takes walking up a hill we felt like we did hike
the trail.”
Kwapis could have been intimidated by
having to guide the performance of a man
who won an Oscar for Best Director on
Ordinary People, but he insists he wasn’t.
“I think Bob really appreciated being
directed,” he says. “Every morning he and I
would discuss the day’s work. He wanted to
make sure we were telling the whole story. It
was a complete collaboration.
“I don’t think people appreciate Bob’s act-
ing enough,” Kwapis adds. “For a long time
people thought of him as a movie star first,
but the depth of detail he brings to his work
is amazing.”
Although Nolte had worked with Redford
in The Company You Keep, other cast members
were encountering Redford for the first time.
“The biggest surprise for me was that I
immediately became the 12-year-old in North
Little Rock watching The Way We Were,”
Mary Steenburgen, an Oscar winner for
Melvin and Howard, told The Connection. She
plays a flirty motel owner Bryson meets when
he and Katz decide to spend a night off the
trail. “I had to fight [the character] making a
fool of me,” Steenburgen confesses.
Fellow co-star Kristen Schaal (from the
cast of The Last Man on Earth) admits to The
Connection, “I was really nervous at first to
work with Bob, but he was very kind.” She
plays a snarky hiker who encounters Redford
on the trail, and says, “It was the first time my
parents lit up when I told them who I was
working with.”
An outlaw sensibility
Being a screen icon can be a burden for
the 79-year-old actor/director/producer/
environmentalist/spokesman for independent film. He is often talked about with such
reverence that he could be the fifth face on
Mount Rushmore.
However, Redford doesn’t see himself
that way. No designer clothes for him during
a day of interviews. Instead, he wears khakis
and a simple black T-shirt.
“I’ve always had an outlaw sensibility
from the time I was a little kid,” he says. “I feel
more comfortable outside the boundaries
society gives us. That’s who I am.”
In some ways A Walk in the Woods is
Redford’s own story. Growing up in Los
Angeles in the 1940s and early ’50s, he resisted
conventions. “Unfortunately, I was rebellious
pretty much my whole life,” he says, breaking
into the famous Redford smile. He once told
a reporter, “I was exposed to a jail cell a time
or two.”
His main goal after high school was to get
out of town. He fled to the University of
Colorado in Boulder on a baseball scholar-
ship, but instead of studying he focused on
skiing and mountain climbing. “I was kicked
out after a year,” he recalls, “and rightly so. I
wasn’t interested in sitting in a classroom.”
At that point Redford wanted to be an
artist. His father, a milkman-turned-accoun-
tant, wasn’t prepared to finance such a whim,
so he found a way himself. “I spent five
months working as a
roustabout at an oil
refinery in El Segundo
n
CONTINUED ON PAGE 36
PHOTOS: FRANK MASI, SMPSP / ©BROAD GREEN PICTURES
Robert Redford, left, and Nick Nolte,
right, take a break during the filming of
A Walk in the Woods.
In our digital editions
Click here for a scene from
A Walk in the Woods with
Redford and Nick Nolte. (See
page 14 for details.)
