Playboy Interview: Robert Redford

What's remarkable about Robert Redford after all this time—and he has been famous for nearly five decades—;'.v that he's still something of a m\sler\. He rarelx gives interviews, and he manages to stay above gossip at a lime when ever\ I 1-year-old -with a cell phone is a paparazzo.

What we do know is that Redjord defies easy categorization. Celebrated jor his golden good looks, he always rejected the role of pretty boy. An intensely pr'wate man, he has dedi­cated his HJe to public causes. And though he's a wealthy Hollywood insider known for blockbusters like Hutch (Mssidy and the Sun-dancc Kid. The Sting and All the President's Men. Redjord's lasting legacy may well be his commitment to scrappy independent film.

At 71, with a face cragged from a lifetime on ski slopes and sunny back lots. Redford isn't showing signs of losing his complexity. This winter he's taking on an unpopular admin­istration by releasing a drama /nil of popular names (Streep, Cruise and, yes, Redjord. who also stars). I.ions for ImiiiIis. set in Washington, [i.C. and Afghanistan, is Redjord's jSthJilm as an actor and his sixth at the helm since whining his only Oscar, Jor directing Ordinary People.

Hut moviemaking is now practically a sideline for Redjord. whose acting and directing efforts have mostly sputtered since long-ago hits like The Xatural, Out of Africa and A River Runs Through it. (He has

fared heller in recent years as a producer of such films as The Motorcycle Diaries.)

From his mountain home on 6,000 acres outside Park City. Utah, the still sandy-liaired icon plays don to a worldwide mob of indie aiiteiirs whose reason for being is the annual Sundance Film Festival. Founded in 1981, Red ford's Sundance Institute and the festival have become the recognized ways to buck the Hollywood establishment. Steven Soderbergh. Quentin Tarantino. Robert Rodriguez and Jim Jarmusch all screened their breakthrough films to the Ugg-booled hipsters there. And Redford has since spun the brand, named for his own career-making role opposite pal Paul Newman, into a small empire. There's the 24-hour Sundance Channel, a Sundance housewares cata­log and an expanding chain of Sundance Cinemas. This year's festival drew -18.000 attendees, some o] whom actually came to see the movies. To counter the increasingly zoo-like atmosphere. Redford's institute dis­tributed pins reading foccs o\ film.

Redford, who's divorced and has three grown children and four grandchildren, is just as focused on politics and the future of the planet. Decades before every Hollywood star drove a hybrid. Redford became a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a base he has used to push for cleaner air and water and alternative-energy production. He has

freqiienlh narrated eco-themed films and com­mercials, and last year the Sundance Channel premiered The Creen, a series of programs and documentaries da'oted to ciwironmental issues. He has also spent much of the past six years railing against the policies—environmental and otherwise—oj the Bush administration.

Horn in Santa Monica, California in 1936, Charles Robert Redford Jr. was a restless kid. His jather -was a milkman and later an oil-company accountant: his mother died young from cancer. In high school Redford stole hub­caps and hiked more than he studied. Later he lost his baseball scholarship at the Univer­sity of Colorado for drinking (and skiing and painting) too much. After a starving-artist stint in Europe, he found his way to New York, where his curiosity about set design led him to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Too good-looking for stage crew. Redford was soon landing parts on Broadway, where his charisma in Xeil Simon's Barefoot in the Park (1963) got Hollywood's attention, and he has been an international star ever since.

Writer David Hochman met Redford at the actor's vacation home in Sapa I alley. (His primary address has been L tali since 1970.) Says Hochman. "Redford is notorious for being late, even though he keeps his watch set half an hour ahead. True to form, he pushed the interview time to the 1 llh hour, but once we sat down he couldn V stop talking. Redford

looks older and softer around the middle than he did in the days of The Sling and The (•real (iatshy, hut at one point he donned a pair oj gold aviator sunglasses and lit uj> that legendary smile. All you can think is. Good Cod! It's Robert Redford!"

PLAYBOY: You've been enormously suc­cessful lor almost 50 years without a major scandal or a real drop in your esteem. In fact, as you've gotten older, you've become more revered. How on earth is that possible? REDFORD: Probably because I never trusted success. I come from a long line of people who thought if something good happens to you, there must be something wrong. Early on, when movies like Butch Cassidy

put a huge spotlight on me, I ran from it. I never fell into the traps of having an entourage and being surrounded by yes-people. 11 never interested me to do Leno or go to parties, and I think that served me. PLAYBOY: Can you imagine starting out in today's celebrity-cra/.ed environment? REDFORD: I'm glad I don't have to. Today more than ever, I see young actors going into the busi­ness of themselves. They find some commercial hook and they play it out. You see them doing every magazine cover, every TV show. I think that's a mistake. One of the benefits of growing up in L.A. was that Hollywood wasn't the end of my rainbow. As a kid, I would see famous actors and say, "Oh shit, that person is bald" or whatever. Furthermore, I always benefited from having interests outside L.A. I felt it was important to be in Utah, to raise my kids there. It was grounding for them and for me. I came to see Hollywood as a place where 1 could make social statements under the guise of entertain­ment—and then get out. PLAYBOY: Lions for Lambs is the latest in a long series of politi­cal movies for you that started

with The Candidate in 19/2. Is your intention to somehow influence public opinion or policy?

REDFORD: 1 gave up a long time ago the idea that a film can change people's lives, let alone their politics. I once had great hopes that people would see movies like The Candidate or All the President's Men and say, "Hey, if we're not careful, we might get snookered." I discovered we Americans enjoy the distraction of entertainment but aren't really interested in the deeper message. We don't like to look inward; we don't like darkness. For me The Candidate is a movie about hypocrisy in politics, about how it's all dominated by cosmetics and dressing well. But I'll never forget,

years later, Dan Quayle saying that was the movie that got him into politics. I thought, Boy, did he miss the point!

The one exception in terms of influ­encing people was always fashion. When we were doing butch Casskh, I wanted to wear a mustache, but they were out of style. My agent was against it. I was told stories about actors whose entire careers were ruined by mustaches. And I said, "That's crap." After the movie hit, mus­taches were everywhere. PLAYBOY: A mustache might have been a good idea for Tom Cruise in Lions for Lambs, given the public's reaction to him lately. As his co-star and director, are you worried about all that negative attention? REOFORD: Tom's a talented actor, and I

think people still respond positively to him. This is an especially interesting role for him because he plays a young Republican who's sort of a better ver­sion of Bush. He's smarter. He went to Harvard and West Point, not to Yale on a pass. The concern for me was whether Tom was up for playing a character like that, and he definitely was. I didn't con­cern myself with the gossip—I never do—and I knew enough from what I've been through to judge the man based on what I experience firsthand. And I didn't see any behavior on the film that troubled me. Really.

PLAYBOY: A producer like Jerry Bruck­heimer has no trouble getting access to military vehicles and government

locations lor his movies. Is that process harder on a Robert Redlbrd film because of your liberal reputation? REDFORD: I can only speculate, but 1 sus­pect it is. For the new film. I wanted a shot of Meryl Streep. who plays a vet­eran political journalist, coming down the steps of the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington. 1 was initially told it wasn't a problem. Word finally got back that the head of security wanted to speak to me directly. Directly? I thought that was odd. He ended up telling me no. which seemed to give him a certain amount of pleasure. Then when our pro­duction designer inquired about taking measurements inside the building so we could re-create it for our sets—not an

uncommon request—we started hearing questions like "Is this that Redford movie?" The tone of the question suggested it would be some sort of lefty pic­ture, as if I were going to shoot down the whole building. In the end, we put in a call to Barack Obama, and he made it possible lo gel what we needed. PLAYBOY: You kicked off this year's Sundance Festival by demanding an apology from President Bush for the war in Iraq. It's nearly a year later. Have you heard from him yet? REDFORD: The situation is worse now. It's worse than Nixon, worse than Vietnam, worse than McCarthy. But it's the same pat­tern, the same sensibility that caused it. You have a leader who's mean, myopic, tyrannical, obsessed with power and willing to make criminal mistakes. You can take almost every area of our society—health, the envi­ronment, the military, jobs— and this administration has savaged it for one percent of the American population. I feel anger and hurt for the loss of the country I once knew. What's amazing is the Republicans— with control of both houses, the Supreme Court and the bully

pulpit—had every opportunity to move the country ahead, and look what they've done in just six years. You begin to won­der. Are we just another empire, like the Ottoman or the Roman, that crashes and burns because of hubris? It's not going to be easy to undo what these guys have done to us. But there's always hope, and my hope has always been in art. PLAYBOY: When you received the Ken­nedy Center Honor in 2005, Presi­dent Bush called you "extraordinarily handsome, effortlessly fascinating and enormously talented." Was it dillicult to shake his hand?

REDFORD: It was tough, but you have to shake his hand. You go through the motions because everybody's taking the

high road. I was assured beforehand that this was an honor above politics, and I said, "If that's the case, okay, I'll have to bite it." It really was about my fam­ily and giving my kids and especially my grandkids a chance to see firsthand how a place like the White House operates, and boy. they saw it all right. PLAYBOY: What happened? REDFORD: What we observed that night was mind-bending. Here were sworn enemies, the leaders who beat the shit out of each other all day in public, but the minute those doors closed for the state dinner, the daggers went away and it was one big happy family. Condoleezza Rice got up and couldn't have been sweeter or more gracious; she was smiling at everyone. I thought, This is so bizarre. Then I saw for­mer Republican senator Bill Frist weaving through the tables, and he came over to Ted Kennedy and started massaging his shoulders and laughing like they were the oldest buddies in the world. Everybody was crossing the aisles and chuckling, and I said, "Oh, I get it! It really is just a game." They have to go out and say, "I represent so-and-so and such-and-such a platform," but it's absolute total bullshit. PLAYBOY: Are you ever ashamed to be an American?

REDFORD: I'm not ashamed. I'm sad. I'm angry. I'm sad to be an American caught in a minority sensibility in this country. But I think it will swing back. It always does. The real question, particularly when it comes to the environment, is when we have a Nero—and that's what Bush is—how many resources do we have to play with before they all run out? How much damage can he do? PLAYBOY: Looking at Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, do you ever think, I should be doing that? REDFORD: Every film about politics I've made makes the point that politics com­promises you. Your hands are tied, and I would never want to be in that posi­tion, so no. I lost all interest in going into politics around the time the Watergate break-in occurred. I was promoting The Candidate, and I did a whistle-stop train tour with George McGovern and some other candidates. I wanted to make the point that I could draw more people just by standing on the back of the train. And that's what happened. They would draw 300 or 400 people, then I would go out and get 3,000 or 4,000. I would tell the crowds, "Thank you all for coming. My fellow Americans, I just want you all to know I have absolutely nothing impor­tant to say." And they would cheer. PLAYBOY: Which presidential candidate excites you most now? REDFORD: There isn't one. In terms of sup­port, I try not to involve myself in national politics. I realize you have much more influence on the local stage. There's so much constipation on the national front, but things can shift locally. I don't agree with everything Mayor Richard Daley has

done, but he's done amazing things with the environment in Chicago, and 1 can support that.

PLAYBOY: Is it a sign of progress that many Hollywood stars now arrive at movie pre­mieres in Priuses instead of limos? REDFORD: Honestly, it scares me. Environ­mental activism isn't about being trendy or making a fashion statement. There's something shallow about that. With the Johnny-come-latelies, you hope it's not just a publicity move, because people will grow tired of it and move on. That's not to say there hasn't been progress. What's changed is the money. The public is wak­ing up to this and buying the green move­ment. Corporate America is finally saying you can be both profitable and environ­mentally conscious. That's something we've been waiting for since the 1960s. What Al Gore's been doing couldn't have happened without corporate funding. Unfortunately, it took the escalation of global threats to make that happen, and now we need more than stars showing up in hybrids and organic cotton. If public enthusiasm wanes, the blue-chip backing will disappear, and then where will we be? We need more funding. We need new green technologies, like the ones coming out of Silicon Valley. We need real action. PLAYBOY: Granted, but we notice you don't have those squiggly bulbs in all your light fixtures. How green are you exactly? REDFORD: I'm not Ed Begley Jr., though I think he's amazing. I'm not that extreme. But I drive hybrid cars. I've had passive solar heating and wind generation in my Utah home since 1975. I bike and hike and ride horses as much as I can. But I must say, I do like racing fast cars. PLAYBOY: How do you rationalize that? REDFORD: Guilty as charged, I'm afraid. It's a hypocritical, weak move on my part. We do what we can. But I've always loved speed. I love finding a good stretch of open road and cutting loose in my Porsche. That's all I want to say about that. PLAYBOY: Do you ever get caught? REDFORD: [Laughs slyly] That's often the interesting part. I was blasting through an Indian reservation one time in northern New Mexico, and the reservation cop took a long lime giving me a ticket. I looked in the mirror, and the place was alive with cop cars. I think the enure Apache nation turned up, and they all wanted a picture with me, down to the last secretary. PLAYBOY: When did that sort of thing start happening to you?

REDFORD: Things started getting hairy around the time I did Barefoot in the Park on Broadway in 1963. I lived a pretty anonymous life before that, but suddenly everything was supercharged. One day in New York I had some busi­ness in a building on the west side, and some nursing-school students got wind I was there. Somebody came up and said, "The nursing gals are freaking out. You have to exit through the base­ment." And I remember being down

there, hearing this thunder of footsteps overhead. I got out to the street, and there was a wall of nurses. They wanted every piece of me. They started clawing at my hair and my clothes. If not for a helpful taxi driver, I would have been torn apart by nurses. PLAYBOY: That doesn't sound totally unpleasant.

REDFORD: The excess attention always made me uncomfortable. I never liked feeling it was all about my looks. You want to be seen for what you can do, not for your hair or your blue eyes or your teeth. The golden-boy thing became a screen in front of everything else, and that really worried me. It felt threat­ening. Suddenly your looks bring up

resentment. You start to represent something to people that has nothing to do with who you are. That's not to say I wasn't enjoy­ing success. I was enjoying parts of it immensely. PLAYBOY: Can you give us a sense of what it was like to be Rob­ert Redford in those days? Were you hang­ing out with Elvis and people like that? REDFORD: I was Elvis in a way. It was abso­lute insanity. Once the money started coming in I could do anything I wanted. I could have a house in Connecticut in addition to an apart­ment in New York. At a moment's notice we could fly to the Carib­bean. We could go out to Trader Vic's for dinner every night if we wanted. PLAYBOY: Were drugs or alcohol ever a problem? REDFORD: No. I tried

everything, but 1 never struggled, tor me, it was a very exciting time, though I wasn't thinking that specifically. I was doing what I wanted to do. People talk about the 1970s now. I was just living my life. I was able to make films that were slightly off the street—Downhill Racer, Jer­emiah Johnson, Three Days of the Condor— and those movies were being funded by popular films like The Great Gatsby. But as good as success was, there were dark sides to it I couldn't have imagined. PLAYBOY: Like stalkers? REDFORD: Stalkers, people hounding you and sneaking through bushes. On my birthday one year, we were on the property in Utah and some woman

came down out of the trees. She was stark naked and carrying a cake, walking toward the house. They led her away, but there was always another girl. Sometimes 1 don't know how 1 survived, but I really don't know how the younger generation of actors—Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and everybody on down—survive, since it's a thousand times more intense. PLAYBOY: Not to alarm you, but do you realize you're as old now as Will Geer was when he played the ornery old coot in Jeremiah Johnson?

REDFORD: Jesus, really? Man, he was old! [laughs] He wasn't in his 80s? Gee, thanks for the reminder. PLAYBOY: Do you feel Will Geer old? REDFORD: I hope this doesn't sound false, but

I don't think about age. It's interesting that other people do. At a certain point I noticed I was being identified by my age: "Blond-haired, 52-year-old actor Redford...." And you wonder. What difference does that make? Well, obviously a big difference. PLAYBOY: Some people—Joan Rivers chief among them—insist you've had plastic surgery. Have you?

REDFORD: No. Look at me. [laughs] I don't like the look of stretchiness plastic sur­gery gives you. It's one reason I've always liked European films. You see real faces. It's sad we feel such pressure in this cul­ture to maintain a certain look forever. I was blessed to look well and retain a youthful look, but that was just genes.

I was disappointed when critics started pointing out my wrinkles. I thought. You mean this is what it's gonna be about now? I'm not going to be permitted to be human? I can't go through the natural changes that have faced every man since the dawn of time?

PLAYBOY: Do you still get sexual attention from strangers?

REDFORD: The sexual energy was always there, and it still is. I'm 71 years old, and 1 still get it. In a way it's bigger now because it's across the spectrum. I get it from peo­ple much, much younger and from older people—teenagers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers. Now it's flattering more than irritating, and it's not as acute; it's more polite. The worst period was probably

alter 1 made Indecent Proposal. Holy God, that one! I couldn't take a step outside without hearing "A million dollars for one night with your wife." If I had to hear "a million dollars" one more time....

PLAYBOY: Did any­body make you a firm offer? REDFORD: Yes, tons of firm offers. Things came through the mail. Certified. I could have made money, [laughs] PLAYBOY: Did that sort of attention contribute to the breakup of your marriage to Lola van VVagenen, the mother of your children, after 27 years together? REDFORD: Yeah,

it was hard. How could it not be? You're a human being, and you're competing with a ghost. You're with this person, but

the person has this other side, this tame thing, that's not real and yet it's every­thing. It's huge; it's bigger than anything you've ever known. But I don't think it's dignified to get into my marriage. There's nothing dark, nothing to hide. I got mar­ried young, at the age of 21, and it was good while it lasted. But you go your dif­ferent ways and grow out of where you were. I want to protect the family. PLAYBOY: Actors like Warren Beatty are well-known for their involvement with numerous women, but you never had a reputation as a philanderer. No doubt you could have had your pick of any woman, including co-stars like Natalie Wood and |ane Fonda.

REDFORD: I won't comment on other actors. The job is hard enough with­out someone like me telling stories. But being single never appealed to me, and I didn't think about it much. I was aware there were people who lived a certain kind of playboy life and were immersed in it; I just didn't. There were always beautiful women around, of course, and I had beautiful co-stars, but making movies for me in those days was like dropping bombs behind enemy lines: I would do my work and get out of town.

PLAYBOY: You're officially single now, though you appear to have a good thing going with your lovely compan­ion of eight years, Sybille Szaggars. Will you get married again? REDFORD: [Silence]

PLAYBOY: Okay. Do you believe in marriage? REDFORD: It depends on the individual, but as a general category, no. PLAYBOY: F'erhaps we should change the subject. Rumor has it you and Fidel Cas­tro are good buddies. REDFORD: Ah, Fidel, [laughs] I met Castro for the first time in 1990. Gabriel Garcia Marquez had come to Sundance at my request to start a Spanish-speaking lab with Cuban filmmakers. They smuggled their films out of Cuba, and it was the first time we got any traction from outside media for the Sundance Institute. Afterward Gabo asked me to return the favor and come to Cuba with him. I took a tiny plane from Orlando to Havana, and we were set up in these magnificent state houses. One night at midnight Castro's men arrived unannounced, followed by Castro. He's a great teaser, that Fidel. He kept hitting my leg. "Oh, you like baseball," he said. "I like baseball too." He told me he loved The Natural, though I have no idea how he got a copy. After a while he decided we were friends and said, "Redford, you're a good guy. I want you to be my guest at the Cinco de Mayo parade." I thought, Hmmm, could be interesting. He started hitting my leg again. "You sit with me on the parade stand," he said, and I said, "Whoa! Wait a minute! I don't think so." I could imagine that picture getting around. PLAYBOY: Were you afraid it might tarnish your reputation among the right wing as a pinko, granola-crunching tree hugger? REDFORD: Hardly. I had already been burned in effigy several times. You have to remember, when I started speaking out politically in the late 1960s, actors weren't supposed to talk about their beliefs. The stu­dios certainly would have been happy if I'd just played romantic leads like in The Way We Were and kept quiet. But I couldn't keep quiet. As I got more successful, I realized I had a platform to get messages across. In the early 1970s I went out against a power plant in southern Utah and got hammered for it. The locals thought it would benefit them economically, but I saw it would totally destroy a big section of contiguous national park. I called 60 Minutes. They did a show

on it, and the plant pulled out. The locals threatened my life and my family. That's when I realized my activism was throwing a net over innocent people, like my kids, and that made me want to retreat further. PLAYBOY: As if it weren't complicated enough for them having a dad like Robert Redford.

REDFORD: I worked hard on giving my kids a solid foundation. That started with communication, encouraging them to speak up about things that bothered them, both in the family and in the larger world. I also spent as much time with them as I could. That was impor­tant. It helped that they grew up in both Utah and New York. Utah taught them the power of nature, which is steady, unlike fashion or show business. Going to school in New York, they learned the value of recognizing bullshit. As you get successful and famous, you start to get taken, even if you have radar. You have so much thrown at you, and it's impor­tant to figure out what's real and what's not. I'm proud to say my kids turned out okay. My son's a writer and producer. One daughter's an actress who recently directed a film. My oldest daughter is a painter and is married to Eric Schlosser, who wrote Fast Food Nation, so there's been a real uptick in their lives. PLAYBOY: Is it tricky having a son-in-law like that around when you're craving a Big Mac?

REDFORD: I eat pretty healthily, but I'll tell you, when I drive from Sundance to Santa Fe, where we have some property, I love a cheeseburger. It's one of those sec­tions of the country that don't have a lot of healthy food options, so what are you going to do? I'm forced to have a Big Mac or a Whopper or a chocolate malt. I like those old-fashioned American pleasures. PLAYBOY: How are you with more mod­ern pleasures? Are you a web surfer or a video-game guy?

REDFORD: No. I love technology. It makes life easier. But I see people checking their handheld devices, and they make me want to scream. Technology has taken the poetry out of communication. I love letter writing. I love getting letters. You can feel the person at the other end. These digital messages we get are over and out. The shorthand leaves me kind of cold. It's why I don't have e-mail. PLAYBOY: You run the Sundance Film Festi­val and you don't have an e-mail address? REDFORD: I have an addictive enough personality to know if I started e-mailing people, I would constantly be checking in, constantly e-mailing people about financing or whatever. Fortunately at Sundance, we have a bigger team in place now than we did the first year, when I was literally out on Main Street in Park City, saying, "Hey, we're showing a film in here. Want to come see it?" PLAYBOY: With 50,000 attendees expected next year, you don't need to do that anymore. In fact, many people

say Sundance has become a media cir­cus and a corporate sellout. REDFORD: It certainly has grown. The success of Sex, Lies and Videotape in 1989 brought the Hollywood merchants. Once the merchants came, the distribu­tion and marketing people came. The agents came, the Weinsteins came, the film press came, the celebrities came, and the paparazzi came. Once the paparazzi came, fashion came. Then another type of paparazzi came, and the parties got bigger. And the crowds got bigger. That's when the difficulties began—to manage it, to keep the reins on it. It had been this safe haven, and now Paris Hilton and Britney Spears were coming, people who had nothing to do with film. I thought, Oh shit! PLAYBOY: Of course, the upside has been huge. Sundance has produced some amazing, provocative films: Little Miss Sunshine, Boys Don't Cry, The Blair Witch Project, El Mariachi, Saw and on and on. What have those successes meant for you personally? REDFORD: They've meant the world to me. At a certain point in my life I said, I've achieved something. Life has been good to me. What can I put back? The idea of creating opportunities for others felt really good. There's no equivalent in the movie world of summer stock in the theater, of a training ground where you can learn by making mistakes and are free to risk. That was the whole point of the Sundance Lab, and the films that came through there needed a place to screen, so we created the festival. Hol­lywood has never been a safe place. It's competitive; it's cutthroat. People will slice you apart for money, and nobody cares much about artistic content. We've worked hard with Sundance to nurture talent, to make movies that aren't just about the bottom line. PLAYBOY: Looking back on Sundance, is there one glory moment that stands out for you?

REDFORD: Quentin Tarantino came through our lab. Paul Thomas Ander­son, Wes Anderson, Kevin Smith. These were all glory moments, but the biggest moment I remember was when 1 was in New York for a photo op, which I never like, for Quiz Show, and I was getting itchy and scratchy and wanted out. All of a sudden this guy came up who looked like a panhandler. He had an Army fatigues jacket on, long straight hair, and he started in, "Mr. Redford, Mr. Redford." I said, "Sorry, son, 1 gotta go," but he had something for me. People always have something to give me—a picture to sign, a script to read—but it was a tape of a movie. I said, "I can't," but he started begging me. Partly to get rid of the guy, I took it. But I also knew that's what Sun­dance was about. Anyway, it turned out the guy was Ed Burns, and the movie was The Brothers McMidlen, which he'd made for less than S35.000. I called Eddie and

told him to cut 35 minutes. He showed it at Sundance. It won the big award and went on to push Waterworld, a movie made for SI75 million, out of theaters. There's nothing more gratifying than seeing a kid who put everything on his credit card or borrowed from everybody in his family to make something great. That's the glory of independent film. PLAYBOY: Do you worry that Sundance will become irrelevant in an age when everybody on YouTube is an indepen­dent filmmaker?

REDFORD: No, because Sundance delivers something you can't get sitting in front of your computer. We've given something to the moviegoer: an experience. The big movie theaters came in and created very hostile environments. You have thin walls, 20 theaters and concession prices that are through the roof. People are noisy, and they usher you in and out as quickly as possible with one movie and six bombastic trailers. Our latest venture takes Sundance into towns across Amer­ica with our chain of Sundance Cinemas. It's not the kind of chain that plants a Godzilla footprint in a neighborhood and

takes the money and runs but a group of theaters that are at heart a gathering place for people who love film. These venues partner with local arts organi­zations and universities and bring the feeling of the labs. The advice I got was "Don't do it. Theaters are dying." But we have six so far, and they're working. PLAYBOY: Is it fair to say all the attention on Sundance and other people's work took its toll on your acting career? REDFORD: I underestimated the amount of time and energy Sundance would take. I underestimated what would hap­pen if my ego got involved. I started tak­ing it personally and felt the need to put money into it, raise money for it. So I didn't make as many films. My attentions were elsewhere, and I have mixed feel­ings about what that has meant. The cost of Sundance has been great personally in that it wore me out. I'm ready to let go now. I'll always be involved with it, but I don't have to tend it. And I miss my own work so much that I need to get back to it. I still want to do more. PLAYBOY: Von haven't done too badly for the son of a milkman. If you had to

choose one moment from childhood to relive, what would it be? REDFORD: The eighth grade. It was a particular time in my life when women kicked into gear. I excelled at sports. I became more social. Life was good. The war was over. America was at its highest point in the 1950s. It was a high point for a number of reasons, and it came together in the eighth grade. PLAYBOY: Is it true your family never con­sidered you a success? REDFORD: My father and grandfather both gave me a hard time. When I went into acting they were scared to death. My father came from a very poor back­ground in New England; he was very cautious and tried to put that shadow on me. When he gave me my allowance, he would hold on to the dollar bill for a few extra seconds so I would know where it came from. He wanted me to go to Stan­ford and get a conventional job. get into business, but I wasn't going that way. PLAYBOY: Wasn't he impressed once you got your early TV and stage gigs? REDFORD: Even when I started becoming well-known, he was still concerned that the bottom would drop out. I would get one bad review for Barefoot in the Park, and that's the one he would men­tion. Eventually he came around and was proud of me, and I think he was surprised he was proud. But his father was the real troublemaker. When Dad told him I wanted to be an artist, my grandfather said, "Did you tell him he can't eat art?" Later, when my grandfa­ther was dying, I went to see him at a nursing home in Connecticut. I wanted to please him, so I got dressed up and pulled up in a fancy car and told him, "Things are going great. I got this part and that part." The nurses had fallen in love with my grandfather. He was a real charmer. And they said, "Charles, isn't it lovely your grandson is doing so well," and he said, "Yeah, but you might want to count the silverware when he leaves." PLAYBOY: Besides keeping you humble, what did your family teach you? REDFORD: When I was in the third grade, 1 had a friend named Lois Levinson, and she was my pal. One day I began to notice this buzz around school: Some­body was a Jew. I didn't understand what was going on. Then 1 heard words like kike and Yid, things like that. Suddenly something bad was going on, and it had something to do with being a Jew. One day out of the blue, in class, Lois stood up and said, "My name is Lois Levinson, and I'm a Jew." And I thought, Lois is one of those! Lois? Oh my God! Why is she doing this? "And I'm proud of it," she said. Very bold, very brave but very confusing to me. So I ran home, and at the dinner table I said, "Hey, what am I?" My dad said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Today Lois Levinson got up and said she was a Jew. What am I?" My dad said, "You're a Jew." I said, "What?" I

thought my life was over. My mom said, "Charlie, Charlie!" And he said, "No, he should know about this." And I was dev­astated. My dad had a wicked sense of humor. I ran to my room and was in there awhile before he came in and said, "Look, I told you that to make a point." It made a huge impact on me. From then on I was going to defend anybody in that situation. PLAYBOY: Who gave you the idea you could achieve greatness? REDFORD: Aside from Ted Williams, nobody, really. If I had to name a person, it was my father's brother, David. He was an amazing guy, six feet six inches with black hair, an incredible athlete. He went to Brown University on a scholarship, became Phi Beta Kappa and a Rhodes Scholar and spoke four languages flu­ently. When World War II broke out he was offered a job playing ball with the St. Louis Browns, but he went into the Army instead and became General Pat-ton's translator. He was killed by a sniper at the Battle of the Bulge. I was around seven, and it was the first sense I had that things could go really wrong. But Uncle David also showed me life could be an adventure. Professionally, I've always been grateful to Paul Newman for giv­ing me the chance to be in Butch Cassidy. After that my life changed forever. PLAYBOY: There's been talk recently of you and Newman getting back together to make another movie. What's the status of that? REDFORD: It's not happening, sadly. Paul and 1 were planning on doing a film ver­sion of Bill Bryson's wonderful book A Walk in the Woods. I got the rights to it four years ago, and we couldn't decide if we were too old to do it. Then we decided, Let's go for it. But time passed, and Paul's been getting older fast. 1 think things deteriorated for him. Finally, two months ago, he called and said, "I gotta retire." The picture was written and everything. It breaks my heart. PLAYBOY: Does that make you think about your own retirement or, dare we say, your mortality?

REDFORD: Retirement is not an issue for me. I'm going to keep working, and I would like to put together more than one picture every three years. I'm inter­ested in telling the story behind the story everyone knows about Jackie Robinson. We've all seen so many photographs of him as this emblematic figure in the Brooklyn Dodgers uniform, who broke the color barrier and paved the way for black players to compete in the major leagues. But nobody knows the story of how he got to that point. Very few people know the story of his relationship with Branch Rickey, the white baseball execu­tive who signed him. Even fewer know how virulent the racial prejudice Robin­son faced was, what a threat his signing was to the Negro Leagues and the tre­mendous amount of risk involved in his going to the majors. I would like that to be my next picture.

PLAYBOY: And when you're not making a movie, what will vou do? REDFORD: I would like to spend as much rime as possible being physical. I've been phvsical all my life, and it gives me such pleasure to ski, bike and play tennis. I'm also interested in talking to people, to tell the public who I am a little more. I pretty much stay private, but about two years ago I realized people had lost touch with who I was because I wasn't out there on TV and had always said no to publicity. People had fallen for this image. I sensed something. Someone suggested I should go out and start speak­ing, to tell people who I am a little more. So I signed up with a speakers bureau and started talking at college campuses, to groups, to Vegas. You wouldn't believe how much they'll pay me to stand onstage for seven minutes with the head of Intel. But it was also a real education for me. PLAYBOY: Did you feel like a rock star? REDFORD: What I felt was respect. People have actually been moved by whatever it is I've done, and there was this enormous gratitude. "Thank you, Mr. Redford, for The Great Waldo Pepper." Or "I took my grandfa­ther to see A River Runs Through It, and he asked me to take him to the river one last time." And also "Thank you for speaking out on the environment and for various issues all these years." It gives me hope that the work I've done means something. PLAYBOY: Do you believe in an afterlife? REDFORD: I'm not sure I do. I've explored every religion, some very deeply, enough to know there's not one philosophy that can satisfy me. Problems can't be solved with one way of thinking. If anything is my guide, nature is. That's where my spiritual­ity is. I don't believe in organized religion, because I don't believe people should be organized in how they think, in what they believe. That has never been driven home as hard as with this administration. When somebody thinks Clod speaks to him, you've got trouble. If God is speaking to the presi­dent, he's speaking with a forked tongue, because the behavior of this administration doesn't seem very godlike or spiritual.

I often think of the arc of my life as having moved from a very narrow space to a much larger one. Growing up in a working-class world in Los Angeles, I had no luxuries or entertainment. I was ashamed to have people come to our house. You're defined by that, and you try to take every opportunity that comes to you with whatever skills you've got. In my case, I acted awhile and then tried to advance those skills. Theater led to TV, TV led to film, and acting led to direct­ing and producing, which led me to think about Sundance. Each time, I got itchy. I wanted more authorship, more ownership of the subject. It's all part of the adventure I've sought since I was a kid. Is there an afterlife? As far as I know, this is it. It's all we've got. You lake your opportunities and you go for it.

A candid conversation with the iconic actor-director about luhy he likes fast cars, hybrids and Paul Neiuman and doesn't like George Bush or the press

You want to be seen for what you can do, not for your hair

or your blue eyes or your

teeth. The golden-boy thing

became a screen in front of

everything else.