Word: redfords
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Redford was also disappointed by the script. It lacked details and substance on the matter that had come to interest him most?the newsgathering process. At this point, Bernstein took a crack at rewriting the script, but that, too, proved a mistake. Bernstein apparently built up his image as the more swinging member of the Woodstein team. "Carl," Redford told him, "Errol Flynn is dead." Thereafter, as Bernstein puts it, "Redford got on the script in a concentrated way." He squeezed a couple more revisions out of the miffed Goldman, who was eager to get on with adapting his Marathon...
Goldman's script did serve one important function. It was good enough to use as a recruiting device for Dustin Hoffman, whom Redford wanted to play Bernstein. Says Hoffman: "I was amazed. Goldman had cracked the narrative problem. I had doubts until then that you could make a movie out of the book." He saw that problems remained, especially in the characterizations. But he signed on, provided that he could share director approval with Redford...
...building by visual means menace and tension into a script that had lacked those qualities. "If our project was to succeed, we'd need the same kind of tension," Hoffman remembers thinking. He adds: "Bob liked him because he felt he wouldn't jump on a liberal bandwagon. Redford saw the film as a detective story, not as a polemic against Nixon...
...Post for further observation of its people and its workings. The hassle over the first-draft script had worked a subtle change in the atmosphere; there was a new wariness in the relationship between the moviemakers and the newspapermen. Hoffman was particularly distressed. At one point he marched on Redford, crying, "Screw it. Let's fictionalize it. I just hate the attitudes around here. Everybody will know what paper we're really representing. What's the difference?" Redford, too, was unhappy. "The ambivalence of the Post drove me nuts," he recalls. He also feels that something valuable emerged from this...
This shared obsession is probably responsible for sustaining the relationship between Redford and Pakula through the strains that were to develop after shooting began. Pakula is a painstaking director, capable of talking out a scene for hours before putting it in front of the camera. Then his habit is to insist on endless retakes, covering every nuance his actors develop as they rework a scene, giving himself every imaginable option once he takes the film into the cutting room. Redford is an actor who does not find a character through ratiocination or conversation, but rather by getting as quickly...