Everybody loved Robert Redford. Directors and co-stars including Ralph Fiennes, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Judd Hirsch, Norman Reedus and F Murray Abraham explain why
James Vanderbilt (Truth, 2015)
Robert Redford hid from me behind a door once. I was directing my first film, Truth, and had somehow, improbably, gotten him to star in it. We were shooting a take, I called cut, went in to give a note, and he was gone. The whole cast was smiling, and I couldn’t figure it out – there was only one door in and out of the room and I had just walked through it. How had I lost Robert Redford?
Then, from behind me, I heard that Redford chuckle. You’ve heard it in a hundred movies. I turned around and there he was, possibly the most famous man in the world, hiding behind the door I had just walked through, pressed up against the wall, giggling.
Before Truth, I had been a journeyman screenwriter with some hits and some misses and had met Bob (he asked me to call him “Bob”, which in itself was a career highlight) after writing a script he was supposed to direct called Against All Enemies that never got made. I remember, while developing that film, he gave me a note on a scene I had written featuring Bill Clinton. I was resisting the note and explained why, and Bob very gently said to me: “It’s just, knowing Bill, he wouldn’t say it like that.” And it crashed in on me that he was giving me the note because he personally knew the president of the United States. It was one of those moments where you remembered: “Oh my God, I’m actually talking to Robert fucking Redford.”
