Word: redfords
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...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...
...question is, after all the pain and bad feelings, was it worth it? The answer is yes, and one reason for that answer is Redford. If he was never completely satisfied with any of his coworkers' contributions, he turned out to be a shrewd editor of their work, choosing from their offerings that which fitted?and expanded?his original conception of the film. He realized, for example, that Goldman was not entirely wrong when he perceived at the outset that the film required a leavening note of newspaper humor and camaraderie. The journalistic world is one where power asserts itself...
Even the painstaking habits that annoyed Redford on the set must seem worthwhile now. The director has patiently sought out the inner dynamics of the film's many short scenes involving characters who have no lasting relationship with Woodward and Bernstein or anyone else in the film. His ability to find drama in the way a cup of coffee is handled, in the briefest play of emotions across the troubled face of a reluctant informer, is remarkable and invaluable in preventing the film from being no more than a historical record, a documentary in the dullest sense of the term...