Robert Redford Didn’t Love Hollywood, Yet Hollywood Loved Him

Robert Redford was not subtle about his distaste for Hollywood.

He loathed awards season, the annual spree of self-congratulation and glittery excess that starts in August and culminates with the Academy Awards in March. His face would frost over if you asked what he thought about the mindless sequels and remakes churned out by the film industry. He lived in the mountains of Utah, where he died on Tuesday, eschewing the air-kiss culture of fashionable Los Angeles neighborhoods.

“He didn’t want to be where elite breeds eliteness,” said John Cooper, who for 32 years worked at Mr. Redford’s Sundance Film Festival, most recently as director.

The feelings were not mutual.

Hollywood tends to have very little tolerance for criticism, whether it is from people outside the industry or at the center of it. But it would be difficult to find anyone in Hollywood who resented Mr. Redford for his stinging assessments, or his decision to spend most of his time in Utah.

To put it simply, the movie capital adored him.

“The amount of gratitude that the industry has for what Bob built and sustained and championed is really without peer,” said Bill Kramer, chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, referring to the Sundance festival and its related workshops. “There is nothing but love.”

Mr. Redford was revered in part because he said out loud what many Hollywood figures think privately but are too afraid for their jobs to speak openly. That includes some of the powerful executives who work at studios putting sequel upon sequel into production. They don’t make those movies because they are fulfilled by them; they make them to sell tickets.

Hollywood is mostly run by people whose love of movies was formed in the 1970s and 1980s, when Mr. Redford was using his celebrity to push through seminal political thrillers like “All the President’s Men,” difficult dramas like “Ordinary People” and commentaries on societal issues like “The Milagro Beanfield War.” These are the kinds of films that they would like to make if only they could.

Mr. Redford was also widely admired in Hollywood for his personal politics, in particular his concern over environmental issues. A trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, he helped stop construction of a coal-fired power plant and a six-lane highway, both in Utah.

In 1981, Mr. Redford founded the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to cultivating fresh cinematic voices. He took over a struggling film festival in Utah in 1984 and renamed it after the institute a few years later. Since then, thousands of directors, writers, actors and other film craftspeople have gotten their start in Hollywood by earning a spot in one of the highly competitive filmmaking workshops, or having their film gain entry into the Sundance Film Festival.

Steven Soderbergh, Ryan Coogler, Quentin Tarantino, James Wan, Darren Aronofsky, Nicole Holofcener, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell, Robert Rodriguez, Chloé Zhao and Ava DuVernay all ascended through Sundance.

“He wanted us to be artistically uncompromising — take risks, don’t listen to outside influences,” Mr. Cooper said, speaking of the films selected to play at the festival. Inevitably, Mr. Redford would receive a call from one of his friends or an agent complaining about someone whose film got cut. “He always backed us up, and that is a rare quality in the business,” Mr. Cooper said.

He also loved getting into the muck of the moviemaking process. Trevor Groth, a longtime programmer for the festival, said Mr. Redford would spend loads of time at the labs where up-and-coming filmmakers workshopped their scenes, helping to coach them along.

“He would work both with the actors and the directors and challenge them and push them so that they would get the best version,” he said, adding: “He is really there to unlock their vision.”

Mr. Redford was also more Hollywood than he sometimes let on, preferring his image as a rebel.

For years, he had a home in Malibu, a short distance up the Pacific Coast from Santa Monica, where he was born. He had deep friendships with people like Paul Newman, the Butch Cassidy to Mr. Redford’s Sundance Kid and another actor with an unconventional approach to Hollywood. The director Sydney Pollack, who made at least seven films with Mr. Redford, including “Out of Africa,” “The Way We Were” and “Three Days of the Condor,” was another close confidant.

Mr. Redford also understood that his power came from cameras — not just the ones on soundstages, but the hundreds that lined red carpet premieres. In 2013, he was all smiles at the gala premiere for his film “All Is Lost” at the Cannes Film Festival. As the film worked its way through the dreaded awards season gantlet, he occasionally popped up at events like the Golden Globes, the epitome of Hollywood nonsense.

And the patron saint of indie film was not above starring in the occasional blockbuster. “Indecent Proposal” was one. Released in 1993, it co-starred Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson and took in $267 million, or $590 million in today’s dollars. He played Alexander Pierce in two Marvel movies: “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” a 2015 superhero sequel that collected an adjusted $989 million and “Avengers: Endgame” which brought in $2.8 billion in 2019.

Yet his complex relationship with Hollywood remained, especially when it came to the commercialization of Sundance. “He was conflicted by the business part of the festival, because he thought it took away the spotlight from the films themselves. It was always a bit of a push and a pull,” Mr. Groth said.

The writer and director David Lowery worked with Mr. Redford on two of his final films, at a time when Mr. Redford’s resistance to Hollywood seemed to be waning. Mr. Lowery said Mr. Redford chose to act in Disney’s “Pete’s Dragon” because “he wanted to make a movie his grandchildren could watch.” “The Old Man & the Gun” was a passion project Mr. Redford had been developing for years.

When Mr. Lowery got on set with Mr. Redford for the first time, he was nervous that Mr. Redford would be judging his directing or giving him pointers. He did neither. Until Mr. Lowery asked for yet another take.

“I’m a director who likes to do a lot of takes, and he’s not,” said Mr. Lowery. “At one point, I said ‘Bob, that was great. Let’s go again.’ I gave him a direction, asked him to do something specific. And he said, ‘I was doing that, you just weren’t paying attention.’”