If it wasn’t for a lucky break in a Southern California, World War II era classroom, the world might not know Robert Redford. As a young boy, “Little Robby” used art to satisfy his boredom during long school hours. Like helium to a balloon, his head filled with images that a teacher forced him to share with his third grade peers in an attempt at humiliating him. The attempt backfired. Everyone in class ended up enjoying art-filled journeys with Robby, as he held court with his fellow eight-year-olds. By the time he was a teenager, there was no denying that Robert had the desire and skills, athletic and artistic, of an amateur Early Wynn with a splash of Pablo Picasso.  And he had the looks of, well, Robert Redford.

It was impressive to all but his father. A one-time milkman by trade, Redford Senior was hopeful his son would become something sensible, like a lawyer. Robert’s first attempt at the mainstream – a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado – didn’t work out. So it wasn’t looked upon fondly when, as his second act, he chose the prestigious Pratt Institute of Art. Art school led to acting classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.  And you most likely know the rest of the story, or, at least, much of it. Robert Redford became the great American actor with brains, brawn, talent and charm. He hit the big time in 1969 with “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” alongside the late Paul Newman. He amassed dozens of hit films, and all the notoriety and success a person could stand. He became a man who got bored with the banality of the mainstream and sought out the tributaries in life. Stepping off the beaten path took him to what would become the headwaters of his legacy – founding the Sundance Institute, which has changed the TYPE of films that are available around the world.

Redford will always be thought of as a heartthrob, an arts activist, a leading man, and a Renaissance man, all rolled into one. But perhaps the most important part of his many-pieced puzzle is that of preservationist, from the land he loves so much in Utah to the ideas that will continue to give “small” films a firm place in our culture.

Based primarily in Napa Valley, California, but as a doting father and grandfather, Redford frequents the Carmel area and other parts of the West. He works tirelessly to weave art into our daily tapestry, whether by supporting Slam Poetry or bare bones movie making. Through his Sundance Institute and programs at the newly formed Sundance Preserve, he is making change happen – one word and one frame at a time. At the age of 72, he knows slow and steady wins the race.

There is nothing slow about his pace in conversation, though. Redford is genial and passionate. He talks with enthusiasm about using art for social change. But before we really get rolling with our conversation, I admit I am fumbling with my tape recorder that never seems to work correctly, and it brings something to mind for Mr. Redford. It’s an example of one of those consequences of being a celebrity, or in his case, an icon, which causes him momentary regret.

ROBERT_REDFORD: This recurring thing happens, which is kind of comic, but also very annoying.  You’re in public somewhere, someone comes up, and you want to be respectful, you want to be polite.  They say, “Oh, can I have a picture?  This would mean everything.  It’s for my grandmother.”  They take a camera, and you wait, and they can’t get it going.  And you stand there, and stand there and stand there.  People start looking and wonder, “What’s going on?”  Then THEY come over.  And that’s how it all begins. You have to stand there, and you become a statue.  And it all begins with somebody who can’t work their camera.

DINA_EASTWOOD:  Yes, I’ve been there, but it’s me who is taking a photo of someone with Clint, and I can’t work their camera! (I have now worked out my issues with the tape recorder so we can continue our conversation about art and its impact).

You have single-handedly changed our exposure to independent film.  Can you tell me what the climate was at the time, internally and with your career, that made you feel you needed to make a change and create The Sundance Film Festival?

REDFORD: When I first got into the business of being able to produce my own films, that was 1970, I had worked through the regular process of starting out as an actor on the New York stage, and from there to live television, and then on to film. When I got into film, I labored as an “actor for hire” for five years, six years, and then I got antsy.  Because I had started my career as an artist, as a painter, I missed being able to have more control over the story that would be told. So that led to me producing. When I started to produce, I was interested in films that didn’t fit easily into a box office formula. They were more independent in nature. They were more like “The Candidate,” “Downhill Racer,” or “Jeremiah Johnson.”  They were not accepted as regular fare. So I had to push hard by balancing it out by doing a large film – a more conventional, commercial film. By being in those films, I was able to ask to make a smaller film, on the side, below a two million dollar budget. That’s how it started. It went on for about ten years. Then 1980 came about, and it led to me directing my first film. All the films that I had been involved in that were very, very personal were all smaller independent films. But I was able to do it within the mainstream because there was no independent film category except in the educational arena. The NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities), or NEA (National Endowment for the Arts), would sometimes sponsor low budgets, you know – ten, twenty thousand dollars – they would give somebody to make a small film. But those films would usually end up in the educational circuit. The category was very small. When 1980 came, I realized the industry was starting to move toward more centralization. It was going to begin to lose its focus on smaller films. Through the 1970’s you could do both. But when I saw this happening, I realized a lot of young filmmakers were not going to have a chance.

I decided in 1980 I was going to stop for a year. I had worked hard for over a decade and filled my life with a lot of work. I decided I was going to take a year off and think about what I could do to put something back. That’s how it came about. The idea of putting something back was creating a mechanism where young filmmakers, new voices, would have a place to work and rehearse, like they do in the theater. That didn’t exist in film. So I took the land I had in Utah and made that available, and I spent about a year designing the process. I decided it would be kind of like the theater, that filmmakers would have a place to rehearse, and we would use tape because film was too expensive. I would have artists come and I would ask colleagues of mine to give up their time. Would they be willing, remembering that we all started at one point from scratch, to put something back with me, and help these new filmmakers? That was the Sundance Institute, and it was non-profit, and that was in 1980.

So we started this lab where we would take scripts from new filmmakers. We would choose the scripts based on how original or how fresh the ideas, and how this process could help them. Finally, in 1985, I could see that we were starting to get films coming through. The first one to break through was a film called “El Norte.” That was by the Navas – Gregory Nava and his wife – their film broke through into the mainstream. That was the first sign that this COULD work.

We were developing this process where filmmakers were coming through and getting their films made, but there was no place for them to go, because the mainstream was locked up between the distributors and the studios, or the distributors and the theater owners. The work was not being seen. That led to the idea of a festival. I put it in Utah because I couldn’t afford anything else! It would be too expensive to do it in an urban area like New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco.   There was not a lot of support for this in the beginning. The Hollywood industry, they didn’t frown on it as much as they sort of pushed it aside as irrelevant. Then sometimes in a paranoid state, they’d say, “What’s he doing?  He’s starting some sort of insurgent camp up there in the mountains.” There was not any support coming from Hollywood, so I had to put it in a place where we could afford it – Utah. I decided to make it weird. I said, “Well, if we are going to start a festival, then we’re going to have to draw attention to the fact that it exists. So let’s move it to the winter, put it in a ski area where it’s hard to get to, and let’s make it weird and strange. That might be interesting!”  That’s how it all started with the festival.

It was about five years before it was clear that the festival would succeed. I was told when I started it that it wouldn’t make it because it wasn’t commercial. You didn’t have any way to market the films because they hadn’t been seen yet. There was such diversity to them, it would be risky because there would be a lot of films that people didn’t want to see.  And I said, “Well, that’s the point?” The point is to keep diversity alive because that’s what, I think, really makes this country work. So let’s show that. Let’s let people decide. We’re not going to decide about the films. We’ll just put them out there, let the audience come and decide for themselves. But at least they’re going to have a broad menu to choose from as opposed to what’s going on in the mainstream. They (Hollywood) were focusing on films that would pretty much be “box office guaranteed” – like franchise films, children’s films, remakes, which I think are a waste of time. There are too many great stories to tell to waste your time with a remake.

Dina: All “children” experience some growing pains. I’m sure there are some things that you’d change, if you could, about the festival? I assume there are things taking place now where you go, “whoa whoa, I didn’t mean for that to happen!”

REDFORD: First of all, let’s talk about the gift bags. The gift bags would be the first sign of something going “off.”  What a lot of people don’t know about the festival is, because it’s non-profit, we program it exactly the same way as we did the first year. It’s now what, 25 years old?  It’s programmed every single year in the exact same way, which is – it’s all about the new filmmakers and the new films. The problem is that somewhere in the early 1990’s or the mid-90’s, the festival started to grow. It started to have monstrous cell reproduction. I’ve always been a big fan of documentaries, and I wanted to promote documentaries in the festival. As globalization was occurring, and borders all over the world were beginning to dissolve, we were able to bring films from all over the world to Park City. So once that happened this thing started to grow. At the same time, independent film started to rear its head in the marketplace. You started to have low budget films that were breaking through. Some of Quentin Tarantino’s films were breaking through and scoring, and that’s when Hollywood paid attention. They said, “Wait a minute, what’s going on up there?” And they didn’t want to lose out. So they began to come up.

In addition, actors were getting tired of the offerings. There weren’t many great roles for actors like there used to be. So they began to gravitate, for the sake of good work, to independent films. Once that happened, and the studios got worried that they were missing out on something, they developed their own independent film categories. They developed Focus Films, Fox Searchlight – they developed their subsidiaries so they wouldn’t lose out. When that happened, suddenly well-known actors and actresses started to come to the festival. Once they came, the paparazzi came, and once the paparazzi came, then suddenly, there was this sort of buzz, this kind of thing happening where it began to move into more “fashion.” Once that happened, then we got – which is the greatest threat of all – the ambush marketers: people who wanted to bring their brands to Park City for ten days, take space on Main Street, and pay a fortune for the space and then promote their brands. That’s when the “swag bags” started. It went from there into private homes in Deer Valley and Park City where the brands would come in and pay three, four times what the places were worth, rent them for two weeks, and throw these big parties where they’d hand out these free bags. Well, that was just an extra tier being added to what we did. But that began to get the attention from the media. The media came in, and then when Paris Hilton showed up, that was it because she didn’t care about the movies – she just went to the parties. Suddenly we had people like that coming to the festival just to be seen. When that started to get more attention than what we were doing at the core, that’s when I started to get worried.

Dina: Well, I guess it’s a free country.

REDFORD: It’s a free country, and therefore we can’t control it. We can’t afford to rent the space out ourselves because the prices are too high.  So the only thing we CAN do is try to draw attention to what the festival is really about, and that has gotten harder and harder over time.

Dina: It’ll pass. I don’t even know if it tarnishes the festival.

REDFORD: You get a lot of people around you trying to leverage their own interests when they get up there and make connections. It becomes a high leveraging place. It adds a tier of drama. But you know, there’s really nothing we can do. We’re just going to wait out this trend.

Dina: Can you explain your observation of films becoming “centralized?”

REDFORD: During the 1970’s, films were made that were different, that maybe took some chances. Films I did, like “Three Days of the Condor,” were a little offbeat, politically driven – but Hollywood would accommodate films like that. You could make large films then, but you could also make the small films. In 1980, the entire industry was moving toward centralization. The studios started to only put money into a guaranteed box office success. And it became all about franchises, sequels, even cartoons were being made into movies. The studios were putting all their energy into that! This all coincided with the advent of cable television, computers coming on line, and video. They were all going to be competing with film. There used to be a bottom line, but now the bottom line seems to have fallen out. I wanted to be able to keep the part alive that supported the smaller films.

Dina: I know you can name a lot of things that are not working well in the industry, but what’s working correctly?

REDFORD: I hate to say it, but I don’t go to the movies very often. I don’t go to the cineplex. I do see movies in my home during the year. It remains to be seen how changes that are affecting the industry are going to be good or not so good. Change – it’s so extraordinary. The studios’ job is changing so much at this time. Studios are now just clearinghouses. They take outside money ‘in’ to get the films made, then they distribute them. They take the outside money, but now with the economic situation, that money is shrinking. It’s a wild, chaotic shift going on.  For me it’s in such a state of flux. The biz as we knew it is NOT going to be the same. I am not sure how it’s going to settle out. Will the multiplexes decline down to nothing? Will the budgets adjust for these huge films? The economy is affecting everything. Outside investors used to take chances with the small films. I’m all for the indy films, but it’s going to get harder to get them made. Where’s the money going to come from?

Dina: Do you teach students at the Sundance Institute how to make films on a small budget?

REDFORD: We don’t teach that. We teach you to get on your feet. If you took the film process and laid it out across a clothesline, you’d have a script, then the actors, the staging, the filming, the editing – we get them straight into that. At the labs at the Institute, each is a concentrated period of time. We use experienced people as resources. They will come in and work with filmmakers, and help them attain a vision for their story. Nobody sits in chairs. The process itself educates you. In the early years, in the process, we would have a producer section. They would come in and discuss how hard it was to get money, to be frugal, to be focused. But the other work was suffering. Now, producers come and talk to the filmmakers in another session and talk about how to make money and save money.

I always hated watching the excesses of big budget films. You take a movie that I’ve done that had a huge budget, like, say “The Great Gatsby” – 22 weeks of filming. Being there and seeing it all happen made me very, very uneasy. You can move faster and dictate your own pace when you’re working on a smaller project. I am a big proponent of lower budget, smaller films.

Dina: Does art factor into your daily life?  Do you still get to paint?

REDFORD: I have pretty strong feelings about art. There are a lot of reasons I enjoy ARTWORKS Magazine, but especially the IDEA of it, how it talks about art in a broader sense.

Right now, I am very focused on young people, and using art as a form of social change by putting art into more schools and into the educational system. It meant the world to me as a kid. I don’t know what would’ve happened to me without art because I went to a pretty lousy public school in Los Angeles. It was the end of the second World War, so a lot of the good teachers were away, off to the war, and we had substitute teachers. It was pretty pathetic, and I was bored. I was a bad student, my mind was wandering and I wanted to be somewhere else. I loved sports and I loved art. So while the teacher would be mumbling something, that to me was incredibly boring or incoherent, I would be sketching. I would be drawing. One day, in third grade, the teacher called me down. She said, “Well, I see that Robby Redford there has something more interesting to do than listen to what we’re doing.” She was going to punish me. It was humiliating. She asked me to step in front of the class and SHOW what I was doing. I was embarrassed. I got up there, and I thought, “Oh Jesus.” But when I showed it to the class, they were interested, they were intrigued. She said, “Now tell us what you’re doing.” So I told them the story I was telling with my drawing. She made an incredible decision that could have altered my pathway. She decided that this was my form of self-expression, and that I shouldn’t be shut down. She then created this space every Wednesday where I would go in front of the class and she would put an easel up there, and some newsprint paper, and tell me, “Now, draw us a story.”  And I would draw a story every Wednesday, and she would give me 15 minutes. The class loved it, and I felt empowered, just when I was feeling humiliated, and feeling like I was stupid and a bad student – I had kind of a rough childhood – and it could have gone really, really south. Now I think about how important it is, even before kindergarten, to learn to draw, and even if kids don’t end up as artists – they can end up stockbrokers, whatever – just the idea of putting creativity up front and see where it could go. I really think it’s a good idea.

I read an article awhile back about a study and there was an enormous dropout rate occurring in colleges around the country. The study showed the majority of dropouts were in curriculums that did not have art. Where art was in the curriculum, and strongly so, there were fewer dropouts. It led me to think of how young people today – particularly with this election and this historical moment – how it’s going to be the young people’s role to shape the world and to be active in it. I think art should play a big role.  So I’m very committed to it, and I am prejudiced because I started out to be a painter, and kind of segued from painting into performing. I just think it’s really important.

Dina: It’s pretty cool to have a gorgeous son – a jock who can paint!  That’s a very interesting combo. But your dad would have probably liked you to stick with numbers and baseball? Or were your parents proud of your artistic skills?

REDFORD: My dad came out of The Depression. He wanted something for me that he couldn’t have. We were a lower/working class family. I grew up in an Hispanic neighborhood in Los Angeles, and we were one of a few Anglo families in this neighborhood of working class, Mexican families. My dad was a milkman. He just wanted me to have an education and do what he thought would be the secure path, be a lawyer or something. It just wasn’t for me. It just wasn’t going to be. So, even though he liked the fact that I was good at sports, he didn’t see art as substantial. There was a lot of pressure, “Don’t fiddle around with art, get serious.” And I couldn’t get serious about the other things because they didn’t interest me. There was not a whole lot of support for me and art work. Just because of the nature of things at that time in our history. People were just coming out of The Depression right into a war. And everybody was worried about their lot in life, and art was not seen as anything substantial.

Dina: What did artists even do then in the workforce? You had do be wearing a beret in a studio, or working for a corporation. I imagine a few graphic artists existed for corporations?

REDFORD: For corporations or the WPA (Work Projects Administration) stuff.  Essentially, it was just not a category that was seen as anything other than trivial, and of course, that would affect me. I thought, “This love that I have is not very substantial.” I couldn’t help it. I mean it feels good to be doing it.

Dina:  I feel a prejudice was instilled in me because I always wanted to be a poet or an artist, and I think that was looked upon as silly. I went with broadcasting, which was kind of a rogue move, when your parents think your job as a waitress shows stability. (Laughs)

Now, when people say their child is in art school, I kind of have this judgment that pops up, “Oh – rich kid.” How does Joe Blow’s child go to art school and not just the elite, or the kids on scholarships?  How do we normalize it as a profession?

REDFORD: In Sundance, over in Utah, we have this series of conferences about progressive ideas for the future. There’s one group called “Americans for the Arts,” which is based in Washington, D.C. They have their conferences once a year there (at Sundance), and this subject comes up. This year people from all over the map came, and it was about art and community organizers, and how art can be built into the fabric of community life, and become part of the community itself.  And by weaving it into that, it creates a different impression about art.  Some of the people that were performing – we had “Youth Speaks,” a group of teenage poets, who do Slam Poetry about particular issues – this one was on global warming.  And then in other parts of the country there were artists who were renting small homes in depressed neighborhoods and forming cooperatives about art. They were building from the bottom up, and it was really, really impressive because I think that’s what’s going to begin to crack this elitist impression of art – that artists are either “wack-jobs” or privileged by collateral, income – that kind of stuff. When you see it coming out of a community where people don’t have anything, but they hit a chord, they strike a chord, I think that’s a start to get rid of this bias.

Dina: Can the people doing Slam Poetry make a living?

REDFORD: There are many things they can do. Initially we had three conferences – we also have a mayors’ conference that was dealing with energy issues, and we work with district mayors in California and in different states. But we bring in the Youth Speaks group, and they will perform for these mayors’ groups. When they go out they will get paid for that. Now that’s a start. But look, you know and I know that art and poetry, those are tough shops to earn money with. They have to be woven into the fabric of society, whether it’s corporations gathering together, or mayors’ conferences, you bring in artists and they perform something; then that makes an impression on the corporate world that tends to think kind of dryly.

Dina: I notice on the Sundance website, you are involving the corporate world with your programs at the Redford Center.

REDFORD: Most corporations, most areas like medicine or science, can’t tell their stories very well. So we bring an artist to the table in these conferences. We have an artist either write, sketch or film as the conference is developing and we have the artist feed back to participants what the story seems to be. That’s the basis. I wouldn’t have done this if there wasn’t something new to it. Because look, conferences, and conferences and conferences – there’s a zillion of them and they’re kind of like cotton candy. You go there for a few days, and you meet a lot of great people, a lot of great things are said, and then it evaporates because there’s no action at the end of it.  When you do this, you are at least making a contribution that helps people tell their stories. A lot of corporations are focused on the bottom line – money.  It’s almost like they have their own language, and it’s not a language that translates to the common person. So by putting an artist in there it says, “What’s the story you are trying to tell?” And outlining the importance of art in the process.

Dina: So have you seen any light bulbs go off over anyone’s head during a conference?

REDFORD: There was a kid from San Francisco who came over with Youth Speaks, and he did a poem on global warming. The mayors were sitting there, and I just took a handheld camera – really crude, like a home movie – and I swung the camera between the kid (and the mayors) – 18-years old, and this beautiful, powerful, passionate poem about how we are trashing our planet, and how we are wasting our energy and what that’s going do to future children, and I’d swing the camera, panning between him and the mayors, and you could see the reaction as it was developing. Then when I cut it together, spliced it together, you could literally see the transformation of the mayors getting fired up.

Dina: I applaud you for doing that because I feel that to get the message across, you must feel like a grain of sand in a sand dune!

At our daughter’s last school, we on the PTA raised money to hire our own art teacher. Do you think people need to take this kind of action, or do you recommend that people wait for the government to help us?

REDFORD: I think it’s a combination. I, for one, wouldn’t wait for the government to do much of anything because it’s too constipated. The process, at the top, is just too constipated. On the other hand, I do think there’s going to be some changes in the next administration. I don’t think they’ll be astronomical, because that’s going to be impossible, but there could be some ideological changes, and I think art will be more acceptable, as one element. Something will happen, but it’s going to take too long for me. I am more interested in going in on the ground level, and working within communities, inspiring communities. If you talk about Chico, Redding, any of these smaller communities around California, you go in on a community basis and you combine the PTA, look for organizations in the community that have any kind of funding, and you go in there, and you bring children with you. Use children as lobbyists. You say, “Look, these kids can really benefit from having art in the curriculum, or having social programs where art is used, and can we get some money up to finance this?” Then parents can get involved. But, you do it on the ground level. The higher up you go, the less chance you have of getting anything done.

Dina: If you could ask for, or direct, donor dollars anywhere, where would you direct them?

REDFORD: I’m kind of old-fashioned. It’s hard for me to ask for anything.  I’m not good at raising money. (What’s important is) what I can hope for, for the community or the country.  In terms of having someone give something to me, it’s just kind of hard for me to ask.

Dina: Did you get anywhere with your recent trip to Washington to talk to the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts)?

REDFORD: The NEA practically does not exist anymore because they have cut the budget down to nothing. About six months ago, I went to DC to make a plea to the NEA. I went with (actress) Kerry Washington and (musician) John Legend, and we got before the committee and did our presentation, and it went great and they said, “Gee, we’re really sorry, we don’t have any money. We are broke.” That’s what’s happening on a national level for the arts. We are back to having to raise money for the arts with grassroots efforts. When I first started Sundance I needed money. Of course, I had people saying, “Why don’t you just pay for it all, you can afford it?” But I did go to the NEA, so I could kick off Sundance with $25,000. I thought it would give us some credibility if we had the support of the NEA and we got it.

As far as other non-profits go, we have The Sundance Preserve. We protect more than 5,000 acres, which is good. We retire that land for wildlife protection. And then, at the center of that is the non-profit Arts Complex at the Sundance Preserve.

Dina: Are you on the board?

REDFORD: I am the Founder and the Chairman. I am forming the board right now, and I will include my family members. We want to create some kind of a legacy.

Dina: Do you have anything in the works, film-wise?

REDFORD: I actually am working on two projects. I am developing them now, but because I am superstitious, I don’t like to talk about them. But I hope they are done by the end of this year!

Dina: Will we get to see that handsome face in them?

REDFORD: I don’t know about handsome. It’s more like a map of the Southwest now.

Artworks Magazine: Winter 2008