As an Activist, Robert Redford Understood the Power of Celebrity

Robert Redford had a knack for making every role seem like the one he was born to play. But the most fitting of all, by my lights, was his turn as Bill McKay in “The Candidate,” the 1972 satirical comedy that is perhaps the greatest film about modern American campaigning ever made.

McKay is a public interest lawyer, the liberal son of a popular former California governor, who is drafted by a political consultant to run against an incumbent Republican senator. Since everyone assumes McKay has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning — including, most importantly, McKay — he reluctantly agrees to run purely in order to have a public platform to speak about his views on caring for the underprivileged and the environment.

But a funny thing happens on the way to election night: It turns out this handsome, charismatic candidate is very appealing, especially on TV. And as his poll numbers edge up, his advisers begin to push his message toward generalities, sanding off his principles, finding ways to do an end-run around moments when his conscience on matters like race and poverty gets the better of him. In the process, his principled identity begins to disappear behind his image, too.

And it works. He wins. Sitting stunned in a hotel room, away from the media throng, he turns to his manager and delivers a now-famous line: “What do we do now?”

Redford hatched the idea for the movie with the film’s director, Michael Ritchie, which makes sense: The legacy of the actor and filmmaker, who died Tuesday at 89, is wrapped up with both his activism and his mixed feelings about the role of politicians in changing the world. His views never fell along neat lines, though he tended leftward. He was known for supporting environmental causes as well as Indigenous and L.G.B.T.Q. rights. He endorsed Barack Obama’s re-election and Joe Biden’s candidacy, and criticized Donald Trump’s policies and “moral compass.” But he supported both Republican and Democratic candidates during his lifetime.

Yet as “The Candidate” reveals, Redford was skeptical that the political process, at least in the American two-party system, was conducive to real change. The movie could come off as cynical, but some five decades after its release, it rings more with realism, because it pinpointed something very particular about modern campaigning: it works with the same visual vocabulary as our entertainment.

McKay is followed around by cameras, and the film often uses a cinéma vérité style, heightening our sense that we’re watching the campaign the way his potential voters are. In an image-driven era, candidates are chosen for their persona, their appeal to the buyer — er, voter. With their advisers, they weave a narrative they hope will resonate with an audience. They play a part in the stories their constituents tell, and they do it all in front of cameras. Politicians are celebrities. They’re stars.

Celebrity is a heady drug, but Redford — who never shied away from what stardom provided — also had the good luck to fall headlong in love with the art form that made him, and understood intuitively that it held a special kind of urgency and influence. In the next few years, he would keep picking roles related to how storytelling in journalism and the media had immense power to change the world, like “Three Days of the Condor” (1975) and “All the President’s Men” (1976). If cameras can turn an ordinary person into a symbol of freedom and power to millions of voters just by making them believe a story, then stories have other powers, too.

So while Redford’s activist legacy includes plenty of direct political work, he really left his biggest mark on the world through his engagement with independent filmmaking. In 1981, he founded the Sundance Institute, inviting 10 emerging filmmakers to his resort in Utah to work with established filmmakers and actors to develop independent projects. Three years earlier, Redford had become the first chairman of the Utah/US Film Festival, held in Salt Lake City, which was started to promote American independent filmmaking; within a few years, it would shift to Park City, about an hour from the resort, and eventually be renamed the Sundance Film Festival.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of Sundance to independent filmmaking, both in the United States and globally. Many artists you know today — Quentin Tarantino, Chloé Zhao, Miranda July, Steven Soderbergh, Ryan Coogler, Nia DaCosta, Richard Linklater, Ari Aster, Ava DuVernay and many more — brought their early work through the Sundance Labs and festival. The financing and mentorship has had an incalculable effect, ensuring that artists who are ordinarily passed over by the mainstream get to make work, and each year, thousands of film lovers trek to the mountains to be among the first to get to see the movies.

To put it another way, Sundance has proved for decades that work from artists who don’t fit the typical Hollywood profile, or whose artistic vision sits outside the mainstream, still can garner an enthusiastic and engaged audience. And to the end of his life, Redford remained connected to Sundance, greeting attendees and filmmakers at the festival and institute events. He often spoke publicly about the importance of what each artist was doing, as well as the importance of audiences buying tickets to see films that challenge and inspire them.

In 2002, accepting an honorary Academy Award for his work promoting independent filmmaking, he said he believed that “in keeping diversity alive, it will help keep our industry alive,” and that “to be able to be part of a freedom of expression that allows us as artists to tell our stories in our own way about the human condition, the complexities of life, the world around us, is a gift, and not one to be taken lightly.”

In 2018, he wrote that his responsibility to the next generation of artists was “to help and empower them, reminding them of the great moral promise of government and the importance of a free press, and the logic of listening to science and thinking like a planet.”

When McKay asked his campaign adviser, “What do we do now?” Redford, it seems, thought about that question, then decided on an answer. If you’ve got a vast sea of opportunity to make sure the voices of the many can tell their stories, make sure not to waste one drop of it.