PARK CITY, Utah — Robert Redford ambles into the Sundance Film Festival in a backward newsboy cap like something he might have worn in “The Sting,” a light-blue cotton work shirt, indigo jeans and buttery-soft fawn boots.
The once-startling blue eyes are less vivid, the sharp features softened asymmetrically by time, but Redford’s holy mission of carrying the torch of independent film keeps him curious, engaged, impassioned.
Outside he’s 73. Inside he’s as undefeated by the years as that still impeccably tousled reddish-blond hair. Redford speaks infectiously of new technologies, edgier films, a bracing cinematic swim against the flow of the mainstream. Even the recession doesn’t bother him.
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“Ironically, in my opinion, this is looking to be our strongest year ever,” he tells The Post. “The product just gets better, and better largely because young people have access to cameras at a younger age, and, by the time they’re in their 20s, they’re quite accomplished.”
He relishes the way the recession has rained devastation on the fest’s swag suites — designed by what he calls “ambush marketers” to ensnare celebrities who are in turn happy to be photographed with luxe items like tricycle-mad children on Christmas Day. The bling bombing, Redford notes ruefully, “brought in people like Paris Hilton, who didn’t have anything to do with anything,” suggesting a lack of acquaintance with Ms. Hilton’s illustrious film career.
Still, as the next generation of filmmakers rises, a previous one fades to black. In the past two years he’s lost two of his favorite collaborators — Sydney Pollack, who died in May 2008, and Paul Newman, who died in September of the same year.
He met Pollack when both were struggling, then went on to provide the director with his quintessential leading man on a shelf full of classics — “Jeremiah Johnson,” “The Way We Were,” “Out of Africa” and “Three Days of the Condor.”
At the opening-night press conference, Redford told a long story about how Pollack, during the filming of “Condor,” agreed to pretend to keep a shot going outside the old New York Times building on West 43rd Street so Redford could duck into the building, escape a paparazzo by another exit, and take refuge in his trailer. When he emerged, he walked up to Pollock and started to tell Pollack about his tomfoolery — “Sydney, the most amazing thing’s happening!” Pollock jumped. Redford had forgotten he was still wearing a giant afro and a mustache, a paparazzo-foiling disguise.
As for Newman, who died of lung cancer, Redford says, “We were very, very close. He had his career and I had mine, but we lived close to each other in Connecticut. I had a house in Westport [as did Newman]. We were two people who were fortunate enough to do what we wanted in life but we didn’t want to grow old doing it so, at the same time, we played jokes on each other. For me, it was a tremendous loss.”
Make that for everyone.
Still, if Butch is gone, the Sundance Kid remains aburst with boyish energy. Through his horn-rimmed glasses, Redford surveys the collapsing marketplace for indie film and sees bright new opportunities.
“The new technology is creating a new and easier way to see the product,” Redford argues, conjuring visions of audiences watching films on their iPhones, on Video on Demand, or streaming them to their PCs.
So far, these businesses are bringing in money by the nickel, but YouTube is, for the first time, offering rentals of Sundance movies right after they premiere. Art-house distributors like Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse have disappeared, while others (Miramax, the Weinstein Co.) have been cinching their belts ever tighter. So what?
“I’m all for the artist getting a little bit more of the pie,” is Redford’s take. A director can skip middlemen like Miramax, put his movie on YouTube and rake in the bucks and glory. But will anyone be watching without a Miramax marketing the film, getting it reviewed, getting it nominated for awards?
Though it wasn’t officially called the Sundance Film Festival until 1991, this is the 26th annual Redford-led celebration of the good, the bad and the unruly answers to studio movies. Redford worries that recently “we had begun to flatline” but promises “a lot of fresh things to keep it moving forward.” That’s in line with one of this year’s slogans: “This is the renewed rebellion.”
As for the numbers: 16 American entrants for the feature prizes, the survivors from 1,058 submissions. (Don’t worry, rejectees: One of the most mind-bogglingly profitable films in American history, “Paranormal Activity,” was slammed by Sundance but blazed like the sun at Slamdance, the offshoot festival.)
There are also a couple of new films by Oscar-winning documentarians and 14 “Premieres” — films which already have distribution deals and feature stars like Ben Affleck, Kristen Stewart, Kevin Kline, Katie Holmes and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Plus, there will be purely experimental, totally noncommercial entries under the “New Frontier” banner. “You will experience what may be coming in two years, five years,” says Redford, his words spilling forth in an ardent undergraduate rush. “It’s artists taking on the new technology and seeing where that would go.” There will even be a comic/scary 3-D movie about ravenous Australian cane toads.
Maybe some of these guerrilla filmmakers will join the long line of ones from the past who, Redford says, have come up to him on planes or in restaurants to tell him simply, “Thank you for changing my life.”
There is, the Oscar winner says with paternal satisfaction, “no greater reward than this.”