I had known this day was coming. I dreaded it, quite frankly. As a writer, I had taken some glee as I typed out the passages in which the character known as “Our Man” finally faces his own mortality after a life mostly well lived. But now, as a director, I sat across from an actual man, Robert Redford, as he struggled through shooting the first takes of the penultimate scene in our 2013 film, “All Is Lost,” the story of a lone man lost at sea.
We were sitting together in a small, mostly deflated life raft, floundering in a two-acre water tank perched high above the Pacific at Baja Studios in Mexico. We had been shooting for more than a month. Now the moment had arrived and, as 150 crew members stared at me, I realized I had completely failed to prepare my actor for this challenge — and as a result we were stuck.
The crew pulled the raft back to the edge of the tank so we could all take a break. I huddled with my producers, panicking in my realization: “He has absolutely no idea this scene is about his character finally for the first time in his life confronting his own mortality!”
After a long silence, their response was very clear: “Well, you have to go tell him.”
I slowly walked over to the small 1980s camper trailer we had brought in to keep Bob warm between takes and knocked on the door. As he always did, he kindly invited me in, and I sat down directly across from him at the dinette table. Our noses weren’t much more than a foot apart and as my heart jumped from my chest he calmly asked me what was on my mind.
“Well, Bob,” I said, “we need to talk about death.”
“Death?” he asked.
“Yes,” I responded. Death.
Robert Redford never gave up. Bob was caring, blunt, kind, frustrating, late, hilarious, brutally serious, sweet, acidic, beautiful, strong and the greatest creative collaborator I will ever have. But in the end what made his life so truly extraordinary was that he was completely and utterly relentless. He often loathed the power that our medium and his celebrity gave him but knew in his heart that great storytelling can be the ultimate equalizer for humanity. So that’s what he did.
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The post I Once Talked to Robert Redford About What Happens When We Die appeared first on New York Times.
