down a whole truckload of barrels doing that, they decided to get me out of the barrel department and put me to work doing something with bottles. And I broke a whole load of bottles, pushed them off the end of the dock while I was looking up at the sky. The sky interested me; the bottles didn't. I was lucky they didn't put me on a boat and ship me out to sea! Then I was fired from a couple of jobs as a carpenter's apprentice because I was always crawling under the foundation to grab some sleep. I was a failure at everything I tried.

[Q] Playboy: Why didn't you finish college?

[A] Redford: Thought it was a waste of time. I dropped out of the University of Colorado during my sophomore year. But I never liked school, don't think I really began to learn much until I left. Most of my teachers were bureaucratic types tied to silly rules. "You must print on this side of the paper." "You must use this kind of line on your paper." "You must use this kind of pencil." "This is your textbook." "This is your seat in the second row." It was so regimented it was awful, and I didn't like it. Didn't like the other guys who followed the rules, either. I remember at my high school graduation, the guy who was the student-body president was giving a speech. I was reading Mad magazine through the whole ceremony. I was a slow reader. And this guy got up and talked about ideals and started to cry, and I just had this weird kind of crystal-ball premonition: This guy ain't going to make it.

[Q] Playboy: Were you really a slow reader?

[A] Redford: Well, I never liked books used as a form of instruction. I liked 'em on my own terms, just for enjoyment.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of books interested you?

[A] Redford: Fantasies, fiction. I responded very strongly to Henry Miller's work; I think because he seemed to me to be breaking all the rules of conformity. I liked his irreverence. And he was carnal, and I was going through what I thought was a very carnal period. His love was as strong as his hate, and both were full-out there for everybody to see. And later, when I spent some time bumming around Europe, I identified with him, because he had had a pretty grim time in Europe, too. I used to drive up to Big Sur and go past his house a lot. One time I even walked up to the gate, but I couldn't bring myself to go in.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Redford: Because at the time I didn't have anything to give him, and I was very taken--and still am--with the concept of a fair exchange of ideas. I don't feel I have the right to go up to somebody who's famous and say, "I like your work, so here I am: Entertain me." If I meet a physicist, I hope I can tell him something about movies, because I'm interested in physics. If I sit with a Barry Commoner, I don't feel it's fair to say, "Ok, lay it on me, Barry, where's technology taking us? How have we fucked ourselves up?," unless Barry has some interest in movies and how they work, and I can tell him something. So I couldn't go talk to Henry Miller.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever meet him?

[A] Redford: In a strange sort of way, years later. I was in Santa Monica, driving along, and I pulled up to a crosswalk just as the light changed to green. It was a bright summer day, and all these kids had just gotten out of school and they were a little crazy, like kids are when they've just gotten out of school, and they were honking their horns and yelling at this old gent who was walking his bicycle across the street, hadn't made it across by the time the light changed. I pulled up next to the guy and I saw that he was Henry Miller, wearing knickers and a tweed jacket and cap and dark glasses. And it all came together right there in the middle of Sunset Boulevard: Henry Miller and all these punks yelling at him, things like, "Hey, move it or milk it," "Haul ass, old man," "Get off the road," stuff like that. And I was filled with 80,000,000 things to say to the guy, but what I did was I hung out over the door, looked at him and said, "Take your time, Henry," and drove off. That was my meeting with Henry Miller.

[Q] Playboy: Driving cars is pretty much of a consuming passion with you, isn't it?

[A] Redford: Yes. I love to drive around the country; my mind opens up a lot when I'm on the open road. When I'm driving alone, I get so high, I talk to myself.

[Q] Playboy: Aloud?

[A] Redford: You bet.

[Q] Playboy: What do you talk about?

[A] Redford: Whatever comes to mind.

[Q] Playboy: Weren't you once pretty heavily into auto racing?

[A] Redford: I used to think racing was everything when I was younger. I'll never forget my first car race. I was really jazzed, because I wanted to be an auto racer so bad, and I went out to this race near Van Nuys, and we were all lined up in double file. The guy with the checkered flag was going past all the cars, slamming the hoods shut, and you got in your car and started revving and revving, and everybody was getting ready to move, and that became such a high that I was just revving out the top end. And when he dropped that flag, everybody charged off, and there I sat. I hadn't put it in gear. I was still in neutral, and I had just wound that engine right to the moon. I had to sit there and wait for it to come down enough to get it in gear, grinding it like hamburger. It was an insane moment; I just sat there like some great, dead turd on the track.

[Q] Playboy: And that experience didn't turn you off racing?

[A] Redford: No, I raced a little bit. But I think cross-country driving is more exciting, because you're always varying the terrain. A race track, for the most part, is round. You can predict what's coming, know what obstacles are ahead. Driving through the desert, there's always something new to see: a rabbit darting across the highway, a wreck at the side of the road, an odd cloud formation, somebody hitchhiking, some unexpected obstacle.

Driving, to me, is serious business. Not that cruising-around stuff like I used to do in high school--with your arm out the window and pretending to watch the road while you're looking out for girls. I mean really driving, and that takes a lot of concentration. There's such a release, not unlike coming off the top of a mountain on skis when you're really loose and you know you're ready, that this run has really got it. It's all going to come together, you're going to make all your best moves, and you really let it fly. You let all the stops out. It's the same thing in a car when you just take a breath and say, Ok, I'm going, and you just pile through the night or the day. It's a great high.

Even in a city, figuring out the lights and how to play them, maneuvering through traffic, allowing for ways to handle the guy who might run a red light--that's exciting to me. I once made it through all the lights on Park Avenue in New York, from 72nd all the way down to that Grand Central Building overpass at 46th Street, without stopping once. I'd always had a fantasy about doing that, because those lights are always stopping you on Park Avenue. So one night I did it. Must have been around two o'clock in the morning, and what I had figured out was that you have to get going faster and faster in order to catch each light before it turns red. I was up to over 100 miles an hour; it's awful to contemplate. That was ten years ago, and my hands get sweaty when I talk about it now. I went barreling into that overpass like some giant dragon, just belching exhaust fumes, with sparks and rubber flying all over hell. I didn't think I was ever going to get geared down. I did a big S inside and just had to pull over afterward and wait for my heart to come back down from my mouth.

[Q] Playboy: You were alone in the car?

[A] Redford: Oh, yeah. It's better to do something like that alone, because you don't want to make someone else nervous, or hurt anybody. I suppose some people would consider that Park Avenue thing as reckless driving, but it was an incredible experience, because it had always been one of my fantasies. I have a lot of fantasies about driving.

[Q] Playboy: What are some others?

[A] Redford: Well, a long time ago, when I was a student in New York and stuck there without any money, the only way I could get away was by car, and I did a lot of driving from coast to coast. I'd start feeling good about the time I'd leave Chicago, along around Elgin, Illinois. And that good feeling increased when I'd get into Iowa. And Nebraska was just terrific. Omaha was one of the best spots for me. For years, I've bought Porsches from a dealer in Omaha just so that I'd have a long drive to the Coast after I picked up the car. Anyway, I always felt good on these trips through Colorado and Utah and Nevada. I just loved that big space. It has a real power to it, like a Henry Moore sculpture. The air took on a form of its own. Then I'd start to get antsy about the time I got into Arizona, and as I got to San Bernardino, just before you dip down into all that smog and shit that is Los Angeles, I'd start to go way down, feel real bad, and not want to go any further. I'd slow the car, stop more frequently, anything to prolong the pleasure of being outside the gates, so to speak. And then when I got to L.A., I'd crash for three or four days. Nothing could bring me up. Finally, I started to develop this fantasy about driving from one end of the country to the other, which always felt good. And when I got to New York, just before the Lincoln Tunnel, I'd just pull a big U right there at the toll station and head right back to the West Coast. And just before San Bernardino, it'd be another U. But in my fantasy, L.A. kept getting bigger and New York kept getting bigger, until pretty soon New York went all the way to Chicago, and L.A. came right after Utah, and eventually they cover the whole country. The only spot left was Nebraska, and I had visions of just spending the rest of my life driving in a circle around the state of Nebraska.

[Q] Playboy: Do you really feel that uncomfortable in New York and Los Angeles?

[A] Redford: With New York, I have a kind of love-hate relationship. There is something quite tasty and honest about New York, because it's dirty, really dirty. If things are going to get really foul and ugly, they're going to get foul and ugly in New York first, and I'd rather be where the action is. The bad things that are happening in London and Rome now happened in New York 20 years ago. Pretty soon, I think, the London bobbies will start having to wear guns, and all the development going on outside Rome will eventually engulf the beauty of the city, and it won't be such an Eternal City anymore. I couldn't stay in New York forever, but after a certain period away from the city, you begin to get restless for its grit, its edge, its unexpected surprises. In New York, you know you're alive.

Now, Los Angeles, well, as a young kid, I loved Los Angeles. I thought it was a fabulous place, and I really believe it was. It was beautiful; I remember being able to see the mountains from miles away, and smelling fragrances in the air that you can't smell anymore. But L.A. was being poisoned, really, from the time World War Two ended. Los Angeles was our first victim of technology, our first warning of the environmental crisis. After the war, L.A. was the end of the rainbow for so many people that everybody was coming there to spend their newly gained money, to sell their new inventions, to drive their new cars. L.A. as a receptacle just couldn't take all this; it cracked under the strain. All the new industry that came in--nobody bothered to think about what effects its chemicals were having on the air. When the freeways came, that really bothered me. I never liked the freeways. They were too smooth; didn't have enough wrinkles in them. By the time I was 16 or 17, Los Angeles had changed. I began to feel that there was nobody at home in L.A. anymore, and that's one of the reasons I left. I started driving or hitching around the country whenever I could.

[Q] Playboy: Where did you go?

[A] Redford: Vegas, lots of times. I used to love the smorgasbords there. I'll never forget, though, one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life happened in Las Vegas when I was about 17. I was supposed to meet this girl there, and I wheeled into town and went into the hotel to find out where she was, and they said she was out by the pool. So I went out by the pool, and there I saw all these fat, middle-aged slugs lying around. All the money guys--promoters, advertisers, publicity people--they were lying around the pool getting tan, to make it look as if they did a lot of swimming, but what grabbed me was that they never went into the water. The first thing that hit me was, hey, I don't have much money--I guess I had about 25 bucks on me--but I don't have to take a back seat to these guys. They're all just lying around, probably have a heart condition. But I needed some kind of entry, something to make people pay attention to me. So I figured, well, the thing I got to do is get up on that high dive there and really dazzle their minds a little bit, go through a few good moves. So I climb up and walk out to the end of the high board--I figure I'll go in dry, you know, to make it all the more impressive--and get ready to do this one and a half. So when I feel that all the eyes are on me, I go into my move. What I didn't know was that those boards in Vegas had so much spring. I knew the instant I hit that thing that I was in trouble. The moment I sprung into the air, I thought, my God, I'm going to the moon! Anyway, I came over and around and over again and landed flat on my back. It hurt so much I was crying under the water. I never wanted to come up, and when I did, there was that horrible moment when people were just looking away, you know? And my back was beet red. I felt as if there were a seam up my back. It was just very clear that whatever plans I had had to establish any kind of position with those people were just blown. I got out and walked around the pool, trying to keep my back turned away from everybody, and just slunk away. I never did get to meet the girl I was going to see. I was never one for hanging in alter a great moment like that.

[Q] Playboy: Does that sort of thing happen often?

[A] Redford: Often enough. Another time started out, coincidentally enough, in Las Vegas, but it ended up in a Texas hamburger stand. That was in 1961, in the days when I used to play golf, and I'd been at the Tournament of Champions in Vegas and I had to go to Texas on some family business, so I just decided to put some miles on my Porsche. I went into the Silver Slipper, loaded up on grub at the smorgasbord, got behind the wheel and just drove 1500 miles, from Vegas to Austin. Stopped for gas and that was it; had a few beers, didn't eat.

[Q] Playboy: How long did that take?

[A] Redford: Day and a night. I got into Austin about, 10:30 at night and I was like a zombie, because I'd been pushing that car to full performance the whole time. I literally had to pry my hands off the wheel when I pulled up at an outdoor hamburger joint. I was starving, had to have something to eat, even though I knew I looked berserk. So I went up to, one window and said, "I-want-a-hamburger," in a robot voice. I could see the girl at the counter looking at me, and I realized that everybody was looking at me, because I was sort of weaving from my legs' being cramped up behind the wheel so long. So I put my hands in my pockets waiting for them to fix my hamburger, trying to appear cool. I decided to stretch a little bit, to let them know I'd been driving for a while, and I stretched and wahhh! Banged my head against the glass so hard it stunned me. This time everyone looked up. Well, I didn't want anybody to think I had done anything crazy, so I just started pounding my head against the glass, again and again, as if to say, Yes, this is what I do, just like you scratch your ear; it's just my thing. That whole experience was weird.

[Q] Playboy: Was it only the driving, or had the beers on the empty stomach gotten to you?

[A] Redford: No. I only had a couple. There was a time when I drank pretty heavily. Before I went to Europe, in 1956, and after I came back.

[Q] Playboy: You went to Europe to paint, didn't you?

[A] Redford: Yes. I was in Italy, in Greece, in Germany. I traveled a lot. It was a great education in a lot of ways, but there was a big low in Italy. I guess what I was doing was testing my self-discipline, and finding out what I could do without the benefit of the crutch that alcohol had become. But I was living in a very, very small room in Florence. I had only one outfit and I wore it constantly. I spent a lot of times alone--I mean, really alone. I went long periods without eating, mostly because I didn't have any money, but I enjoyed the fasting. I was willfully putting myself into a bleak situation, and I got into some wild trips. I'd sit in a chair for hours on end, not moving, just letting my mind go. I'd pick a small part of the room and concentrate on it for hours to see what happened. And finally, I was getting into honest-to-God self-induced hallucinations. It was exciting, but then it got frightening because I thought I was losing control of it. I started to conjure up physical symptoms of madness and sickness. I was getting these odd visitations from strange creatures, and it certainly wasn't anything I could share with anybody. I was too young and I didn't feel like any of my friends could understand.

So it was a completely solitary experience. Everything was going into me, and nothing was coming out except in the painting; and when I felt that the professor I admired most was rejecting my painting, it was a terrific blow. So much was happening to me mentally that I couldn't deal with it, and I began thinking very heavily about death and darkness. I remember one particular time lying there in that little room, puffing away on cigarettes all day, and thinking that no one anywhere knew where I was. I was completely alone, and I started thinking about Las Vegas, and it made me crazy. I could hear the slot machines, and I could see the Cadillacs pulling up and the guys with the sharkskin suits stepping out with the chicks on their arms, and I was hallucinating like mad. It was then that I realized how much you can really do on your own, and the idea of drugs and liquor couldn't carry much weight with me after that. But I was just so messed up it was ridiculous, and when I left Italy to hitchhike pretty much wherever a ride would take me, nothing seemed to matter. I had no desire to go home. I just wanted to move. And it was very frustrating when I came home after that experience. In about a year, I felt like I'd aged and become an old man. No one could relate to what I'd been through at all, and so it went back inside me, and I started drinking worse than ever because I didn't have anyone to share that incredible experience with.

[Q] Playboy: Was that when you met your wife?

[A] Redford: Yes.

[Q] Playboy: What were you doing when you met her?

[A] Redford: Dying. Just dying a little bit every day. Heading right downhill, and almost enjoying it. The worse it got, the more I kind of liked it. I really didn't have the energy to come out of it.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think would have happened if you hadn't met Lola then?

[A] Redford: I have a hunch, which probably sounds melodramatic, that I might have gone under in some way. Walked in front of a truck, thinking about the moon, maybe. I just don't know. The fact is that I did meet her. I needed to talk to someone who could understand what I'd been through, and Lola's attitude was so fresh and responsive that I started talking, all night long for a long time. She was genuinely interested in what I had to say, at a time when I really needed to talk. There were nights when we would walk around Hollywood Hills and start talking, like after dinner; walk down Hollywood Boulevard to Sunset, then up Sunset to the top of the hills, then over to the Hollywood Bowl and back and watch the dawn come up, and we'd still be talking. I had always said I'd never get married before I was 35, but my instincts told me that this was a person I'd like to go through life with. So we got married.

[Q] Playboy: When was that?

[A] Redford: September 1958. We've been married 16 years now, and as time goes on, I begin to realize we're sort of a museum piece, just by virtue of the fact we're still married. It's hard to be married, to make a marriage work, but the rewards are awfully rich if you can. There's an exchange that gets deeper as you go on, and it's very fulfilling. A lot of people can have relationships that go on for four or five years and then come apart, or they can just go their own way and have other relationships. That's just as acceptable, but I just happen to like the way things are going for me as is.

[Q] Playboy: Has having children changed your relationship in any way?

[A] Redford: What the kids did was make me realize that I could broaden my capacity to love people. There was a time when I didn't think I wanted kids. I used to have trouble expressing affection. But having kids made me find out that I can love one child as much as the next, and then a third child as much as the other two.

[Q] Playboy: What do you expect to pass on to your children as advice on how to live their lives?

[A] Redford: Don't expect anything, and learn to enjoy the surprises, because they're goddamn enjoyable. I will lay on them the things I think they should know, but it's up to them what they do with it. I wouldn't want them ever to feel they had to go along with peer pressure, which is very dangerous. If they can just develop their own thinking, their own way of doing things, I hope I'm big enough to go along with them. One thing I hope I can give them is a sense of roots, growing up here in Utah. I felt no roots at all, growing up in Los Angeles. Living in Los Angeles is like living someplace on a two-year lease. You feel no sense of permanence.

[Q] Playboy: What was it that made you settle on Utah for your home?

[A] Redford: I was exploring the West, tramping around a little bit, hitting the road, and I came to this place, and I remember saying to myself, I really want to build a house here, right here on this spot that I think is the most beautiful spot I've seen so far. I know there must be a lot of people who say the same thing when they're passing through some beautiful piece of territory, but they pass right on through the woods and only keep the place as a memory. That wasn't for me. I wanted to do it and I didn't care what it took, what sacrifices had to be made; and I was going to do it then. It was wildly inconvenient, actually; my career was going badly and I didn't have any dough. Besides, I had my doubts about my ability to build the place myself because I already had a record of being a klutz as a carpenter's apprentice back in high school. For another thing, I had signed to do a Broadway play--Barefoot in the Park--and I had only four and a half months before rehearsals began. Starting on the house was a monumental decision, but I made it. And it was a good move. It was the beginning of so many meaningful things that have happened to me; helped me learn so much about myself.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Redford: I learned to care for things I never thought I cared about. For example, I used to hunt; hunting was very important to me at one time. But while I was working on the house, deer would come down and feed in the mornings, you know, and migratory birds would come around, and I started looking at birds and animals from a different viewpoint. That changed my whole attitude about killing animals. And I got very, very deep into the experience of living outdoors, being organically connected with the land. I guess I'd always had strong feelings about the land, but they'd been dormant; now they were becoming explicit. And I could express them in building the house, working with my own hands, putting up a stone wall.

Of course, not everything went according to plan. There were some great accidents in building the house. A stairway ended three steps before it was supposed to, so we had to improvise, do something with the space. I got so much into the experience of building the house that I never once gave the Broadway play a thought. I didn't want to go to New York. I wanted to stay and finish the house, and when the winter came I wanted to sit inside and see if the walls were going to fall off, or if the glass was going to crack, or whether the 40-foot fireplace I built was going to crumble into the 35 tons of rock that I had collected myself. I wanted to find out if it was going to stand, to get a reaction like Frank Lloyd Wright must have felt after that earthquake in Japan, when he got the telegram saying his Imperial Hotel was one of the few buildings in Tokyo still standing. So the night before I left for New York we were still working, with lights and lanterns, putting the last of the rocks in place. Then I got on the plane; and when I landed in New York, it was like a re-entry from space, which I didn't handle well at all. Everything seemed speeded up. Everybody was talking too fast and too loud. I felt as if I were about 15 feet tall and a total idiot, as if everything I was doing was in slow motion. And when we went into rehearsals, I just couldn't adjust to it; the play seemed stupid, silly, lightweight. I tried to get fired from the play, told Mike Nichols, who was the director, to get another actor. I did everything but lie down on the stage.

[Q] Playboy: What did Nichols do about it?

[A] Redford: He's a very smart man, an extremely smart man, and something of a psychologist as well. He didn't know why I didn't want to act, but he understood the fact that I didn't want to act--and furthermore, that I should act. He was determined that I was right for the part, and finally he said to me, "Look, I know what you're doing. And I can only say that you're not going to be fired from this part. If you want to go out on opening night with a script in your hand, then that's the way it's going to be. So it's kind of up to you, and I don't think you can afford not to do your best." So from then on, I kind of straightened out. But what I really wanted to do was to get back to the house and our two acres of land.

[Q] Playboy: How much land do you have now?

[A] Redford: Eleven hundred acres at the original place, plus an interest in the Sundance resort, which is another three thousand acres. Then we just bought a 56-acre farm in southern Utah at the mouth of a canyon. It's an old horse palace, with an indoor riding arena, a place for rodeos, 41 stables and a race track, but the principal thing is that it provides 56 acres for crops--corn, sugar beets, tomatoes and alfalfa. I need to have land around me, to farm--because I'm really afraid we may be heading for a famine--and just to walk, through, just to sit down on, get in touch with the elements. We're running out of elements; we're abusing them so badly that people can't relate to anything. I think being away from the land is screwing up most people's psyches.

[Q] Playboy: How can you reconcile this concern for the environment with the building of a resort, which most ecologists would deplore?

[A] Redford: Sundance isn't an ordinary resort. We're developing an area that is anti-development. We're trying to enhance the beauty of the place, not destroy it; emphasizing the ecological underpinnings of the area. There is one other owner at Sundance, incidentally; I'm just the one who gets most of the publicity, because I'm an actor. One time they asked me to speak to a bunch of bankers about Sundance, and I'm not much on public speaking, but I agreed to do it. Now, Utah is quite a conservative area; I think the bankers there have a tremendous distinction in that they think they can somehow take their money with them. They sure are sitting on a big wad. They don't put it into the state and they don't send it outside the state. God knows what they do with it. So I was a little uptight about talking to the bankers, because I thought the way they were doing business in this state was prehistoric. Besides, I didn't think they really wanted to hear me give a speech. Didn't they really want to see me stand up and pull a fast draw, maybe, or find out if I'm actually six feet tall or only five feet, six, or whether I'm really pudgy and wear a hairpiece? Well, one of the other owners, who's a very dear friend of mine, wrote out something nice for me to say. But the moment I got up and looked down at the paper, I knew that speech had to go.

I started out with about the first four lines--you know, "Well, it's a pleasure to be here tonight"--and that's when I put the paper down. What I said to them was, "What are you guys sitting on your money for?" I said, "I would like to talk to you about how tough it is to do business with the bankers in this state." My friend was wilting in his chair, but I went on. What I said was heartfelt and not a put-down or anything, more of a question. Like: "I don't understand. You explain it to me. We come from outside the state; we want to improve the state. We want to build a development here that we think is unique. And we get no help or encouragement from you. You manage to treat people like they're invaders from Mars, and you find it difficult to give up ten bucks. And meanwhile, all the development that you people scream and yell about wanting to bring into the state is being developed by outside money: Texas money, Seattle money, California money, New Orleans money. Where's the Utah money? I mean, are you planting it, or what?" It was kind of an old-fashioned harangue, went on for about a half hour I guess, and I finally just sat down, kind of puffing.

[Q] Playboy: What was the bankers' reaction?

[A] Redford: Well, they clapped, and everyone started to pile out. They came up to me like you do at a wake, when you look at the body in the coffin, and shook my hand. And I thought, well, this is going to be interesting, because they're really going to jump on my bones. They'll say to me, "Who in the hell do you think you are? Some two-bit actor coming into an arena you know nothing about, telling us how to bank?" But that's not what happened. What did happen was that they came up and said, "Sure was an interesting talk. Say, tell me, you know in Butch Cassidy, when you guys jumped off the cliff, did you really make that jump yourself?"

[Q] Playboy: We won't ask if you did. But after making four movies in a little more than a year, what are your plans?

[A] Redford: I'm going to spend as much time as I can in Utah with my family. I guess after all is said and done, I'm happiest in the mountains and the West. And we've started designing a new house up at our new place. I'm so excited about it I can hardly wait to get to work on it. It's going to make even more interesting use of space than our first one. We'll have water coming down from a spring above, and we're going to try to use solar-cell heating and maybe a windmill for electricity, so the main thrust of its energy will be from natural sources. I hope to do as much work on the house as I can myself.

[Q] Playboy: And what do you plan to do with yourself after you've finished the house?

[A] Redford: I'll think about that when the time comes.