Robert Redford retired from acting with a stylish performance in the crime comedy film The Old Man & the Gun. Set in 1981, the film features an all-star cast including Casey Affleck, Danny Glover, Sissy Spacek, Tika Sumpter and the singer Tom Waits. Although an Oscar-winning director himself, the eighty-three-year-old Redford approached the filmmaker David Lowery with the idea for a movie based on a true crime story that he had read in The New Yorker magazine. Lowery, the writer and director behind A Ghost Story (2017) and Pete's Dragon (2016), as well as the upcoming medieval fantasy film The Green Knight, was fascinated by the story of the audacious geriatric criminal Forrest Tucker. As he explains, he decided to both pay homage to and shake up the classic crime film genre.
David Lowery (American accent): I love crime films as a genre and in preparation for this I watched all of the classics. I decided to try to veer off in a different direction. I'm a very quiet person and I just thought rather than follow the traditional beats of a cops and robbers’ movie what if we just tried to do something a little bit different.
SMOOTH CRIMINAL
The Old Man & the Gun tells the story of a notorious thief and escape artist who spent his life in and out of jail. Redford, who has played a few outlaws in the past, found Tucker, who robbed banks well into his seventies, a wonderful character.
Robert Redford (American accent): He was addicted to that way of life: he got caught seventeen times I began to think that maybe he was actually assuming he was going to get caught but his thrill was being able to break out of prison… It’s kind of a game with him: seventeen times he got out, including Alcatraz, you don't get out of Alcatraz too easily!
NO HARM DONE
Tucker and his gang comprised of Teddy Green, played by Danny Glover, and John Waller, played by Tom Waits conducted bank heists across the US. Most remarkable, says Redford, was that Tucker’s gun was unloaded the whole time.
Robert Redford: He never shot anybody. He had a gun but it was never loaded, he just used it to get his way. So that's what gets [gives you] the title: old man and a gun.
Based on an incredible true story, The Old Man & The Gun stars Robert Redford in the lead role of Forrest Tucker, a veteran career criminal with an extraordinary ability to escape from prison. The film, written and directed by David Lowery, focuses on the unprecedented series of bank robberies that Tucker and his gang of men of retirement age (played by Danny Glover and the singer Tom Waits) carried out across America in the 1980s — without Tucker ever firing a shot. Casey Affleck plays John Hunt, the Texas police officer who becomes obsessed with catching Tucker yet who is also captivated by his audacity. Sissy Spacek plays Jewel, a widow that Forrest meets on the road and who falls for his easy-going charm. The entertaining film, Redford’s last as an actor, he has said, was widely praised by critics who called it a fitting farewell to a legendary movie star.
RICH AND BORED
In the film, Tucker meets the charming Jewell Centers played by Sissy Spacek. In real life, Jewell was a wealthy widow who Tucker married in 1982. Despite being rich, however, Tucker carried on robbing banks! Spacek describes the chemistry she had with Redford, which was key to an authentic performance.
Sissy Spacek (American accent): We shot all of Jewell’s scenes in [at] the beginning of the filming when it was just us there, and so we got to know each other on film and through the scenes. So it really got to unfold and that's something that rarely happens
HUNT IN PURSUIT
Casey Affleck plays John Hunt, the Texas cop determined to catch the elderly criminal gang, nicknamed ‘The Over-the-Hill Gang’ by the police. Hunt and Tucker developed the competitive yet respectful relationship of hunter and hunted, as Redford explains:
Robert Redford: I think there was a respect between the two of them: Hunt was the animal that chased him and he [Tucker] was the animal that escaped and he just loved that connection. Hunt was only interested in getting this guy, that was his job. In the meantime, this cat-and-mouse game actually drew them together so I think that Hunt finally had a certain kind of respect [for Tucker].
RETRO TECHNOLOGY
The movie is filmed with a Super 16mm camera, technology from the early 1980s. Lowery says the sound it made while filming provoked reverence from the cast that contributed to their performances.
David Lowery: I wanted it to feel old-fashioned and the best way to do that is to use the technology that existed back then, so we just tried to make it the way a movie would have been made in the late ‘70s or early ‘80s. When you're on set and you hear the film whirring through the camera everybody just takes it a little bit more seriously because you just know that something is being captured at that moment.
RObert redford – THE SUNDANCE MAN
An actor, director and producer with a social, environmental and political conscience, Robert Redford has made an outstanding contribution to cinema. Now eighty-three, the American star has promoted independent movies since the 1980s as the founder of the Sundance Institute and Film Festival, probably the most renowned independent film festival in the world.
Redford was brought up in a working-class neighbourhood of Los Angeles. A restless student, he initially dismissed cinema as a fantasy world. After roaming across Europe in the 1950s, however, he took acting classes in New York, where he was encouraged by his teachers to take the vocation seriously.
In the 1960s, Redford performed on Broadway and appeared in TV dramas. He won a Golden Globe for the film Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and played a bisexual celebrity in Sydney Pollack’s pioneering movie This Property Is Condemned (1966).
Redford fought hard to get the role of the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), although Paul Newman was originally meant for that part. Redford’s inclusion in the film saw the title swapped around to place the bigger star first. The movie made Redford as famous as Newman.
The actor took an active role in his career, putting his weight behind the making of political satire The Candidate (1972), a film that reflected his concern that politics was becoming more about image than content. He teamed up with Newman again in crime caper The Sting (1973), earning an Oscar nomination.
Redford consulted Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward before playing the part of Woodward, opposite Dustin Hoffman, in All the President's Men (1976), a film about the political scandal that brought down President Nixon. Redford’s love of landscape is reflected in movies such as Lasse Hallström’s An Unfinished Life (2005) and All is Lost (2013), about a man lost at sea, in which he gives an acclaimed41 performance.
He is equally renowned as a director. His debut was the Oscar-winning Ordinary People (1980), about an upper-middle class family falling apart. Other films he has directed include the period drama A River Runs Through It (1992) and Quiz Show (1994), about a real-life TV scandal in the late 1950s.