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 last summer. “My father delivered milk. And everybody’s working – it was gas stations, garages, stores, you know, but they’re working. There was this real camaraderie, with the paper drives and everybody sacrificing. 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, looking to escape some of the late-1940s tension, but Redford loathed the new neighborhood. He longed to get on any bus or train that would get him away from Southern California. His salvation came in a most natural way: a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado, which got him out of town even though he promptly drank his way off the squad.
All of this personal history and geography circled back through Redford’s mind while he was filming scenes for “Lions for Lambs,” which opened nationwide Friday. 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. He found himself driving through the San Fernando Valley, that old home he never missed.
“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 with a surprisingly aggressive edge in his voice. “Here I have to go back and use it for a war.”
“Lions for Lambs,” which stars Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Peter Berg and Redford himself, is indeed about combat, but it is also about classism, citizen apathy and the modern rules of political engagement.
The director took the title for his seventh film from the words of a German general who, in appraising his British foes, saved his scorn for the high command and his praise for the field soldiers whom he considered “such lions led by such lambs.”
The movie will renew Redford as a target of conservatives, and its 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 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 person, Redford is physically trim and confident in every gesture. The most interesting thing about being across a table from Redford? When he speaks, he’s a filmmaker, but when he smiles, he’s still pure movie star.
In the film, Streep plays broadcast journalist Janine Roth, a sort of weary version of Diane Sawyer, 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 (Cruise), who is a neoconservative with a military pedigree and high-wattage smile.
The senator is pushing forward a military initiative in Afghanistan, and, while he jousts with the journalist, the film cuts away to its “lions,” a pair of soldiers (Michael Peña and Derek Luke), who are in harm’s way in agonizing fashion.
The third part of the film presents another office dialogue as a college professor named Stephen Malley (Redford) challenges and attempts to awaken the political passion of a bright student (Andrew Garfield) who has, over the course of one semester, decided that the only party system worth his time is the one that taps beer kegs.
Reviews of the film have been divided – some say winner, others say just windy – but Redford said he knows he will be a target for the far right. “I’ve been told that someone on Fox said, ‘What’s Redford’s problem with America?’ So it’s started already. They haven’t even seen it. My problem with America is I love it and I worry about it.”
