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Redford Goes Home Again For 'Lions' - Reluctantly

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By GEOFF BOUCHER, Los Angeles Times

Published: November 9, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO - After all the Golden Boy roles, Robert Redford moves across a film screen with an aura of confidence and relaxed privilege that he wears like a country-club blazer. But while making his new film, "Lions for Lambs," the star and director found himself reconnecting to his youth in 1940s Los Angeles, a time and place far removed from any ivory towers.

"I grew up in a mostly Mexican neighborhood in South Los Angeles, and during the war it was fine," said Redford, who turned 70 this summer. "... And suddenly the war ended, and this weird thing happened. Suddenly everything was about class. And then there was an anger you could just feel."

His family moved to the San Fernando Valley, but Redford, a daydreamer who grew sullen when facing blackboards and textbooks, loathed the new neighborhood even more. He got a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado.

All of this personal history and geography circled back through Redford's mind while he was filming scenes for "Lions for Lambs," which opens nationwide today. The movie is split among three settings: a powerful senator's office in Washington, a California university campus and a frozen battlefield in the mountains of Afghanistan. For studio issues of budget, director Redford reluctantly agreed to use Simi Valley as a stand-in for Afghanistan.

"How about that? Over the hill, it's the place I left - the place I had to get away from and never wanted to see again - and now I go back there and have to make it look like Afghanistan," he said.

"Lions for Lambs" is indeed about combat, but it is also about classism, citizen apathy and the modern rules of political engagement.

The movie instantly will renew Redford as a target of conservative pundits, and its grim geopolitical topics aren't exactly crowd-pleasing fare. None of this seems to matter to Redford, but he also said emphatically that "Lions for Lambs" is about his practice of filmmaking - not his preaching for change in politics.

"You can't change people's minds; I don't try that anymore," Redford said. "I spent years working on 'All the President's Men,' and after it came out, I thought, 'Boy, no administration will ever be able to get away with this kind of thing.' And it's worse, worse, worse."

In the film, Meryl Streep plays broadcast journalist Janine Roth, who has found that in recent years, the hardest questions she has regard her own industry and its loss of standards and stamina in the face of political manipulation.

She spends most of the film in a one-on-one interview in the office of Sen. Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise), a neoconservative with a military pedigree and high-wattage smile.

The senator is pushing forward a new military initiative in Afghanistan, and, while he jousts with the journalist, the film cuts away to two soldiers (Michael Pena and Derek Luke), who are in harm's way in agonizing fashion.

The third part of the film's triptych presents another office dialogue as a college professor (Redford) challenges and attempts to awaken the political passion of a bright student (Andrew Garfield).

"I've been told that someone on Fox said, 'What's Redford's problem with America ?' ... They haven't even seen it. My problem with America is I love it and I worry about it."

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