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Park City • With the movie world descending today on this usually quiet ski town, Robert Redford has a message for every filmmaker struggling to tell a story: He's been there.
" 'The Candidate,' 'Downhill Racer,' 'Jeremiah Johnson,' 'Ordinary People,' 'All the President's Men,' 'A River Runs Through It' — just about every film I've had any role in getting made has been difficult, and each one has a story attached to it that brings me closer to these filmmakers," Redford said Wednesday in a Tribune interview. The 2011 Sundance Film Festival begins its 11-day run with five screenings tonight in Park City.
Those difficulties in getting a movie made, and the determination of new generations of filmmakers to get their stories told, are what has driven Redford's Sundance Institute since he founded it in 1980.
And this year, the people who attend Sundance — which festival director John Cooper has estimated may hit a record 60,000 people — will hear what Redford calls "the full story of Sundance, [which] I don't think a lot of people know."
"There are two narrow views of Sundance," Redford said, sitting in Zoom, his Park City restaurant. "One is that Sundance is the festival and that's it. The other is that Sundance is Park City, which it isn't. "
While the world focuses on Sundance for the glitz and glitter of the festival, Redford counters that "the real Sundance is 40 miles away" from Park City, in the institute's lab programs. If Sundance were a car, the labs would be the engine, and the festival its shiny paint job.
Each June, the institute conducts labs for directors at Redford's Sundance resort in Provo Canyon. The filmmakers get a chance to workshop scenes with real film crews and actors — and with a group of advisors made up of veteran directors, editors, cinematographers and actors, including Redford himself. Each January and June, the institute runs intensive labs for screenwriters to polish and re-examine their scripts.
Over the years, directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson ("Boogie Nights") and James Mangold ("Walk the Line") came through the Sundance labs while developing their first films.
At the Sundance festival this year, Redford boasted, a record number of films in the U.S. dramatic competition —six out of 16 — came through the labs.
Those six films represent the wide scope of American independent film, and in some cases beyond. The drama "Circumstance," for example, depicts a liberal family in Iran (though the movie was shot in Lebanon), while the road movie "Here" follows an American cartographer (Ben Foster) finding love while conducting a survey of Armenia.
"I believe that independent film can transcend borders," Redford said. "If the stories are on the humane side, what people are experiencing in their own lives, in their own countries, in their own villages, you're going to find out there's a common thread about victories and failures and losses and so forth. It becomes an international human-interest story."
Redford witnessed that international scope during the January Screenwriters' Lab, held just before the festival, where he met writers from Pakistan, Israel and Brazil working on their scripts. Redford has seen similar global interest in independent film as the Sundance Channel — a cable network that plays independent movies, many of them first seen at the festival — has expanded across Europe and Asia.
As Redford has overseen the expansion of Sundance into cable TV and movie exhibition (with Sundance Cinemas in San Francisco and Madison, Wis.), he's also tried to guard the festival against what he terms "the ambush marketers," the companies who hit Park City looking to sell products, the celebrities who come for the parties and free merchandise, and the media that trails the celebrities.
"Last year, we were given a bit of luck, because the economy prevented the ambush marketers from coming in and taking over Main Street. It was just natural that people were just able to focus more on the films," Redford said. "It created more space to see that's what we've always done."
Redford comes to Park City after experiencing the other side of independent-film life, when he went to the Toronto International Film Festival to find a distributor for "The Conspirator," the independently financed post-Civil War drama he directed. (Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions bought the rights, and will release the film in April.)
"It was a challenge and a test that I came out of it enjoying," Redford said. "This is an independent film, there was no distributor behind it. It's just a clean indie film. I thought, 'Well, this is ironic.' But, also, it was kind of good. I enjoyed that after all the support I've given to independent film, here I was with one of my own."
Sundancing the festival
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