In 2014, I found myself in New York, having just arrived from Los Angeles for my first and only interview with the actor and Sundance founder, Robert Redford. I felt nervous. Although I was a seasoned journalist, I was still young enough to feel butterflies at the thought of meeting a Hollywood icon whose films—Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Natural, The Sting, All the President’s Men—had introduced me to cinema. Yet, it was Redford’s reputation that filled me with dread; he was known for being notoriously late, if he showed up at all.
A colleague recounted a trip to Utah for a meeting that never happened, while a friend spent a week waiting on location only for Redford to appear on the tenth day. His career has left a similar impression. Suddenly, he was there, larger than life, with that shock of hair and unmistakable face—Robert Redford, the Sundance Kid, dressed in a black sweatshirt and casual overcoat. We sat down, and for the next two and a half hours, we had an engaging conversation. “I was always a rule breaker,” he shared, reflecting on his childhood in Santa Monica during the 1940s and ’50s, growing up in a working-class neighborhood of immigrants, with his father as a weary milkman.
He spoke of his Hollywood journey, noting that acting wasn’t his initial passion. “That was my dream when I was young,” he said. But circumstances changed. After leaving college at the University of Colorado, he stumbled into acting and never looked back, quickly landing his first TV role in an episode of the old Twilight Zone titled ‘Nothing in the Dark.’