When He's 64

By Jess Cagle/Los Angeles

Yes, Robert Redford is wrinkled. He's weathered and wizened by good days on the Utah slopes and long years on movie sets. He's 64 and looks it, and he's O.K. with that. "A person's road map is there to be seen and shared," he says. "The only time I think about aging is when it's put in front of me. It started about 10 years ago. 'I notice you're more wrinkled. How does it feel?' I thought, Yeah, that's what happens, doesn't it?"

We might as well make peace with it too, because these days we're seeing a lot more of Redford. His Sundance Institute--the laboratory he started for independent filmmakers in Sundance, Utah--is celebrating its 20th anniversary. And he is starring in two movies: the prison drama The Last Castle, which opened last month, and the Tony Scott espionage thriller, Spy Game, which opens Nov. 21.

Audiences have shied away from Last Castle, and most critics have declared it a stinker, except for one thing: Redford's performance as a court-martialed three-star general leading a prison revolt. He says he was intrigued by the role because he hadn't played a military character before. Still, it's the kind of part he specializes in: the canny outsider itching to outsmart the system. He has higher hopes for Spy Game, in which he co-stars with Brad Pitt, whom he directed in the 1992 drama A River Runs Through It. With Pitt as his former protege, Redford plays a renegade CIA agent, a twist on the government-targeted fugitive he played in 1975 in Three Days of the Condor. "Condor was a critical look at the CIA, and Spy Game is an inside look at it from a historical perspective," he says. "It's intriguing to play a character that's the flip side of one you played before."

Here's an irony that is not lost on Redford: while celebrating Sundance, which is dedicated to scrappy, low-budget endeavors, its founder and protector is starring in big-budget studio movies, commanding $8 million to $10 million a pop. "Talk about contradiction," he says, laughing. "There you have it. There's a line by Kris Kristofferson: 'I'm just a walking contradiction.' Well, it sure seems that way."

Redford has always offered a study in contrasts. He is the California all-American kid who was born (in 1937) into a section of Santa Monica where most of his neighbors spoke Spanish. He had the looks of a matinee idol and the brains of a subversive mogul. Like his Sundance Film Festival--where each January in Park City, Utah, makers of low-budget films mix with cell phone-addicted agents and studio executives--Redford is a fiercely independent entity with an inescapable aura of Hollywood glamour.

In the 1970s, when his stardom was at its most luminous--with The Sting, The Way We Were, Condor and All the President's Men--he preferred the Utah mountains to Beverly Hills, taking three- and four-year breaks from acting. Except for a romance with actress Sonia Braga, whom he directed in The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), his private life has seldom drawn the spotlight. He has had only one marriage, to Lola Van Wagenen, which ended after 27 years, in 1985. And none of his three grown kids appears to have a Daddy Dearest story to tell.

From the moment his career took off, he began trading on his stardom to produce edgy films like Downhill Racer, The Candidate and President's Men--movies that resonated with a nation disillusioned by Watergate and Vietnam. And still in the glow of his 1980 directorial debut with Ordinary People, which won him Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, he founded the Sundance Institute. "The industry was moving more and more away from the films that were made in the '70s, which were about things, which were more diverse," he says. "The mainstream was going more centralized and more high-tech, more action and more special effects."

The institute and its film festival, which began in 1985, have brought to light such audacious talents as Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies, and videotape), Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs) and Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry), and provided a valuable antidote to Hollywood in its post-Jaws era of quick thrills and saturation bookings. But while moviegoers have benefited from Sundance, the institute has exacted a high price from its godfather. "Sundance turned out to be something far more personal than I ever imagined," says Redford, who has poured much energy into developing labs for screenwriting, directing, theater and music, as well as the Sundance cable channel. "All that commanded my attention to the point where I got conflicted about my own career. When you're passionate about something, you get so far into it, you can't get out. I got a little lost for a while."

Sure enough, while nurturing young talent at Sundance, Redford lost his footing as a filmmaker. He cast himself in the popular but sappy 1998 romance The Horse Whisperer. "I had a plan never to direct myself," he says. "I didn't exactly enjoy it." He also directed last year's expensive bomb, The Legend of Bagger Vance, starring Matt Damon and Will Smith as a golfer and his mystical caddy. "It was disappointing, but you live with that," says Redford. "I felt the point of the film was missed. Critics just didn't go with the mythological part of it, but I moved on." After three years spent making those films, he decided he missed "just acting" and signed on for Spy Game and Last Castle. "I started in the business as an actor," he says. "I've developed some mixed feelings about it in the past, but it's still the first love."

Both his new movies were called into question in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, which made Hollywood re-examine its product and marketing strategies. DreamWorks pulled ads for Last Castle that depicted an upside-down flag (though in the film, it's merely a sign of distress). Scott toned down some of the explosions in Spy Game. "Right now the scrambling [in the movie industry] has to do with, Is it gonna sell or not?" says Redford. "Moral concerns are overwhelmed by a larger concern, which is business. If this is a sustained mood in the country, then you'll see a reduction of violence. The business will shift to whatever sells."

The question now is whether Redford still sells. Unlike Michael Douglas, who is 57, Redford hasn't courted a younger audience. He turned down the 1997 President-in-peril action film Air Force One, for example, because "it felt like it was approaching a cartoon." (Harrison Ford took the job, and the picture earned $300 million worldwide.) Redford says that when reading scripts these days, he misses "wit and subtlety. You either bring the audience in or you go out there and hammer them in the face to get their attention. That seems to be the general state of things. That's just not as appealing to me." He can get grouchy when discussing the film business--a "chickens___ industry," he calls it.

He's more at ease when talking about environmental issues or, better yet, the love of his life, Sundance. He warms when he speaks of the "cinema centers" that at this point are still a dream. He calls them "a mammoth undertaking" in which grand old Art Deco movie palaces would be restored and programmed with independent pictures and documentaries and equipped with libraries for film students.

One of the movie houses Redford has been eyeing is the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. He saw his first film there--a Nazi thriller starring John Garfield called The Fallen Sparrow--when he was six. Recalling the Saturday matinees in which half a dozen cartoons and serials played at a stretch, he says, "Movie theaters were not only for entertainment--they were a gathering place for people." This memory kindles a smile and, for a moment, restores the youth of the Sundance Kid.