Robert Redford, the Oscar-winning actor, director and founder of the Sundance Film Festival, championed independence, integrity and new voices throughout a career that reshaped American cinema, he often said. Redford, who died Tuesday at 89, repeatedly framed his work as an effort to protect artistic freedom and to create opportunities for storytellers outside the Hollywood mainstream.
Redford credited others and his own sense of independence for key turns in his career. Recalling the casting of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he said Paul Newman’s insistence on working with an actor rather than a big name changed the course of his life. "Had it not been for Paul, I would not have gotten that break," Redford said in 2015, describing months of argument over casting and Newman’s respect for craft.
His directing work and film choices reflected a similar commitment to principle. Speaking about All the President’s Men in 2006, Redford dismissed the notion that the film was merely a political hatchet and stressed its focus on investigative journalism. "Nixon had already resigned and the held opinion (in Hollywood) was ‘No one cares. No one wants to hear about this,’ And I said, ‘No, it’s not about Nixon. It’s about something else. It’s about investigative journalism and hard work,'" he said. He described his curiosity about the reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as rooted in human dynamics: "One guy was a Jew, one guy was a WASP. One guy was a Republican, the other guy was a liberal... They didn’t like each other, but they had to work together. Now that’s an interesting dynamic I’d love to know about."
Those same impulses led Redford to create institutions intended to enlarge the field for independent artists. "For me, the word to be underscored is ‘independence,'" he said in 2018, describing why he founded the Sundance Institute and the Sundance Film Festival. He said he wanted "to create a category that supported independent artists who weren’t given a chance to be heard," noting that the industry was long dominated by mainstream interests.
As Sundance grew into a global platform, Redford acknowledged trade-offs between success and preservation of purpose. In 2016 he warned that swelling crowds and development in Park City risked "choking" the festival and eroding "the heart and soul of what we were when we started against the odds." He said those tensions required rethinking how the festival should operate as it expanded.
Away from filmmaking, Redford returned to his first love — drawing and painting — and described art as a way to observe and understand people. In 2020 he said he was "going back to the way I started before I became a filmmaker which was to be an artist, a painter and a sketch artist," adding that sketching helped him see something deeper in subjects.
Redford also spoke openly about the arc of his career. In 2018 he described a role in an aging bank robber film as a possible farewell to acting and said he was "moving toward retirement" to spend more time with family. Despite that, he took later on-screen roles in projects such as Avengers: Endgame and the series Dark Winds.
The Associated Press compiled these remarks from interviews over the years. They illustrate a through line in Redford’s public life: a consistent emphasis on independence, on elevating underrepresented voices, and on preserving the conditions that allow artists to tell their stories. Those themes guided both his creative choices and his work building institutions that many filmmakers say changed the cultural landscape of American cinema.