Fresh Air - Robert Redford, Over The Years

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

The legendary actor died Tuesday at age 89. He spoke with Terry Gross about his movies, creating the Sundance Film Festival and Institute, and why he couldn't wait to leave school and Southern California. "I wasn't learning the way I was supposed to learn. I realized that my education was going to happen when I got out in the world." Interviews are from 1998 and 2013. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org. This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David B. and Cooley. Actor Robert Redford, founder of the Sundance Film Institute and the Sundance Film Festival, died Tuesday at age 89. He never won an Oscar for his acting, but he did with him. one as a director for the 1980 film Ordinary People and was awarded an honorary Oscar for his influential work with Sundance. He also was a recipient at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2005,

and Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. It was as an actor, though, that Robert Redford made his most indelible mark of all. So many of his roles ended up being classic, even iconic. Butch Cassidy and Butch Cassidy in the Sundance Kid, Roy Hobbs in the Natural, Bob Woodward in all the president's men. And the list doesn't stop there.

We devote today's fresh air to the memory of Robert Redford by listening back to two of Terry's interviews with him. And we begin with this appreciation. Robert Redford was born in Santa Monica in 1936. As a young man, he excelled at athletics,

was interested in drawing and art, and after a trip around Europe, returned to America and ended up shifting to the dramatic arts, where his good looks and blossoming talent led to many small roles on stage and on TV. In 1960, he made his first television appearance on an episode of Maverick, and also clocked guest shots on such series as Perry Mason, Naked City, Route 66, and Alfred Hitchcock's anthology shows. In 1962, he starred in an episode of Rod Serling's The Twilight zone, and Redford gave one of the best performances of his early career. The episode was called Nothing in the Dark and was about an elderly woman who had barricaded herself in her isolated home

afraid that death was coming to take her. A policeman, played by Redford, is shot outside her door. She lets him in and tends to him, and eventually she realizes that her fears were justified, and that death has indeed come to call. Gladys Cooper plays the old woman. Am I really so bad? Am I really so frightening? You've talked to me? You've confided in me? Have I tried to hurt you?

It isn't me you're afraid of. You understand me. What you're afraid of is the unknown. Don't. Don't be afraid. But I am afraid. The running's over. It's time to rest.

Give me your hat. But I don't want to die. Trust me. No. No. Mother. Give me your head. Robert Redford tasted major success on Broadway in 1960,

starring in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park, a comedy he returned to on film opposite Jane Fonda in 1967. But the movie that made him a star was 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the fact-based story of two bank robbers. Paul Newman was Butch, Redford was Sundance, and their on-screen chemistry was unsurpassed. Catherine Ross from the graduate played Sundance's girlfriend at a place.

And in this scene, the three of them have just arrived in Bolivia, which was Butch's plan to evade capture from a relentless posse. The train has dropped them off in a desolate barnyard, and But Butch is trying to look on the bright side. But Sundance, wading deep into the animals, is furious. Well, you know, it could be worse. Get a lot more for your money in Bolivia. I checked on it.

What could they have here that you could possibly want to buy? All Bolivia can't look like this. How do you know? This might be the garden spot of the whole country. People may travel hundreds of miles just to get to this spot where we're standing now. This might be the Atlantic City, New Jersey, of old Bolivia, all you know. Look, I know a lot more about Bolivia than you know about Atlantic City, New Jersey. I can tell you that. Aha! You do, huh? I was born there. I was born in New Jersey. Brought up there. So...

You're from the East? I didn't know that. The total tonnage of what you don't know is enough to... I'm not sure we're accomplishing as much as we might here. Listen, your job is to back me up because you'd starve without me. And you, your job is to shut up. Well, he'll feel a lot better after he's robbed a couple of banks. Robert Redford and Paul Newman re-teamed in 1973 for another great movie, The Sting. And that same year, Redford also starred opposite Barbara Streisand in the romantic drama The Way We Were. But at the same time, Redford was starring in Darker Fair. in three days of the Condor, for instance, and the candidate.

He also sought more serious material when he branched out into directing and producing. In his first film behind the camera, he directed Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland, and Timothy Hutton, in a searing family drama called Ordinary People, and won an Oscar as Best Director. He also directed A River Runs Through It and Quiz Show, and made his biggest mark when buying the film rights to an as-yet unpublished book, All the President's Men by Washington Post Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The 1976 film starred Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein, and the movie drew its drama by watching newspaper reporters go about their everyday work,

chasing down leads, making phone calls, writing stories. In one scene, which runs nearly seven minutes, that drama is enhanced by the fact that it's photographed by one camera in a single unedited. take. The newsroom is buzzing in the background, while in the foreground, all it is is Redford as Woodward, placing a series of phone calls. Yet, as an unbroken, gripping piece of acting, it's pretty magnificent. Here's just a piece of it. Committee to reelect the president. Could I please speak to Mr. Clark McGregor? One moment I'll connect you. Thank you.

Yes? Mr. McGregor. Yes. This is Bob Woodward, the Washington Post. Hello? Yes? Uh, this is Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. Mm-hmm. I just spoke to a Mr. Kenneth Dahlberg who says that he has Midwest financed. Yeah, I know Ken Dahlberg.

Well, I can't seem to get an explanation on why a check for $25,000 made out to Mr. Dahlberg that he apparently sent to the committee to re-like the president would end up in the bank account of a Watergate burglar. I don't know. But you're head of the committee, sir. Look, I just came aboard. John Mitchell was the head of the committee. He might know. Well, what would the explanation possibly be... I don't know. You're implying that I should know.

If you print that, our relationship will be terminated. Sir, we don't have a relationship. Two years after starring in all the president's men, Robert Redford founded the Sundance Film Institute, which led to the Sundance Film Festival. Sundance still thrives. And though Robert Redford's own resume, as actor, director, and producer,

would be impressive enough, the filmmakers he is supported at Sundance are equally noteworthy. Who first got noticed at Sundance? Stephen Soderberg, Wes Anderson, Sterlin Harjo, Quentin Tarantino, Ava DuVernay, to name a few. Finally, there's his long-standing environmental activism and support,

which included his advocacy for Native Americans, his political lobbying on behalf of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and his establishment of the Redford Center, a nonprofit dedicated to environmental impact filmmaking. Terry Gross first spoke to Robert Redford in 1998. He had mentioned that as a young man in the 1950s, he was drawn to beat poetry and jazz. I'm interested in hearing more about beat poetry and jazz. Really?

When you were a young man, yeah. So did you ever play yourself? Did you ever play an instrument? No, no, I didn't. I was from a musical family, oddly enough. But we were so poor when I was a kid that there was a guy that came through the neighborhood, I'll never forget. and he was offering free guitar lessons. You know, he'd give you one free guitar lesson,

and if you liked it, then you could go on. You'd pay for it, and I was desperate. I just wanted it so badly. And my dad heard that this guy had come through. He said, no way, don't trust anybody that's offering you for a free. No, this thing is a free lunch. And that was the end of that. I never went down that road, sadly, because I love music.

and jazz just happened to come to me well naturally because the West Coast Jazz was just happening at that moment and those guys you know very Mulligan and some of the other musicians were musicians that

there was this sort of exodus from the east because they felt the big band had run dry and that there wasn't any place for them to go with their new ideas and new concepts so they'd kind of gathered out in the West Coast and there were places that existed then that were really

wonderful. There was a place in Long Beach right on the sand called Howard Rumses Lighthouse, and then there was the place that I used to go to, and the only way I could get in there I was taken there by an older woman who was 20, and I was just 15. I was 15, of course, I was riding high because I was

not only going in illegally, but I was going in with an older woman, which made me feel like really big stuff, and we went to a place called a Hague. It was a tiny little kind of a dive, looked like a sunken foundation in this big lawn across

from the Ambassador Hotel and I remember her taking me in there in 1952 I guess it was 53 and it was just tiny as big as a living room and there was Mulligan and Baker

and these other guys and they were just coming out with a sound that was so different and it just went through me it just went right through me And I was just transfixed, and so I hooked into something that was just starting, and I think that association gave me, you know, added to my passion about it

because I felt that I was part of something new. And the same with the beat poetry. I had no idea what was going on. I didn't know who any of these people were, Kenneth Rex Roth, and Aukkahure and Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. I just remember there was a guy who made a lot of noise. you know and and uh i thought i was going into a jazz place and instead it was it was city lights in san francisco the bookstore yeah and ferland getty's place and so i didn't know what was going on i

just stumbled in there looking for jazz and and was about to leave because i thought wrong and then there was this stuff going on that was just different and you could feel it you know you can feel it when you're in the presence of something new a new voice a new idea and it it becomes a real hook so i stayed and was very, very taken with it because for me it was somehow, I mean, I was not a, I guess I was quite a maverick kid. I didn't, I was not drawn to convention and I was bothered by the conventions I was forced to live in in a kind of Republican environment in Southern California where everything was perfect, the sun always shown, and there was something missing for me that I found in these two movements. You know, when you're talking about jazz and

beat poetry in the 1950s, I think there's, you know, know, at least two things that they embodied for people. One was just the art itself, you know, the music and the poetry themselves. But the others was the lifestyle of these really interesting people who were making that art. I mean, they were hipsters. They were bohemians. And what spoke to you about that? Did they give you ideas about a different kind of life that you could live?

Well, yes, the essential ingredient for me was freedom. I mean, you were living in an atmosphere of post-war, post-war atmosphere of the, there was a big boom going on. You know, there was an economic boom. I don't know that the economic history of this country has ever known the strength of that time, the 50s. And as a result, there was huge, you know how money protects itself with rules. And mores even come out of money to make sure you hold on to it and protect it and keep it. And so that was going on.

And I was repulsed by that. I just wanted desperately to get out. I didn't want to be in Los Angeles. I didn't want to be in my house. It wasn't, or like a blub or anything like that. It's just, I just didn't want to be there. I wanted to be somewhere else where something else was happening. And so the lifestyle of being on the road or being free, freewheeling,

was enormously appealing to me because it meant that I would have some license. If I hooked into that, there would be some license there to break the rules, which was very appealing to me. So how did that translate into acting? the translation probably was that as an actor I was drawn to the freedom that acting can provide the freedom of expression which is physical it's essentially physical as opposed to drawing or writing that to be activating all parts of your body and senses was appealing to me and to keep it free because there is a freedom in acting along with the discipline so it was kind of

natural evolution, but I didn't start as an actor. I started as an artist. As a painter. My life began, yeah. Sundance is, of course, named after your character in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, your 1969 film. What was the impact of that film on your life and on your career? Before that, I had a certain freedom that I lost. There's a danger, I think, if you're conscious, if you're paying attention. that with a kind of success that you began to be treated like an object.

And maybe some people want that. Maybe that's the end game for some people. But it wasn't for me because it was going to deprive me of the ability to observe. If I was being observed as an object, then it was less likely. I was going to be able to look back and see somebody in a real way. And that would be a danger. And then you move to the next stage of that, which is you begin to be able. behave like one because you have no course and no recourse i mean if you for example if you surround

yourself with too much protection to guard against the assault from the outside that is full of such distortion then the the danger that comes from that is you become insulated at the point of losing a sense of reality and you begin to behave like the very thing that people are viewing you as and then the the third i think in final death now is you've become one so that was always something that I was on guard against and kind of moved through my life wary of it, you know, tried to avoid ever getting sucked into that place. But I think that particular film put me into a new place that was extremely difficult in the beginning because I had a lot of balancing to do and I had a lot of soul searching to do. And it was a struggle for a while.

What was a soul searching about? That might be too personal in which case. How honest you were going to be with it, how really, honest you were going to be with it you know a lot of people like to be falsely humbled say oh i don't like all this attention i don't like this and the truth is they they want it desperately and so it's a lie and i wanted to look real hard at that i thought well i've ended up in this place this is something i basically maybe really wanted or did it just come on me and i need to get in i need to get in touch with that and understand what that's really about otherwise i'll go way off the track so that's where the struggle came. I had to identify what part of it I really did like and be able to be

honest about it and say, this feels good. And then separate out from the part that didn't, that was going to be destructive or dangerous. And that took a while. Did Paul Newman, who was your co-star and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, did he give you any advice on handling this new celebrity? Yeah, he did. He says, the best thing you could do would be to have a mind like mine, which is essentially empty. What does that mean? That way you'll get, you'll survive forever. You know, you forget things, you don't, you forget where you are, what time it is. That's the way you survive in this business, and I've really tried to follow him. He's done a beautiful job setting an example. Paul had a real strong value system built in, and I saw his struggle.

that he was, I think, quite successful with. So in a way, Paul did set something of an example. I think it's one of the reasons we got along well is that we both had little use for a lot of the things that other people place a high value on. Since it seems like you were somewhat ambivalent about all the success that Bush Cassidy and the Sundance kid brought to you, why did you want to name Sundance

after your character Sundance? Well, this is weird, but I didn't. It's a hard one to say that, because I don't think anybody believes it was true. I did not want to name it Sundance. I was overruled. When I started Sundance, I had four partners, which dissolved within a year

when I realized that they were really only interested in Sundance as a real estate venture, and I was interested in it as more of a preservation project. But when it was starting, and I had the four other partners, and we were getting into the venture and buying this land from a sheepherder in Utah, there was the discussion of a name. and I was making the film.

I was in the process of making Bush Cassidy at the time, and that name, which is a great name, came up. And I said, no, I love the name because in truth, what Sundance really is is a ritual. It's a Native American ritual that owes to the Plains Indians. It's a ceremonial. And there is a place called Sundance, Wyoming. And so I said, I like the name,

and also you can translate it to what this place looks like when you go up to the top of the mountain, particularly in the wintertime, the sun does seem to bounce off the top of the peaks all around you in the Wasatch range. And Sun has got a lot of symbolism. It makes a lot of sense in a lot of different ways, but I'm playing a character called the Sundance Kid, and I don't want to be, I don't want to go that way because it'll look like I'm ripping off the film just to get a name for Sundance. So I argued with the other investors, and they overruled me because the other names weren't

very good, and they said that I wasn't objective and that it was. stupid and it was a great name. So I gave into that, but that was not what I wanted. Do you remember any of the names you wanted? Yeah, I wanted Mr. Redford's place. Right. I can't remember now what it was, but it wasn't as good as Sundance. I have to agree that it's a very good name. And through the years now, maybe in time that that film will be forgotten to the point, at least as it relates to the name. Robert Redford, speaking to Terry Gross in 1998. After a break, we'll listen to another of their conversations, this one from 2013.

It's part of today's tribute to the actor, director, and philanthropist who died Tuesday at age 89. I'm David Being Coulee, and this is fresh air. Support for NPR, and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org. Today, we're remembering Robert Redford, who died Tuesday at age 89. In the latter years of his life, Redford accepted fewer and fewer acting roles. He played a deep state villain in a series of movies in the Marvel Avengers universe,

purely because he enjoyed those types of films. And his last appearance was an uncredited role in a TV series he also produced, Dark Winds. But in 2013, when Terry Gross spoke to him again, Robert Redford had just completed one of the most demanding roles of his career. He was the star and only actor in the movie All Is Lost, playing a man alone on a small yacht in the ocean. You know, a couple of years ago there was a biography of you written by Michael Feeney Callan.

And I was reading that, and I was really surprised to learn that as a child who had polio. I mean, you're such a physical person. and you're so athletic and so physically fit. And now even at the age of 77, you're so physically fit. You needed to be in order to do all those lost. And the thought of you being paralyzed for a while as a child was shocking to me. Yeah, it was to me too.

Sure. It wasn't a severe case. I think we should want to make sure we get this straight. It wasn't an iron lung case. It was a case of mild polio, but it was severe enough to put me in bed for two weeks. And because in those days, polio before the salt vaccine was discovered, what hung over your childhood was always the fear of polio because all you saw were people in iron lungs. So, yeah, when I got it, it was because of an extreme exertion in the ocean, in the bright sunlight, in the air. ocean and it was alarming but it wasn't serious enough to to go much further were you paralyzed at

all no no i was down i was i couldn't move very well but i was not paralyzed your mother died when you were 18 um she was sick i'm i'm not sure what she died of um how did the change the course of your life? Did you have to, like, rewrite your plans? I don't know that it changed anything at the time. She was a wonderful person. She died very young. She was full of life, full of laughter, full of love. She was out there. I mean, she would take chances, and she was very risky. And she taught me how to drive a car when I was 10, and nobody knew about it. I mean, that kind of stuff. So we had a close relationship, but also I was of a young mind just like all the other kids my age where you didn't want your parents around. You didn't want your parents doting on you.

You didn't want attention or anything like that. And you had a mother that wanted to give you that attention. And you kind of pushed it away. I feel bad about that. You went to college. And from what I've read, academics was not your thing so much and that you did a lot of drinking. and road motorcycles or drag races or whatever. The whole thing.

Right. Well, not, I don't know about that because that came a little bit later. It was really, I went to college to get out of Los Angeles. I went to college because it was Colorado and it was the mountains. And by that time I realized that nature was going to be a huge part of my life. That Los Angeles for me was a city that when I was a little kid at the end of the Second World War, I loved that. I loved it. It was full of green spaces.

And suddenly, when the war ended and the economy revived, suddenly Los Angeles would have no land use plan, it felt like the city was being pushed into the sea that I loved because suddenly there were skyscrapers and freeways and smog. And I said, wait a minute, I want it out. So I went into the mountains, into the sierras, and worked at Yosemite National Park and fell in love with nature that way. And I realized that nature was going to be a big part of my life. So I sought land elsewhere that I thought would be kept free of development. You're talking about Sunday else? Yeah.

But let's get back to the drinking part in college. Oh, okay. You know, just reading briefly about that. No, it sounded like an almost like Rebel Without a Cause era. You know, because like. Well, you know what it was, was, yeah, I guess it was. You know, like you're breaking loose and everything, but there's no. It sounds like there was no, like, social, political, spiritual, whatever, drug even, like context to put it in.

Well, there was alcohol. There was social. The sociability was tied mostly to alcohol in those days. And so, yeah, I certainly had my feel of that. But what was at the heart of all this, I think, was the fact that I never really, I was not a good student through my entire life. My mind was out the window. I drew underneath the desk. I drew pictures. I just didn't, I wasn't learning the way I was supposed to learn. And I think I realized that my education was going to happen when I got out in the world and engaged with other cultures and other places and other languages and had the adventure of exploration. I felt that's my education. So I left. Actually, I was asked to leave. Why? Why were you asked to leave? Because my grades, because I was such a terrible student. My grades were terrible. And the interests I had were not anything that was going to amount to much of a career for me. You know, anthropology I loved, psychology I loved, and geology I just really loved. So you put all those things together. What are you going to be in life? And anyway, I took off and earned some money in an oil field to earn enough money to last for a year in Europe. And I went there when I was 18 and to be an artist, and that's when I begin. I think that's when my education really began. Robert Redford, speaking to Terry Gross in 2013. More after a break, this is fresh air.

You did a lot of episodic TV early in your career in the early 1960s, Maverick, Rescue 8, the Deputy Playhouse 90, Perry Mason, Naked City, the Twilight Zone. Hey, no, Terry Mason, no look. Do you know what the title of that? That was, what, 1959? You know what the title of that was? What? The case of the treacherous toupee.

That was the name of it. I was so excited to have a job. Who had the toupee? Was it? I can't remember. It wasn't Raymond Burr, but somebody did, some blonde. But those were your apprenticeship years, and it's always sort of, one of the things that's sort of been weird is to see yourself characterized so often as,

somebody that looks well, that has glamorous looks, or is appealing physically, that's nice. I mean, I'm not unhappy about that, but what I saw happening over time was that was getting the attention and sometimes, because I always felt that I was an actor, and that's how I started. I wanted, I was a person who loved the idea of craft, and that learning your craft was something fundamentally and good, and I wanted to be good at my craft, and therefore I would be an actor that we've played many different kinds of roles, which I did. I played killers.

I played rapists, really deranged characters, but most people don't know about that because that was in television. So suddenly you're seeing yourself kind of in a glamour category and you're saying, well, wait a minute, you know.

The notion is that, well, you're not so much of an actor, you're just somebody that looks well. And that was always hard for me because I always took pride in whatever role I was playing, I would be that character. Like, you know, if you look at, say, Jeremiah Johnson, you know,

the character in the wilderness. And within the same year I was doing the candidate, and you put those two together, and you would hope that some of you say, well, somebody's acting here. I wanted to play a clip from your early episodic TV years and was thinking, well, I'm a big fan of Route 66. Have the box set?

Yeah, I love that show. I loved it as a kid, and I love it looking back at it. As a kid. Thanks a lot. What were you 10 when I did my segment? Hey, I was alive then. A lot of people weren't. What I liked about Route 66 was not so much the show as it was the route.

Because I remember hitchhiking as a kid back and forth on Route 66, because there were no freeways then. There were no turnpikes or anything like that. And so Route 66 was the way you got from Chicago, L.A. or vice versa. So anyway, so I figured, whoa, let's do a clear. from Route 66 and then I'm reading your biography and I read this line on page 87 and that you're saying to your agent, I'd rather rot than be remembered for Route 66. I said that? You're quoted as saying that. What can I say? Am I? I can't remember the show. Do you have a

clip you say? Yeah. Yeah. So this is, you don't even remember doing it. This is from a 1961 episode with Nehemiah Persoff as your father. And it's set in a mill town in a Polish-American community. And, like, you've gone off to out-of-town college. So you've gotten out of the mill town, but you're back on a college break. And the episode opens with you chasing after your girlfriend who's running away in the woods. And we don't know what this fight is about, but you're trying to catch up to her. You're not trying to attack her or anything. You're just trying to catch up to her and to reach her and to communicate with her.

She accidentally kind of falls off this hill and hits her head and dies. And you don't know what to do. So you don't call the cops. You don't tell anybody. You try to tell your father. but your father, your father just doesn't want to hear anything. You're having trouble communicating with him. He doesn't want to hear it.

Later, the police discover her dead. You're implicated in her death. And you're trying to explain to your father what really happened because he's on the verge of killing you. Your father doesn't know that you secretly had this girlfriend who was the daughter of your father's good friend. So anyways. So here's you trying to explain to your father,

played by Nehemiah Persoff, what was really going on with your girlfriend and what was really going on with your relationship with your father. Do you know why she ran? Because she said to me, do you love me? Will you marry me?

And I couldn't answer her with the truth. I couldn't say yes! Oh boy, I want to marry you. Before God in the whole world, I do. How could I say that to her and hurt her even more? I wanted to marry her. Would you have stood for it, Papa?

If you have to marry for you, marry her. No, I didn't have to. It was never anything like that. Then why shit and around with you? Why are you not come to me? Why you not come to me? Have I ever, ever, ever been able to come to you, Papa? With anything that was my own idea.

Haven't you always decided everything for me? Haven't you decided everything for me always? Who I must be? what I must be, how I must be. I don't remember that at all. I'm not ashamed of it, obviously, but I don't, God, that's so interesting. I don't remember, I just don't remember that at all. That's amazing.

So your voice sounds, you know, so much different, it's higher. Well, yeah, I was recently, J.C. and I, J.C. Chandor and I were at a director of Al's Lost, yeah. Director as Al Zoss. J.C. and I were at a festival. festival and they ran clips of my career. And I had never seen it. They had clips going all the way back, all the way up to now. And it was very uncomfortable, very uncomfortable, clips from different films. And it went back into TV. And you're right, the voice was very different, just like you're describing. And I did the last Playhouse 90 that was ever done. I just thought that was the best show. When I was a kid, I thought that was the best show on television. And I was fortunate enough to be in the very last playhouse night. Hosnati that was written by Rod Serling, and I was able to be. I played a young German lieutenant, very sympathetic Nazi lieutenant.

He gets corrupted by, or somebody else tries to corrupt him, but he resists the corruption. And Charles Lawton played the rabbi. Oh, acting with Charles Lawton must have been so interesting, but there's a great story that's told in your biography about the slap. Oh, yeah. He was intimidating. It was one of my first parts. And there was a scene with George McCready, who played my commanding officer.

And it's during a pogrom, and they're calling out names in the street to be packed into trucks. And then after we come up to the rabbi's apartment, and there's a tension between the rabbi played by Charles Lawton and McCready. And there's an intellectual challenge involving Nietzsche and God and so forth. So I'm just there clueless. I'm this young, innocent, naive guy, and at one point, Lawton drops something. He drops his Bible. And I reached down to pick it up, which is a no-no. And McCready sees this and realizes, oh, oh, this kid needs some training.

And the rabbi sees that my instinct is to be compassionate. I reach down to pick up the Bible. And so he looks me in the eye. And the look is like, I see who you really are. I see who he really are. McCready says, apparently you feel like you have to be sympathetic to the rabbi. He says, therefore I instruct you to slap him. So then I supposedly slap him.

I am reluctantly, but I slap him. If you're getting ready to do it, it was going to be live. It was going to be live telecast. As we're getting ready in rehearsal, Lawton comes up and he says, dear boy, he's called him to slap. What are you going to do? And I said, what do you mean? What am I going to?

He said, what are you going to do? Because I can't be hit. I said, you can't be hit? No, I can't be hit. What are you going to do? I thought, oh, geez, well, now what am I going to do, you know? So I go to the director, and I said, what am I supposed to do here? And he said, oh, gee, don't bother me.

I got enough troubles. So we get on the show, and I'm sitting there, and as we're getting to the moment, I'm thinking, who is this guy to tell me what I'm supposed? supposed to do what I can't do what I can't do. And I got so riled up and I was so nervous on top of it that when it came time, I thought, who's he to tell me what I can do or can't do? So I hauled up and really whacked him. And it wasn't a slap. It was a whack. And his jowl, spit came out of his jaw. You know, and he looked at me and tears came out of his eyes. He looked at me. And when it was over, I thought, oh, boy, you know, I can get a

mouthful out. So I go to his dressing room to apologize. I'm really sorry. He says, no, you did the right thing. You did the right thing. Robert Redford, speaking to Terry Gross in 2013. More after a break, this is fresh air. So skipping ahead to 1969, you make Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with Paul Newman. And this is the movie that makes you kind of iconic. Did you already know how to ride horses? Did you like westerns when you were making this? Yeah, I knew how to ride horses. I loved horses.

I liked doing my own stunts when I could. When it first came up, because of the age difference between Paul and I, which was like 12, 13 years, and he was really well known. I was not well known. I had just done, I think, the film Belfort the Park. but he had a career obviously that was very high and so the studio did not want me that the director George Roy Hill

and I met in a bar in 3rd Avenue and they were putting me up to play Butch Cassidy because I'd done this comedy on Broadway so nobody thinks very deep about stuff like that they said well if he did a comedy maybe you should go up for Bush Cassidy and so we were sitting in this bar and I told him at the time I said

yeah I can do that But that's not the part that interests me. I'm more interested in the Sundance Kid. I feel more comfortable in that role. I feel more, I could connect more to that character. And that surprised George, and then he got kind of sold on that idea, but the studio didn't want me. And they tried everything to keep me out of the film at that time. It was 20th century pox.

And I think it was Paul Newman and William Goldman, the right. and George that stood up for me against the studio. But the one that really pushed it aside, of course, was Paul. And when I met Paul, he was very generous, and he said, I'll do it with Redford. I never forgot that. That was a gesture that I never forgot. I felt that I really owed him after that. And then he and I, in the course of that film, became really, really good friends.

And that friendship carried on to the next film, and then it carried on to our person. He was originally supposed to be the Sundance Kid and you were supposed to be Butch Cassidy? Yeah, that's right. The original title of the script was The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy. That was the original title that Goldman had written. And Newman was to play Sundance, but he had played that kind of part before. And George was the guy that saw Paul, he saw a side of Paul that many hadn't seen because he had worked with him in television and he knew him personally. He says, no. He's very nervous. He talks a lot. He tells bad jokes. He, he, I think I see him as Bush Cassidy, and he saw me his Sundance. So he had to fight for that.

So when it was finally done, then they changed the title to Bush Cassidy, the Sundance kid. Would you mind if I played a scene? Mm-mm. Okay. So this is a kind of famous scene where, you know, you're both bank and train robbers. And at this point, you're not exactly surrounded, but you're cornered. You're on a ledge. A ledge, yeah, and on top of you on this, you know, rocky ledge is the posse that's

sending you down. You've got no place to turn. You've got no place to go except for the water that's underneath, and that's, you're up really, really high, and it's a very rocky river or stream. But anyways, as Bush Cassidy is trying to figure out what their options are. What you want to do is, like, shoot your way out. And so you speak first. Ready?

No, we'll jump. Like hell we will. No, it'll be okay. If the water's deep enough, we don't get squished to death. He'll never follow us. How do you know? Would you make a jump like that and you didn't have to? I have to, and I'm not going to.

Well, we got to, otherwise we're dead. They're just going to have to go back down the same way they come. Come on. Just one clear shot, that's all I want. Come on. We got to. Stop. Get away from me. Why?

I want to fight them. They'll kill us. Maybe. You want to die? Do you? All right I'll jump first Nope

And you jump first Oh I said What's the matter with you I can't swim So that's my guess Why are you crazy The fall will probably kill you How reassuring

So that's my guest Robert Redford With Paul Newman From the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Were you surprised at how famous that scene became? Yes, I was. I mean, I was surprised at the whole thing.

I remember when I saw the rough cut, I mean, I loved making the film. I had a lot of fun. I've never had so much fun on a film as I have that one. But when I saw the rough cut of it, I said, wait a minute, what's that song doing in it? Oh, raindrops are falling on my head. Yeah, I said, wait a minute, what's that all about? I said, what in the hell? I said, rain drop, first of all, it's not raining.

Secondly, what's that got to do with anything? I thought, well, that's, they're just killed the film. It made no sense to me. And, you know, how wrong can you be? I had to listen to that song in the radio for six months. But the film also, Terry, another thing that's interesting about how, I guess, the value of word of mouth. I remember when the film came out, George, Roy Hill, and William Goldman were very upset and depressed because the reviews were mixed to negative.

And word of mouth is what made the film build. But when it first opened, it had these mixed reviews. I didn't read them. I remember they were very upset and depressed. And one of the reasons the reviews, some of the reviews were negative was that the anachronism of the dialogue, like modern-day talk. then. I found that pretty inspiring and fun. It was just fun. But apparently that's what some of the negative response was, but it was, I guess, overridden by the acceptance of the whole film. By the way, I had the same reaction about raindrops of frolin on my head in the middle of a film.

I thought, yeah, it made absolutely no sense to me. It says you and me, then, there's two of us. Well, unfortunately, our time is up. But I hope we get to continue this conversation. I look forward to a part two. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's so much we haven't gotten to. It's really been a pleasure to talk with you.

Thank you so much for coming back to a freshman. Thank you, Terry. And your voice is a lot more pleasant than mine. Oh, I wish. No, it is. You have a beautiful voice. Oh, thank you so much. I'll play that back in my mind.

Okay. Robert Redford, speaking to Terry Gross in 2013. He died Tuesday. at age 89. The Sundance Film Festival, which he founded in 1978, is scheduled to be held next January in its traditional locations, Park City and Salt Lake City, in Utah. Beginning in 27, the festival is scheduled to relocate to Boulder, Colorado. On Monday's show, Elizabeth Gilbert, the best-selling author of Eat, Prey Love, talks about her first non-fiction book in a decade all the way to the river. It's about her intense

relationship with her best friend Raya, a love that she describes as deep and life-changing, but also destructive marked by addiction and heartbreak. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Brigger is our managing producer. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shurrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham,

with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Charlie Kair. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Mollis. Myers, Anne-Marie Baldinado, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaliner, Susan Yacundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper. Hope Wilson is our consulting visual producer. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David B. Inc. Support for NPR, and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy Working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right.

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