Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American actor Robert Redford.
Last updated on November 25, 2024.
Charles Robert Redford Jr. is an American actor, director and producer. He is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award from four nominations, a British Academy Film Award, two Golden Globe Awards, the Cecil B. DeMille Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2014, Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Generally speaking, I went through that. I came to a place where I realised what true value was. It wasn't money. Money is a means to achieving an end, but it's not the end.
The big moment for me was making 'All the President's Men'. It was not about Watergate or President Nixon. I wanted to focus on something I thought not many people knew about: How do journalists get the story?
Usually I like to improvise. Sometimes, depending on the nature of the piece, I like to improvise because I think it brings certain freshness and a reality to it, as long as it doesn't go too far out of the box.
Hollywood was not a place I dreamed of getting to. I never could take seriously the obsession people have about being a celebrity or getting to Hollywood - I was born next door.
Lastly get emotionally connected to your story so you can deliver it, you know, if you can't deliver the emotions to your script there's no point to your story. Story is the key.
I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?
A few years after that first visit, I applied for a job in Yosemite.
It's hard to pay attention these days because of multiple affects of the information technology nowadays. You tend to develop a faster, speedier mind, but I don't think it's necessarily broader or smarter.
Radio, newspapers, they were normal parts of my life. In those days, you had to go somewhere to watch television and leave something to see it.
Once the festival achieved a certain level of notoriety, then people began to come here with agendas that were not the same as ours. We can't do anything about that. We can't control that.
He's meant to be that classic Homer, Ulysses, Hercules - a character who goes out or has some gift of some kind. He goes on a journey of discovery and part of that is falling into darkness - the temptations of life.
I'm interested in that thing that happens where there's a breaking point for some people and not for others. You go through such hardship, things that are almost impossibly difficult, and there's no sign that it's going to get any better, and that's the point when people quit. But some don't.
I believe in mythology. I guess I share Joseph Campbell's notion that a culture or society without mythology would die, and we're close to that.
We program the festival, after 20 years, exactly the way we did on the first day.
Sundance was started as a mechanism for the discovery of new voices and new talent.
If you want to slice into America, it's pretty red, white, and blue in terms of how it goes about things, but there's a gray area there, and I've always been interested in where things are complicated.
I did not, like my children and people today, grow up with television as part of my life.
It's an honor putting art above politics. Politics can be seductive in terms of things reductive to the soul.
The important thing about a sport is the people who devote their lives to it.
When I was a kid, nobody told me I was good-looking. I wish they had. I would've had a better time.
I don't know what your childhood was like, but we didn't have much money. We'd go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was such a big deal, to go in and get my own book.
I was seen in earlier years by family members and people of authority as somebody wasting his time. I had trouble with the restrictions of conformity. It made me edgy.
Never revisit the past, that's dangerous. You know, move on.
Health food may be good for the conscience but Oreos taste a hell of a lot better.
I don't think about when it's going to stop and what you do before it stops. You just keep moving.
Be careful of success; it has a dark side.
When I started, I was an artist; I wanted to be an artist. I became an actor almost by accident. I acted for fifteen years and tried to produce. I looked for stories that were the story beneath the story that you thought you knew, like 'The Candidate'.
I've always liked speed. I own a car that I shouldn't be talking about because I'm an environmentalist, but the 1955 Porsche Spyder 550 RS is the finest sports car ever made.
I had a mild case of polio - not enough to put me in an iron lung, but enough to keep me bedridden for weeks. As I came out of it, my mom wanted to do something for me. She realized that, growing up in the city, I'd missed out on a lot of nature.
It's good to say, 'Look, I can't always be right, but my gut tells me this' - and then you confirm with your gut.
People are becoming more and more aware of how the dominance of development and business is altering their lives and, in particular, their own heritage.
I am a cynical optimist. Big opening weekends are like cotton candy. The films you will remember over time are the films that stick in the consciousness of the audience in a good way.
I'm not a facelift person. I am what I am.
For me, personally, skiing holds everything. I used to race cars, but skiing is a step beyond that. It removes the machinery and puts you one step closer to the elements. And it's a complete physical expression of freedom.
Park City is developing itself, almost to death.
People say I've gone against Hollywood, but I've tried to be independent within Hollywood, tried to be my own person.
Golf has become so manicured, so perfect. The greens, the fairways. I don't like golf carts. I like walking. Some clubs won't let you in unless you have a caddy and a cart.
I'm not interested in a film about golf but I am interested in golf as a metaphor.
There is nothing I can do about this stuff and I am pretty well ok with the fact that I think Sundance is not going to be stopped by it, because he Festival is itself now, and doesn't need me out there to talk about it like I did years ago.
You can't completely control the sport - Tiger Woods comes close. The test is against yourself and nature's own way. I find golf a particularly good metaphor for this story.
I work because I want to work. Work keeps me going.
Any time I saw people treated unfairly because of race, creed, whatever - it struck a nerve.
If you talk about an issue, what comes back is a description of what you're wearing. Reporters only want to know how tall you are and if your teeth are capped.
I have no regrets, because I've done everything I could to the best of my ability.
When you get older, you learn certain life lessons. You apply that wisdom, and suddenly you say, 'Hey, I've got a new lease on this thing. So let's go.'
Ambiguity is something that I really respond to. I like the complexity of it.
I was never a good student. I had to be dragged into kindergarten. It was hard to sit and listen to somebody talk. I wanted to be out, educated by experience and adventure, and I didn't know how to express that.
In fact you've got your hands tied behind your back when somebody chooses to take a low road in to you, there is nothing you can do about it, and so you just live with it and move on.
Well first of all it's a business and it's a tough business, and you have to have the strength to survive all the set backs all the failures that make this a mean business, that's getting meaner and meaner every year in my opinion.
I had just arrived in New York from California. I was nineteen years old and excited beyond belief. I was an art student and an acting student and behaved as most young actors did - meaning that there was no such thing as a good actor, 'cause you yourself hadn't shown up yet.
What I would do is when I was younger I would draw in a sketch book something that happened in my life and then write a little something on the side about what happened or what the story.
As an actor and as a person you come together with being in familiar territory although that has not been my whole life. That's been a part of it. I think a lot of people associate me with the west because of Sundance.
Journalism has changed tremendously because of the democratization of information. Anybody can put something up on the Internet. It's harder and harder to find what the truth is.
I'm not much interested in sport just as sport. I wouldn't be interested in making a golf film or baseball or fishing film.
Filmgoers are starved for new ideas, voices and visions.
Sport is a wonderful metaphor for life. Of all the sports that I played - skiing, baseball, fishing - there is no greater example than golf, because you're playing against yourself and nature.
Whereas money is a means to an end for a filmmaker, to the corporate mind money is the end. Right now, I think independent film is very confused, because there's excess pressure in the marketplace for entertainment to pay off.
Because, you know, you're in Utah. And because of its political conservatism, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
I have the freedom to take chances, to say no. I have the freedom to be who I really want to be, rather than have to conform to this or that just to stay alive.
The technology available for film-making now is incredible, but I am a big believer that it's all in the story.