As an actor, filmmaker, and transformative presence in the independent scene, Robert Redford knows a thing or two about cinema in its many shapes and forms.
After all, he was one of the ‘New Hollywood’ era’s biggest stars and most bankable leading men, lending his name to a procession of classics and smash hits that included Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, The Natural, and Out of Africa, to name just a few.
When he turned his hand to directing, he couldn’t have gotten off to a much better start after his feature-length debut Ordinary People won him the Academy Award for ‘Best Director’, scooping additional prizes for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’, and ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for Timothy Hutton.
He’s been around long enough to collect lifetime achievement awards from the Oscars, the Golden Globes, and the Screen Actors Guild, and his contributions to the industry will continue to live on through the Sundance Institute, which has been spotlighting independent features and untested filmmakers for over 40 years, with the festival evolving into one of the hottest tickets on the filmic calendar.
With that in mind, Redford is well-placed to comment on what cinema could, should, and may yet be, and he found himself captivated by a sparse screenplay that reaffirmed his love for the medium in a way he never expected, given the threadbare sum of its parts.
JC Chandor sent his script for the survival drama All Is Lost directly to Redford, and he couldn’t believe what he was reading. He’d only played one leading role in a film he hadn’t directed himself in the previous decade, and yet the rookie auteur had sought to gauge his interest in a project where he wasn’t only the sole character seen onscreen for the duration but he’d be tasked to carry the entire movie with little more than 50 words of dialogue.
All Is Lost ran for 105 minutes in its finished form, but the script was only 31 pages long. “That was the first thing I liked,” Robert told The Hollywood Reporter. “Wow! I mean, this is really bold. And then, once we talked, I said, ‘This is a chance for me to go back to my roots and really be an actor’. By taking away dialogue, taking away voiceovers, taking away special effects, it was pure cinema the way cinema used to be.”
The result was a gripping combination of survival story and character study, with Redford giving his best performance in years as the unnamed protagonist who faces up to their own mortality amid a raging storm. He may have missed out on an Oscar nod, but All Is Lost netted the icon his first Golden Globe nomination for acting since he won ‘New Star of the Year’ all the way back in 1965, and it instantly took its place among his finest work.