Rendering 11

The article which is called Redford gets into his swing  was published  in The Gardian. The author wrote about  that  Redford's latest film, as director, features Hollywood's brightest young stars. The golfing fable also marks a return to form. Interview by John Anderson. Robert Redford enters the Manhattan hotel room smiling, blond, trim, casual, a bit craggy at 63 but pretty much as you expect. The legendary mystique is intact. His cultivated superstardom has made the actor-director-producer a kind of totem in the annals of Hollywood stereotyping. Redford, after all, always has been Redford - the way Gable was Gable, Cooper was Cooper, William Powell was William Powell. Redford is his own man, and his own model, too - and he does not deviate from it much. Younger stars push the envelope: Tom Cruise has done Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut, Brad Pitt 12 Monkeys and even Matt Damon - seemingly the most Redfordian of them all - was in The Talented Mr. Ripley, although his sexually ambivalent homicidal maniac was the most sympathetic sociopath you had ever seen. Damon, not coincidentally, is the star of The Legend of Bagger Vance, Redford's sixth film as a director - the area of Redford's career where he has stretched himself. In the Oscar-winning Ordinary People (1980) or the much-honoured Quiz Show ( 1994) or even his last, The Horse Whisperer (1998), Redford exhibits more daring than he ever did in his choice of movie roles, although nobility, or a grasping for nobility, is afoot in all his work. In Bagger Vance, a Jazz Age golden boy (Damon), a golfing sensation, goes off to the First World War, has his ideals shot out from under him and returns a broken man. With the aid of a mysterious caddie named Bagger (Will Smith), he strives to regain his swing, his soul and his girl (Charlize Theron). Redford did fly fishing in A River Runs Through It ( 1992). Maybe a movie about golf is not so strange. And maybe golf isn't the attraction at all. 'No, that would not interest me,' he says. 'First of all, it's everywhere. It's ubiquitous. You turn on the Golf Channel. Airlines. It's everywhere.' Some would suggest that's just the reason to do it. 'Yeah, but it wouldn't be mine,' he says. 'But golf as a metaphor for life does interest me.' Bagger Vance is based on a novel by Steven Pressfield (screenplay by Jeremy Leven) and what Redford found in it was the way to create a story in a classic form: the hero's fall into darkness and his struggle to return to the light. Pressfield, Redford says, borrowed heavily from the Bhagavad-Gita and other Eastern sources, as well as Western mythology 'and the part that interested me was the part that related to the character's battle with himself, the idea of focus, concentration, centre, what we now hear of as "the zone" - the way an athlete gets into the zone. He also needed a break after the gravity of The Horse Whisperer. The author underline the festival, of course, is Sundance, with which Redford has been involved since the mid-Eighties, when his Sundance Institute (he was, after all, the Sundance Kid) took over the existing US Film Festival. His presence there has been erratic, almost shadowy; in an effort not to eclipse the filmmakers, he has become its resident phan. Redford is himself, of course, an independent filmmaker, one with carefully wrought ideas and a genuine cinematic palette: The opening sequence in Horse Whisperer, for example, is an elegiac daydream of half-tones and impressionism; Quiz Show recreates its era of early TV with effortless grace.

Interesting article! I think the author like this man and his work. How he wrote -  Redford has directed a few films, starred in scores more. But if you had to guess it would be directing that has his heart.