Robert Redford, His Festival Has Changed The Face Of The US Film Industry

Robert Redford decided to change the world in Buffalo. It was the winter of 1970 and Redford, fresh from the box-office success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, ran up against a wall that even his star power could not crack. "I wanted to make a trilogy, in documentary style, about the American mythology of success," he recalls. He persuaded Paramount to release the first installment, Downhill Racer, in which he starred as a headstrong Olympic skier. But, against his wishes, the studio marketed the film as an action feature, then lost confidence and failed to back it with distribution and promotion. So Redford himself went on the road to promote it. "Then one night I was snowed in Buffalo and had dinner with a field representative. He finally said: 'Forget it, kid - the studio is dumping this film. I hate to see you chasing it. Let it go.' "

Redford let it go, but he didn't forget. As he looks back on the episode, in his cabin-like office in Park City, Utah, the shock is still evident. Indeed, for the past 30 years he has been working to make sure that Buffalo never happens again - to him or to other film-makers - even if it means transforming every aspect of cinema, from writing and directing to production, distribution and the film-going experience itself.

The vehicles he has created - the Sundance Institute, which is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary, and its most visible offshoot, the Sundance film festival, which opens in Park City today - link the scrappy world of independent film-making with the glittering industry of Hollywood. The Sundance operation has been more successful than Redford ever imagined, and grown into an enterprise so big that, he says, "I don't want to run it - and never really did." Yet even as he attempts, at the age of 64, to revive a long-neglected acting career, he is forced to reckon with the possibility that history will remember him less for his own films than for those that Sundance has made possible.

Most film buffs know the story of Sundance: how Redford took the foundering American film festival and, in the mid-1980s, moved it from Salt Lake City to Park City. It became a program of the Sundance Institute and was branded with the Sundance name in 1991. "At first I couldn't find enough decent films to show and I couldn't get anybody to come in off the street," Redford says. "Now you can't walk down the streets during the festival." What happened, in 1989, was Sex, Lies and Videotape: Steven Soderbergh's steamy domestic tell-all made Sundance unmissable in the commercial film world. Before Sundance, no distributor would touch the film; afterwards it became Hollywood's equivalent of the Holy Grail: a highbrow, low-budget smash.

Since then the festival has been a launch pad for directors from Tarantino to Kimberly Peirce and stars from Liv Tyler to Brad Pitt. Shine, Memento, Trainspotting and Brassed Off all premiered at Sundance. As director Atom Egoyan says: "It's become every film-maker's fantasy - you go, you hit the jackpot, you get a big Hollywood deal."

Beyond its commercial clout, Sundance has helped to change the look and feel of independent films. They are better produced, more culturally diverse and visually polished. As Redford says, "Independent doesn't have to be a synonym for badly made." And the influences run both ways. Studio films such as Traffic and Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums display a distinctly indie attitude. Anderson developed his first film, Bottle Rocket, at the institute. The festival's co-director, Geoffrey Gilmore, sums it up: "It's almost impossible to say now just what an independent film is, and Sundance has had a lot to do with that."

But the festival's greatest impact may be on the most neglected film genre: documentaries. Films such as Hoop Dreams and Crumb, both first seen at Sundance, have smashed the stereotype of the non-fiction film as "a painfully boring experience that's supposed to be good for you", in the words of Nicole Guillemet, who heads the institute's documentary program. Last year Redford and Guillemet founded the House of Docs at the festival, to give documentary-makers a networking headquarters and their first real stall in the marketplace.

For that is what the festival has become. It now has to cope with crowds in excess of 20,000, 11 days of programming and constant pressure from producers, agents and studio executives trawling for a hit. The greater the success, the more it seems to weary Redford, who can sound almost petulant on the subject. "With all the hype, we can't make our point, that this is still a festival for film-makers," he says. But he is willing to sup with the devil.

Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax Films, once remarked of Redford's willingness to balance art and commerce: "Nobody has to be Vincent van Gogh any more. Bob gets that." Redford himself admits that "Sundance shouldn't be revolutionary - perhaps antithetical". Yet when it comes to the institute, he is both protective and evangelistic. The institute may be less well known than the festival, but it is far more ambitious. If the festival puts creativity in a display window, the institute hangs a "No trespassing" sign on it.

Redford founded it in the mountains above Provo, Utah, on part of 5,000 acres that he bought there. In this extreme Eden of brilliant blue skies, tall pines and rugged peaks, Redford wanted to create a place where directors, writers, actors and composers could explore ideas in a workshop setting, free from commercial pressure. "My idea was simple: keep it authentic, keep the money out."

But of course, you need to have money coming in if you're going to keep commercial interests out. So Redford built a resort and founded a retail catalogue business to finance the institute's program. Sundance still has to raise almost $5m in donations each year, however, and corporate contributions are scrutinized for any whiff of compromise. The summer workshops in film, theatre and screenwriting are off limits to studios and producers, who are invited on campus only for a three-day conference. When Redford is on the scene, as he usually is each summer, he seems not so much to walk the grounds as patrol them.

This sense of protection is what many of the artists who have come to Sundance value most. "Sundance is the only structure I know of in the film world that hasn't been corrupted," says John Cameron Mitchell, who used two sessions at the institute to turn his gender-bending performance piece Hedwig and the Angry Inch into a film musical. "I had been advised not to try to do a film of the play. I'd been told that I'd have to play ball because the studios could choose not to distribute the film even if I made it. At Sundance there was none of that. I was challenged in a way I hadn't been for decades.

"Bob has used his power to do good," Mitchell adds. "I can't think of anyone in the business today who would do what he's done."

Just as Redford has been criticized for directing and acting in mainstream films, so the institute is routinely attacked for sponsoring mainstream projects. This is partly fallout from the festival and partly because as many as 40% of its projects make it to production. With the institute staff often running interference with the commercial world, making contacts, making phone calls, making things happen, Sundance participants can feel connected as well as sheltered. "We are located between the fringe and the high concept," says Michelle Satter, director of the feature film program. "In fact, our point is not the outcome or the product, but the creative process."

The growing concentration of distribution and production, and the short time that films are granted to build an audience, have only made Redford more determined that Sundance keep its outside edge. "I underestimated the greed factor in our society," he says. "Things have only got worse: more emphasis on high technology and on younger audiences, with less risk-taking. The point of Sundance is diversity."

Words such as "purity", "freedom", "truth" and "exhilaration" come up again and again among Sundance participants. But though the institute may feel like heaven, there is one crucial difference: the residents eventually have to leave. For the Native American novelist and film-maker Sherman Alexie, the real world has been like an exile. At Sundance's urging, he developed the successful Smoke Signals (1998) from his own short stories. It had its premiere at the festival, where it was picked up for commercial release. Then Hollywood came calling. "Every horrible thing they say about the commercial film world is true," he says. "I worked there for years, and I finally realized that I was just trying to re-create what I had found at Sundance." As even independent productions grow more expensive and more dependent on broad audiences, his approach has grown more frugal. Alexie's current projects, all shot on digital video, bypass the conventional channels altogether. He expects to release them directly to consumers on DVD, not through cinemas. "The only question anyone at Sundance ever asked is, 'Is it any good?' " he says. "It spoiled me."

In attempting to make a world in which film-makers such as Alexie can remain true to their visions, Redford has paid a price. As the institute has grown, he has begun to resemble a reluctant CEO, spending increasing amounts of time in board meetings. He started the Sundance Channel to showcase independent films and the Sundance Archive at UCLA to collect and preserve them. He has also led the globalization of Sundance, with a pioneering workshop program in Cuba and labs in Brazil and the Czech Republic. He started - and folded - a Sundance production company and a Sundance cinema chain. Meanwhile, he starred in only six films between 1979 and 1992, and after the Oscar success of Ordinary People in 1980, he directed just five more features: The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), A River Runs Through It (1992), Quiz Show (1994), The Horse Whisperer (1998), and The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000). "Sundance overwhelmed my life," he admits.

And much as his Sundance colleagues are forced by the passage of time to contemplate the inevitability of life after Redford, so he is contemplating life beyond Sundance. To that end, he has appointed staff whose vision of film as a force for change is every bit as strong as his. The institute's director, Kenneth Brecher, is not a film professional, but a social anthropologist. Redford's successors may take the institute to places he hasn't, but they won't be places that he wouldn't. And Redford has sought more acting projects. He has recently completed two more films (The Last Castle and Spy Game) and is still in the market for more. "I am an actor," he insists. "That is my art."

Ask Redford whether he would rather be remembered for the institute or his films, however, and he hesitates. When he finally does reply, it is obliquely. "You want to be part of a continuity beyond your time, something self-sustaining that will change the way the world is going. I believe Sundance is building that." © New York Times 2002. Lyle Rexer