War On Terror wheeze Lions For Lambs is released this week and to celebrate we have a short interview with director Robert Redford. Click below to watch the trailer.

Did making this movie feel a bit like returning to the Hollywood of the Seventies, with your political films, like All The President’s Men?

Robert Redford: It’s not really like a return to the Seventies. I don’t think you can ever return to times that went before. And really there’s no Hollywood anymore, producing their own films and distributing them, so now you’d have to call it just the mainstream. There’s more investment capital available now to finance the films that the studios distribute, so there are a lot more films out there. And the mainstream mainly follows trends, rather than setting them, so the trend now is that you can criticise this administration, because it has tanked in terms of popularity. That makes it a little easier, while four or five years ago, if you said anything against the administration you were labelled unpatriotic.

So it’s definitely becoming easier to get these films made…

It’s a little easier, but what’s not easier is to get these kinds of films financed, because they’re considered risky commercial ventures. So that time of the Seventies has gone. This film was never meant to be solely about the war. It’s about something different that contains the war as one element.

The Tom Cruise character, Senator Irving, in Lions For Lambs could have been this very black and white villain…

That would be agit-propaganda and I don’t believe in that. It would have been easy to talk about and criticise this administration, because it’s in a pretty bad way right now but I felt that there are deeper ways of looking at it, which is that we all have some responsibility here, all of us — the public, students, the media — we should look at this in a broader and deeper way. The point of the Tom Cruise character is that the thing that would make him dangerous is that he would just give us a better-dressed version of what we have now. Considering what’s happened to our country over the last six years, the idea was to present him as someone who had an all-American quality, someone who would be popular, strong and dangerous. But if you had made him a moustache-twirling villain he wouldn’t be dangerous.

So he had to give a point of view that’s acceptable?

All the characters had to do that. The student that I’m talking to in the film says that why should he feel guilty just because his parents have worked hard to give him a better life and he’s just out there enjoying it? Tom Cruise’s character says that it doesn’t matter whether decisions made in the past are right or wrong, we have a problem now. And he’s got a point. He wants to win, but then you think why does he want to win? The scene had to twist and turn, but that couldn’t happen unless he had a genuine point of view, so as hard it is, if you go to some conservative states in America, down in Dallas and in Texas, and show this film, they’d back the senator.

Were you concerned that having apparent Democratic sympathies might lead some people to see this film as a PR coup?

Yes, I always presumed that would be the case. Considering where we are — right now the right-wing bloggers are talking about it even though they haven’t seen it — it’ll be considered a left-wing film.

Posted by Thin White Duke

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 11th, 2007 at 11:35 am and is filed under National, News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.