What a wild ride with Robert Redford taught me about risk — and its rewards

I attended one of my first Sundance Film Festivals in the 1990s. I feared it also could have been my last — thanks to Robert Redford’s wild spirit, something I hope will live on well past his death earlier this week at the age of 89.

That early visit happened when I was a young entertainment reporter at the Associated Press. The assignment was simple: I would be dropped off at the Sundance Resort in the mountains of Utah, where Bob kept an office, and then conduct my interview with the festival’s founder as he drove for about an hour to Park City, where the annual January gathering was held some 50 miles away.

Bob (as nearly everyone who knew him called him, including me) had a well-documented tendency to run late. Very late. So as soon as I arrived at Sundance, Bob’s several assistants in rapidly escalating panic told him he needed to leave thatverysecond. And yet Bob dawdled, and dawdled…until we had but 30 minutes to drive to Park City, where he was scheduled to introduce the festival’s opening film that afternoon. Just as all hope was lost, Bob finally grabbed the keys to his Aston Martin, we jumped in, and off we went on Utah’s snowy roads.

Later that day, my editor called to ask what I had for him.

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“Nothing,” I told him.

Before his head exploded in fury, I recounted our 120 mph drive from Sundance to Park City, complete with Bob's fishtailing on icy corners, and my inability to take a single note (let alone let go of the car’s dashboard) over the course of the harrowing and electrifying 25-minute journey.

That vivid memory came to mind soon after I heard of Bob’s death, but not because it was another random Hollywood tale. Rather, it brought Bob’s character fully to life. To my mind, Bob’s swashbuckling driving was more than some local showing off — it was an inevitable outgrowth of someone who loved risk, and the commensurate rewards it could bring. Of course, Bob somehow arrived for his introductory speech with a few minutes to spare.

A legacy beyond his own films

While Bob is best known for creating the Sundance festival, for acting, for directing and for producing — along with his work for the environment — none of those endeavors matched the passion for what he told me was his most important work, even if it received scant attention: launching and running the Sundance Institute Labs.

Paul Newman, Glenn Close and Robert Redford co-hosted the Sundance Institute 25th Anniversary celebration in New York City in 2006.

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Evan Agostini

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The labs were founded in 1981, four years before the festival, just as Hollywood was on the verge of becoming paralyzingly cautious, and right after Bob’s independent-minded Ordinary People won the best picture Oscar. Much like the festival, the labs were founded on the premise that risk must be embraced, and that failure is indeed an option if original storytelling was to survive.

Tellingly, it was nearly impossible to spot Bob at the film festival (one friend once organized an informal “Where’s Waldo” contest to see who, if anyone, could spot him), but he was everywhere at the lab, held at his stunningly sylvan resort in Sundance and run by Michelle Satter, the senior director of The Sundance Institute's Artist Programs.

I spent three days with Bob at the lab nine years ago for a story for LAist.

A farm-to-table film boot camp

The labs are basically a filmic farm-to-table boot camp for up-and-coming independent filmmakers, largely focused on writing and directing. Fellows, representing a diverse range of people from around the globe, were paired with industry veterans to refine their often very rough work, everyone rambling around the Sundance Resort deep in conversation.

"Once you sit in a chair it becomes a classroom, and I was sort of against that because I was always a lousy student,” Bob told me with a laugh. “I hated going to class and I didn’t want it here, so I thought, well, let’s just get on our feet and muscle it through."

John Horn and Robert Redford.

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Courtesy John Horn

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Given normal Hollywood power structures, what I observed was remarkably equitable and non-judgmental, even if the days were long and the work challenging.

“I remember leaving here feeling like an arm had been cut off,” the writer-director Ira Sachs (whose credits include 2014’s Love is Strange and 2016’s Little Men) told me at the time. He had attended the labs while working on his feature 40 Shades of Blue and had returned as an adviser. “There was a sense of violence, but also of care.”

No clear hierarchy was visible; Bob would table hop during communal meals to chat up the current lab participants with visible enthusiasm.

Beyond its summer camp camaraderie, the most critical aspect of the labs was this: the endgame was artistic, not commercial. In fact, participants were explicitly barred from releasing any resulting lab work after their fellowship: the process wasn’t intended to yield a deal, but to refine a storyteller’s vision. To take a leap, in other words, but with a net. (All the same, an estimated 60% of movies supported by the Sundance Directors Lab are actually made.)

Redford thought the labs became increasingly meaningful as the industry shifted almost completely toward sequels, remakes, spinoffs, prequels and all sorts of pre-existing intellectual property, rather than original ideas. And the labs ended up leading directly to new works from new filmmakers, including movies from alumni, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Nia DaCosta, Taika Waititi, Lulu Wang, and Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the writers and directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Hollywood has only grown more cautious over the past decades, with nine of the Top 10 highest-grossing films this year being sequels, spinoffs or remakes of some sort. The sole outlier? Sinners, made by Fruitvale Station filmmaker and Sundance lab alumnus Ryan Coogler.

Coincidence? I think not.

John Horn is a former LAist host and reporter. He has covered the Sundance Film Festival for more than 30 years. He never accepted another ride from Bob.