2013’s All Is Lost might get lost in the crowd of terrific Robert Redford performances, but it’s one of his best. Some thoughts. The news yesterday of the passing of Robert Redford sent ripples right through the film world. Rightly so. Few figures have been such a name in cinema for so long, and his ... All Is Lost | A salute to an overlooked Robert Redford performance
2013’s All Is Lost might get lost in the crowd of terrific Robert Redford performances, but it’s one of his best. Some thoughts.
The news yesterday of the passing of Robert Redford sent ripples right through the film world. Rightly so. Few figures have been such a name in cinema for so long, and his resume of movies he’s left behind is enough to make even the most storied of filmmakers envious. A cinema great, both behind and in front of the camera, has left us.
Inevitably, some of his highest profile work – The Sting, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, All The President’s Men – is being cited and celebrated. He also directed one of my favourite films of the 1990s, Quiz Show, and starred in another, Sneakers.
As an actor, he wasn’t renowned for enjoying starting on time (as per many directors interviewed over the years), but once on set, the man dripped charisma and star quality.
Still, lots of people have written far better tributes to Redford than I could manage, and they’re all around the internet today.
But I do want to put one of his later films on the radar. I think it’s an extraordinary feature for a couple of reasons, and one that was shamefully overlooked by the likes of the Oscars (appreciating that awards are all pretend really.) It’s a film that also arrived when Redford was working at the opposite end of the scale, courtesy of his appearance in Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
The film in question is J C Chandor’s 2013 drama All Is Lost.
It’s a modest and stripped down film on the surface, that cost around $9m. That’s nine plots of Indecent Proposal. But also, it plays host to one of Redford’s best performances. He’s alone on screen for the film; just him, a damaged boat and an awful lot of water. It’s both a physical role and an introspective one. On the surface, he’s trying to survive. Beneath it, the metaphorical one at least, he’s having to wrestle with wanting to survive.
It’s a role that suits a seventysomething actor with a high profile film history. The early frames, the presence of Redford brings presence, fast. The lines on his face, that we as an audience have seen appear over decades, are testament to his lived experiences.
I spoke to Chandor at the end of last year for his latest movie, Kraven The Hunter, but shoehorned in a few words about working with Redford on All Is Lost. Turns out the pair had kept in touch, and met in Santa Fe last year for a meal and a catch-up.
But on All Is Lost, there was a filmmaker who knew exactly what he wanted – “I could see every frame of that film, and what I wanted it to be,” he told me – and an actor willing to take a risk and a half by signing up.
It’s not as if Redford needed the money. His Sundance Institute had certainly had money troubles in the past (he was pushed towards films like Indecent Proposal in the early 1990s for that reason), but those were in the rear view mirror. All Is Lost hardly had a handsome paycheque either. But underneath the environmentalist, the producer, the independent film champion, the director, that was – in his late 70s – an actor unable to resist a really challenging, meaty role.
The production itself had a stroke of luck on its side, incidentally, as it was the beneficiary of a blockbuster movie that never was. In the early 2010s, David Fincher was set to make 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea for – of all studios – Disney, and thus a large investment was made refurbishing the water tanks at Baja Studios in Mexico in preparation for his arrival.
Fincher’s film never turned up. Clashes behind the scenes with Disney over the direction of the film consigned it to the movies never made pile, and next in at Baja was All Is Lost. The kind of investment required for a $50-100m Disney blockbuster had been spent on the water tanks, and a film whose budget wouldn’t cover the refit proudly showed them off.
What this all meant was that Robert Redford was spending the bulk of the two months filming at Baja, in a massive water tank. Often, too, subjected to choppy water. There were a couple of extra days on the actual ocean in addition. “We shot most of it in that facility,” Chandor confirmed to me.
At the point the movie was filming, Robert Redford was 77 years old. There’s little sign he enjoyed the experience. The story goes that he was soaked so many times from the assorted water effects being deployed, that it led to an ear infection. This, in turn, would permanently affect his hearing. He would describe to The Hollywood Reporter how the process of making the film as “intense and exhausting”.
But what had appealed to Redford was a film that stripped most of the mechanics away. His character has very little dialogue, for instance, and while there were over 1000 post-production special effects added, the actual physical shoot involved water, and a lot of it. The script for the feature topped out at just 31 pages long.
It was a frustrating shoot for Redford, stuck in the water for long periods of time and unable to head off to a trailer to unwind.
Still, much was made when Tom Hanks was left on screen with precious little dialogue in Cast Away, earning a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his trouble. For my money, Redford’s haunting performance in All Is Lost surpasses that. We don’t get the back details of his character, and words on a page can’t be relied on to fill in gaps. The story is told by one man, in an enormous body of water.
It just so happens that actor was one of the finest of his generation, and a legend of cinema.
All Is Lost wasn’t a box office success, nor was its mantelpiece weight down by awards. But it’s a superb film, anchored by a superb performance. From a man who, if he’d had any sense, would have stayed in the warm with a nice drink.
That’d be the easy way, though. And across his career, you could hardly accuse him of taking that path very often.
Rest in peace, Robert Redford.
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