Sundance 2012 began with a rare audience at the Bing Bar on Main Street with the man himself, Mr Robert Redford, true Hollywood superstar, festival founder and self-confessed documentary nut. Though something of a will o’ the wisp at Sundance, Redford still definitely has a firm grasp on the event, which he took pains to explain is simply one aspect of the Sundance Institute. Much of his work in Park City, he explained, takes place behind the scenes, notably at a filmmakers lunch on the opening weekend, at which he gets to meet the directors and discuss their movies. Far from being a Meet The Queen kind of thing, it’s a chance for Redford to share his own experiences – which, he told me, aren't quite so removed from the trials and tribulations of the average independent director.
He said, “I tell them, ‘You don't know me, but, believe me, when I started to make films, I went though a lot of what you're going through.’ No one knows that. Because a lot of the films I wanted to make were not ones to be accepted. So I was told, ‘We don't think this is commercial,’ and I would say, ‘Please, this is a story I want to tell.’ They would say, ‘Well, we’ll let you tell it if you do a bigger film for us and do this for under $2m. So I would do The Great Gatsby, The Way We Were – films I was happy to do. But those were big-budget films, and they would then let me make my movie. And some of those films were not easy to come by, I’d make them and they wouldn't release them, because they didn't think they were commercial. Or they took four years to make. Or I had to go out of the mainstream to find somebody to support it. Or I had to have somebody in the mainstream tell me the truth about what I was going through and warn me, ‘By the way, you're wasting your time. This project is already gone. I don't want to see you wasting your time.’ These were heartbreaking things for me to hear. So I've had some hardships too. And I try to share that with them, so they don't think I just parachuted in from somewhere.”
I put it to Redford that the irony there is that films like The Way We Were – obviously The Great Gatsby is currently getting the Baz Luhrmann 3D treatment – are no longer being made in Hollywood, at least not as mainstream studio fare. “They’re making big films,” he nodded, “but not those kinds of films. They’re films that are related to special effects. And they're not so much story-related as they effects-related. And that's OK. It's a broad industry. But it seems like the industry is more focused on what is gonna guarantee a bottom line on a return. Not that I think it I necessarily will. When we start spending $100m-plus dollars... That’s not a business I want to be in.”
The first film I saw was Wish You Were Here (pictured) by Australian director Kieran Darcy-Smith, starring Joel Edgerton as suburban Sydney boatmaker and family man Dave Flannery (although, unlike his equally homely physics teacher in Warrior, he doesn't have a martial arts sideline here). The film started very well for me, with a crisply edited montage of a group of tourists – Dave, his wife, his sister-in-law and her boyfriend – on holiday in Cambodia. Sightseeing turns to partying, drugs are involved – and with a crash, the image cuts to a bloodied Edgerton staggering through a bleak morning landscape. Back in Sydney, we learn that the sister's boyfriend has gone missing, and Darcy-Smith's film reveals the disturbing truth behind his disappearance in a series of flashbacks.
I was with this film for quite a while, despite its digressions. Although Cinema Of Unease is, I think, a Kiwi term, it applies here, and I liked the way Wish You Were Here fused genre elements with domestic drama (as deployed to great effect in David Michod's Animal Kingdom). The performances were very good too, especially Felicity Price as the wife and Teresa Palmer as the sister – but when the film played its hand I felt very short-changed. Just when it should be becoming leaner and tighter, Darcy-Smith introduces key plot elements that we cannot hope to see reconciled in a trim 90-minute movie. Which is a shame, since, when it is good, Wish You Were Here is very good, creating a mood of mystery and tension that, sadly, also sets it up for a fall.
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