Robert Redford on chasing truth, dodging red lights and defying Washington

"He says he did."

"Okay, so what’s the big deal?"

Actually, to drive down Park Avenue at 100mph — even at 2am — is a big deal. It means, since there is a nasty S-bend at the end of the run, that you have to be a little crazy. Some people would say that you have to be suicidal as well. Talking to Redford at the conclusion of my sedate taxi-ride, I kept meaning to bring up the great Park Avenue run and discuss its inner meaning. In the event we got launched straight away into a serious discussion of environmental politics — in which Redford is deeply engaged — and of journalism, the subject of his new film. So we never got round to it.

But we were talking about the image of journalists and their reality, and it was nice to feel that Redford had, if not a skeleton, then the saucy roar of an expensive exhaust-pipe in his cupboard.

All the President’s Men, produced by Redford and starring him as Bob Woodward, one of the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, is very much about the actuality of reporting. Back in 1973, Redford went around interviewing journalists about their business. "Most of them were very sceptical. I was saying that I wanted to find out about the newspaper business, explore what the reality is like. And that is the major angle of the film. Very few of them said, 'Let’s wait and see', rather than jump to conclusions or push an image."

What most of these journalists were thinking of was The Front Page, the folkloric movie about Chicago newsmen in the '20s. Those newsmen were lazy, smart-ass, deceitful and usually drunk. The Washington journalists affected alarm that Redford and Dustin Hoffman — who plays Carl Bernstein in the film — would do some sort of crude update. Nervous editors and reporters hung around, being off-handedly tough to Redford and secretly consumed with worry about their image. The joke was that these same journalists did what journalists in the old Front Page image are meant to do.

After the movie-makers had left Washington, the Washington Post promptly ran an enormous feature putting down Redford and Hoffman: a traditional newspaper double-cross. Recalling this episode, I remarked to Redford that journalists are slightly more unpleasant than as portrayed in his film. "I agree," he said a little sourly. "They are more unpleasant."

He thought about it a little longer and then added, "They’re very unsubtle people, and as a result very easy to study. The chances are that if you portrayed them the way they really are, no one would believe you. But basics were all we could deal with. We were trying to show the public something they don’t know anything about, the newspaper business. How investigative journalism works. We didn’t have time to make it a portrait study."

It’s a pity that they did not have the time. Looking genial, as indeed he had every reason to do since he was off to his home in Utah for a couple of weeks’ skiing with his wife and children, Redford launched into brisk but decidedly hard-edged sketches of Carl Bernstein — "Despite his apparent sensitivity, he’s quite insensitive, a lot more establishment-minded than people think" — and of Seymour Hersh, the New York Times’s top investigative reporter who had competed with Woodward and Bernstein on many of the later Watergate stories. "He showed no sign of taste or style. He was like a rabid dog, but interesting. I liked him. He never finished a sentence. He walked into my hotel room talking and he walked out talking. He never said hello, and he never said goodbye."

As Redford delivered these assessments, it seemed reasonable enough for the inky-fingered quill-driver (myself) to shed his self-protective, patronising attitude towards the rich and vacation-bound star and to concede that he is intelligent and tough-minded.

For one thing, he had not, unlike many of the denizens of Hollywood, thrown in his lot with Jimmy Carter — glamorous front-runner for the Presidency. "I don’t like Carter. I think he’s highly dangerous." Redford struck a candidate’s pose and said in the deep, rich tones of the stump politician, "I want you to know that I stand for… nothing." Which at once brought to mind the last line of The Candidate, the film in which Redford played a politician running for office. The successful candidate turns to his aides and says, "What do we do now?"

I suggested to Redford that films like All the President’s Men, The Candidate and Downhill Racer — an excellent portrait of a sports champion — are all about obsession, variations on the American theme that nice guys finish last and truly determined guys finish first. He conceded the possibility and — perhaps to consolidate the notion on an autobiographical level — returned to the subject of the environment.

When President Ford first attempted to appoint Stanley Hathaway secretary of the interior, Redford was one of the people who lobbied most vigorously against his confirmation on the grounds that Hathaway’s environmental record in Wyoming was bad.

Redford went to Washington and lobbied in Congress. "They were just solid for Hathaway because he’d been chosen by Ford." Now Redford is trying to set up an umbrella organisation for environmental groups. The Citizens’ Action Fund is being financed initially by premieres of All the President’s Men in 13 cities around the United States. He talked crisply about future plans.

He continued to talk crisply as he, wife and children started to gather up bags for the flight westward to Utah. He was nice and interesting to the last, telling me that there had been subtle obstruction of the making of All the President’s Men by people in Ford’s White House; that like myself he had some Scottish and Irish blood, which was surely why he was drawn to the role of the outlaw — as in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

There was just a trace of gooeyness in this last confession, which reminded me of what might be termed the Porsche-element in his make-up. Redford is serious about a great many things, but in what he himself called the unsubtle business of journalism, we should not plump entirely for one side or the other. Nothing is monochrome, Redford included. Yet it’s a little sad that few of the students who will be cramming the nation’s journalism schools in imitation of the daring young men who cracked Watergate will see things quite like that.

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