1. What made you want to write about Robert Redford?
I wanted to write about a Hollywood artist whose cultural influence was beyond pop iconography. Redford's creation of Sundance - an empowerment resource for young filmmakers and, in essence, an "alternative" world cinema - attracted me very much.

2. What changes did you notice during the fourteen years?
Changes in Redford? He embraced age as an actor for the first time (in An Unfinished Life). Also he applied an even greater seriousness of intent to his Sundance work, and also his environmental campaigning with the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) and local politics.

3. What was the most fascinating lesson you learnt from him?
A motto of his: Winning is what matters.

4. How did the Sundance Film Festival inspire you to set up BOBCOM?
Not just the Sundance Film Festival, but the Sundance Institute, the "mother ship", whose defining principle is the empowerment of the independent artist. Artists are too often beholden to faceless corporations and "juries of three." Myself and my partner, Olivier Capt, felt it was time to grasp a key founding concept of the internet - a democratic voice for all - and put it to the service of empowering marginalised musicians. We see ourselves today as an IT version of Sundance, dedicated to aggressively engaging multi-media to give real career-liberating chances to independent-minded musicians.

5. What advice would you give to an aspiring young musician looking for a career in the music business? Would your advice be the same for their parents looking to fulfill a lost music dream?
The artist's voice is of enormous value in our culture. As Redford often says, it wasn't an accountant who created the universe. I'd encourage all artists to act bravely on their own instincts. And parents' lost dreams? No dreams need ever die. Work on your own dreams for yourself, let your kids follow theirs.

6. Looking back over your career, what are you most proud of? Do you have any unfulfilled ambitions?
In my career I'm most proud of the fact that I'm still learning (I hope). Unfulfilled ambition? To direct a film called Quimby Americus, about endurance. I hope to do that very shortly.

7. When you get time to relax, what is your perfect escape?
Chasing the dream of Arcadia from my favourite book, The Wind in the Willows. Oh for the river, the journey, the freedom from the Wild Wood! Painting and poetry keeps me on the river.

Thank you so much for taking part in this interview.

Michael Feeney Callan is the author of a collection of short stories, for which he won the Hennessy Literary Award, two novels, and several plays, as well as biographies of Anthony Hopkins, Richard Harris, Julie Christie, and Sean Connery. He has worked for the BBC, Ireland’s Ardmore Studios, and PBS as a writer, producer, and director of television dramas and documentaries. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.

www.bobcom.com

Robert Redford: The Biography by Michael Feeney Callan, Simon & Schuster £20, Published 9 June.

Robert Redford: The Biography by Michael Feeney Callan
Synopsis: Among the most widely admired Hollywood stars of his generation, Robert Redford has appeared onstage and on-screen, in front of and behind the camera, earning Academy, Golden Globe, and a multitude of other awards and nominations for acting, directing, and producing, and for his contributions to the arts. His Sundance Film Festival transformed the world of filmmaking; his films defined a generation. America has come to know him as the Sundance Kid, Bob Woodward, Johnny Hooker, Jay Gatsby, and Roy Hobbs. But only now, with this revelatory biography, do we see the surprising and complex man beneath the Hollywood façade.

From Redford’s personal papers, journals, script notes, correspondence and hundreds of hours of taped interviews, Michael Feeney Callan brings the legendary star into focus. Here is his scattered family background and restless childhood, his rocky start in acting, the death of his son, his star-making relationship with director Sydney Pollack, the creation of Sundance, his political activism, his artistic successes and failures, his friendships and romances. This is a candid, surprising portrait of a man whose iconic roles on-screen (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, The Natural) and directorial brilliance (Ordinary People, Quiz Show) have both defined and obscured one of the most celebrated, and, until now, least understood, public figures of our time.

Hot Brands Cool Places Verdict
This is a fascinating book, despite being a very public figure we actually know very little about the private life of Robert Redford. Michael Feeney Callan in writing this biography has been on a journey with Redford. What we loved was getting to know more about Redford growing up;

Redford remembers that for a child of five… ”There was this ritual,” he recalls.“ At dusk I would cycle to the very edge of the sidewalk and roll the lead wheel onto the curbstone, balancing it, as if I was poised on a chasm; I was told I couldn’t go into the street so I was pushing it as far as I could. From there I’d wait for the sunset-and the air was so clear in L.A. at that time those sunsets were amazing. I’d watch the dark come up from the east. And then bit by bit, the stars appeared. It was mesmerizing just to contemplate it. The brightness of this sky. The beauty. What could it mean? Where did it begin?” Callan says ‘Redford loves this first childhood recollection: it represents for him the incessant curiosity that has ensured him a line of movement’

Callan’s biography takes us through Redford’s life, his time in California, his later graduation, how he became famous, his films, and how he created the Sundance Film Festival and the Sundance Institute.

Running through the biography is his relationship with his children, as Shauna described, ‘He wasn’t a sit down and watch TV dad. He liked to play tennis, take a sauna, swim, build a fence. He did it with all of us, but he and I made a special connection when we took out our horses. I valued my time on horseback with him. We discussed everything under the sun. I wanted to study art, and he was very supportive. The fact he had not been encouraged as a child made him want to make up I think”

Amy described him, as “He was a movie star, so he was often absent. I took for granted that that’s how life was. But when he was there, he was this vortex that came along and swept me into all kinds of sports and activities. I loved him for that child-energy”‘ Growing up, Jamie says, his father often seemed to him “like a spirit tethered by the longest thinnest thread to planet earth.” But he also has become Jamie’s greatest influence. ”In my darkest hours on the transplant waiting list anticipating death, my father’s courage kept me going” But Redford equally recognizes what Jamie has given to him, and how now he is his role model. Callan suggests that the fact that the family’s affection for Sundance has never wavered was the source of greatest pride of all to Redford.

“I try to slow him down”, says Jamie, “I tell him to go back to Sundance, that’s his destiny, that’s the final frontier” but Callan adds ‘Redford well knows it, and to recognize a frontier, as Heidegger says, is to have gone beyond it’

Michael Feeney Callan has created a totally absorbing book, there is so much to discover, the intimate detail, the photographs, and the conversations with Redford, his family and friends has given us a special insight into the man that no one really knows and we loved it! Highly Recommended!