Robert Redford Explores Aging in "A Walk in the Woods"

The reason I was attracted to it, one, it was a comedy. I wanted to do a comedy. I hadn't done a comedy in a long, long time, and I kind of missed it, and I was doing some very serious dramatic work, which was fine. I just wanted to do a comedy. I'd done comedy on Broadway and earlier films, and I wanted to go back to that. I felt that a lot of the comedy in the last few years was making its way with kind of, it was lower grade, lower grade comedy. It was good, it was fun, but it was kind of one-dimensional in that it was, I don't want to say bathroom humor, that's too negative, but it was a certain kind of quality. It was down there, it was low. And I thought, I would like to do a comedy that had pathos mixed into it. This comedy was about friendship, of friendship lost for 30 years and then regained. And that journey on the Appalachian Trail was how it was found again, by two guys that once were very close, had a parting of their ways, went in totally different directions, and came back together again because no one else would walk the trail with my character. So I was stuck with this guy I hadn't seen in 30 years, and I just thought, that's a great story. So he has a titanium knee and a trick knee? Yeah, yeah. Let's go to a clip. That's the least of it. Let's go to a clip of Walk in the Woods. Hey, Stephen. You're Stephen. This is my wife. You're the British nurse I've heard so much about. I certainly hope so. It's a little bit like a bear hug. Are you limping? I don't know, it's that titanium knee. This one's a trick knee, you know. I gotta eat every hour or so, otherwise I get these... Episodes? No, no, they're... Seizures? Seizures, that's right. You get seizures? Mm-hmm, yeah. You know, I ate some contaminated PSI amines about 10 years ago. You know, totally changed my system, you know. I thought you said you were in shape. I am. That's Robert Redford and Nick Nolte and the Thompson as well. And especially for our radio listeners who aren't watching this on television, the part where you heard a candy machine working, that was Nick Nolte sort of revving up, getting some fuel before his walk. Isn't it also a film about getting older? Yeah, I think so. I think it's certainly about that. It's about what are you going to do with what time you've got left? Are you just going to sit? And one thing you don't want to do is be a guy sitting on a rocking chair on a stoop somewhere in a bathrobe and go, I wish I would have. I wish I could have. I should have. You don't want to have that. So you make the most of your life. And these guys hit a point where they see the end of the road. It's not that far away. What are you going to do? One last shot, one last effort to break through monotony, break through convention. Are you still young enough and able enough to try something risky that might change the whole picture? So I think that was the motivation. Do you continue to try risky things? Yes. What do you consider? The only risk is not taking a risk, in my mind. I think risk is what moves things forward. You're not going to make it all the time. You're going to fail. You won't achieve what you want to, but as long as you're willing to take a risk to move things forward. When have you failed and seen that? Now in this interview. We don't need to go into it. There's a lot of times in my life. And seen it as actually in retrospect, because it's very hard to feel it when you fail, but as an important turning point that actually led you in a direction you wanted to go in. Well, I think taking chances, again, this risk, taking a chance. I began my early adult life. I thought I was going to be an artist. I'd gone to Europe to study art. I saved up enough money to last for a year, kind of on the bum. And that travel exposed me to a real education that I didn't feel I was getting in a classroom. Getting out in the world and experience other cultures, other languages, different people with different views. That became my education. And so I thought to keep myself company, I would have a sketchbook. I would go to bars and hitchhike along the way and I would sketch people. I was alone. And so I thought I was going to be an artist. And I studied in Paris and I came back to New York and through a series of serendipitous turns, I ended up in a dramatic school. I wasn't planning that. But what happened when I went into it was something clicked that I hadn't expected. And my life took a different turn and suddenly I was an actor. Do you draw now? Pardon? Do you draw now? Do you paint? I do. I keep, yeah. It's the way I tell a story to myself. If I'm sitting in a restaurant and I'm alone, I used to be able to sketch. Are you ever alone in a restaurant? Yeah. What I would do would be, because I was alone, to keep myself company, I would sketch people I would see. I can't do that now. Somebody's looking at you. But it gave me great comfort. And I would sketch. There was a story being told at another table and I would sketch the person or the couple or the group. And then I would imagine what their story was. And on the right hand side of the page, I would write what I thought their story was to correspond to the picture. So in my mind, I was putting the picture and the story together in my mind. And so that's what I thought I was going to do with my life until I became an actor. Truth. Can you talk about this new film you're working on? Truth is the story. It's a wonderful story. It has elements of Greek tragedy to it. Dan Rather, well-known anchor, along with the two other anchors from the other networks. It was that moment in time where Dan was at the top of his game and he fell from grace very quickly. His producing partner, Mary Mapes, they were producing incredible work. And he ran afoul of his bosses, CBS at that time, who felt that he was pushing a little too hard against George Bush on his Air National Guard record, which was flawed and had holes in it. And he was beginning to pursue what the real truth behind that was. Can you just remind people what that National Guard story was about? Well, it got complicated. It had to do with a memo, but what it was was that the administration was covering up the fact that he didn't show up, didn't do a physical, didn't show up, went to Alabama to campaign rather than showing up to duty in Arkansas. Way back when he served in the National Guard. And so Mary Mapes was doing the research, getting the facts together, and Dan was putting it on the air. But CBS didn't want it because they wanted a relationship with the administration. They asked him to back off. He said, I can't do that. My job is to tell the truth. He said, you can also tell it too much. So anyway, there was a tension that ended up because he did not stop. He said, this is my job. So they fired him and her. And that was a fall from grace that took place in a very short amount of time. So this film is just about that moment where he was at the top and then fell. And I talked to Dan, I called him before I did the film. And it's a hard character to play for me because he's so well known. You've got a public face that's very well known. And you want to be careful. You don't want to imitate that person that could become a character. You also want to find the essence of the person so you can be truthful to his type of person. So I called him and told him about this. I asked him if he was going to be uncomfortable with it. He said, no. I said, well, then tell me something. What was it about you and Mary Mapes? Because Kate Blanchett plays Mary Mapes in this. What was it? He said, tell you what, Bob, it was about loyalty. He said, she and I were loyal to each other. And we were loyal to our boss. The heartache, the tragedy was that we were, our faith in our bosses wasn't acknowledged. There was no reciprocation for that. And so we were fired, but we stayed loyal to each other. We've stayed loyal all these years to each other because that was the core of our relationship, loyalty to get to the truth. And we were kind of done in by our own bosses, who we were both very loyal to. We believed in them. I thought that's a great story. It wasn't my idea. Are there any echoes of all the president's men in this? Maybe a little bit. I think in all the president's men, what attracted me to that story was showing what two reporters did that nobody knew anything about. Everybody knew about Nixon. Everybody knew all the headline stuff, but these two guys were doing something nobody else was doing.