Tell It to the Kids

Talking with Robert Redford about Lions for Lambs.

by Sam Adams

interview

In Lions for Lambs, Robert Redford plays a college professor who calls a promising but indolent young student (Andrew Garfield) into his office for a motivational speech. He must have liked the feeling. Instead of going the usual promotional route, Redford took the film on a brief tour of college campuses that included a stop at Penn. "It's your future," he told the assembled students after a screening of the film. "What are you going to do about it?"

Lions pointedly contrasts the entitled cynicism of Garfield's character with the plight of two of Redford's former students, played by Michael Peña and Derek Luke, who heeded his call to service by joining the military. Reflecting on the screening the next day, Garfield says seeing the two stories intercut made him viscerally upset. "I was disgusted at myself in that part," he says. "Me sitting back with my fucking tan in my fucking Hawaiian shirt with my Starbucks — it made me feel ill."

The reaction, Peña says, is shared by much of the film's young audience. "People have been coming up to us afterwards saying, 'What can I do?' I don't think a film or a piece of art can change a whole society, but it can change individuals."

Although it's a little hard to square with the movie's tendentious tone, Redford insists Lions is not meant to take a side, disclaiming any connection to "agit-propaganda." For him, the purpose is to ask questions, not answer them. He's obviously shy of the movie being seen as an illustrated lecture, and points out that the foreign theater where Peña and Luke get pinned down is Afghanistan, not Iraq.

Still, Redford admits, "I think this film will probably have a rough time getting traction," a prediction bolstered by the underwhelming box office of In the Valley of Elah and Rendition. And that, he worries, may mean that the fall's glut of war-themed films may be followed by another drought. "The mainstream is interested in only one thing: profit," he says. "Hollywood is a business, nothing more, and it's not the business it used to be. It's a clearinghouse."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Lions for Lambs opens Friday at area theaters. See Sam Adams' review on p. 41.