Maureen Dowd has taken some time off from beating down what’s left of the Obama administration to give some ink to the great Robert Redford. Would that Dowd would write this kind of stuff more often, at least until Obama leaves office. Redford gives her three intimate hours of honest talk – one thing about Redford (I can say this having met the guy, then fainting) is that he’s dead straight. He’s honest. He’s humble. He doesn’t bullshit you – even if you’re telling him what millions of others have gushed at him over the years. Even if you’re saying out loud that you’re not worthy to stand near him. Out loud. He looks you in the eye and tells it straight. The Down piece is a great depiction of what he’s like to talk to or to listen to. It ends this way:
He seldom watches his movies. He didn’t see “The Sting,” a smash hit in 1973, until 2004 when his grandson suggested it at Christmastime. “I thought it was a really good movie,” Mr. Redford marveled. And he hadn’t seen “All Is Lost” until May when he and Mr. Chandor got to Cannes, where it played out of competition. Mr. Chandor said Mr. Redford never even checked the monitor during filming.
At Cannes, “we walk in and we sit down front and center and that made me nervous,” Mr. Redford recalled. “Where do you escape? How do you get out of here? And then the film plays, and it was hard for me to watch it.”
Mr. Redford, who has never won an Oscar for acting, braced himself for boos and received a nine-minute standing ovation.
“It just threw me completely,” he said. “I felt self-conscious and awkward and shy, and I didn’t know what to do.” He remembers saying to his wife, the German artist Sibylle Szaggars, and his director, “Hey, let’s go.” He said he also told Mr. Chandor, “Enjoy this moment because it will probably never come again,” acknowledging with a laugh that he might have been a damper on the party. “I’m a great partner to have.”
He says he has grown more comfortable in himself as he gets older, and abides by his favorite T. S. Eliot line: “There is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
“To me, it was always to climb up the hill,” said the man sitting on his own mountain. “Not standing at the top.”