Q. Does making this film feel a bit like returning to the Hollywood of the ’70s, with your political films, like All The President’s Men?

Robert Redford: It’s not really like a return to the ’70s. I don’t think you can ever return to times that went before. And really, there’s no Hollywood anymore, producing their own films and distributing them — really they just distribute them — so now you’d have to call it just the mainstream. There’s more investment capital available now, to finance the films that the studios distribute, so there are a lot more films out there. And the mainstream mainly follows trends, rather than setting them, so the trend now is that you can criticise this administration, because it has tanked in terms of popularity. That makes it a little easier, while four or five years ago, if you said anything against the administration you were labelled unpatriotic. So there are going to be lots of films about the Iraq War, although that didn’t interest me, because I knew there would be a lot of features and documentaries covering it.

Q. So it’s definitely becoming easier to get these films made…
Robert Redford: It’s a little easier, but what’s not easier is to get these kinds of films financed, because they’re considered risky commercial ventures. So that time of the ’70s has gone. This film was never meant to be solely about the War. It’s about something different that contains the War as one element.

Q. These two students that eventually take the risk of going to Afghanistan and dying in the snow…
Robert Redford: I don’t think they had that [dying] in mind at the time! But these kids had been through risk that is far greater than most people. If you look at the student I’m communicating with [Todd, played by Andrew Garfield], he has not been through much risk, while these other two grew up in an area that was extremely violent — these neighbourhoods do still exist in America — and many are lucky to survive, with drive-by-shootings, and drugs wars. So these guys managed to survive, and they wanted to get ahead and get an education. My character sees their potential; his job is to inspire to people to achieve their full potential, to aspire to greater things. He didn’t figure that they’d chose to join the army and go to war, particularly after he’d been in a war that he thought was wrong. He tries to talk them out of it, and even when he uses the argument about repaying students loans, they point out another hard truth. It would take them 10 years to repay that loan, while if they go into the army, when they come out it can be more on their terms. That dilemma is intended; the film uses the issues of today as fodder for looking at much deeper issues. We’re in a complicated time; and here we look at a situation through the eyes of where education is today, where our politics are today, where the administration is and where the media is. And what is the role of the citizen today. The film hopes to inspire some debate, and it doesn’t offer answers.

Q. Looking back to your youth, has there always been a general apathy towards politics from young people, or has that become more pronounced?
Robert Redford: I think there has, starting with me. I couldn’t care less when I was a kid. I grew up in LA, and Nixon was my state senator. And he was so boring, that I thought ‘if that’s what politics is, I don’t what any part of it!’ They were boring people in suits, talking about boring things. I was interested in sport and art, and getting an education by getting out into the world. So I didn’t know about politics until I came to Europe.

Q. Was that after you got kicked out of high school?
Robert Redford: Yes, I was asked after to leave school, because I was a very poor student. I wanted to come to Europe when I was 18, to experience other cultures and histories. Reading books on European art, and the colonies that thrived in Paris had inspired me. Then coming to France and Italy I had to find somewhere cheap to live, because I didn’t have very much money, I had to live low, and stayed in a bohemian area of Paris with lots of students. We all lived in a communal way, and I was challenged, politically. But I didn’t have a clue. This was the late ’50s and they wanted to discuss politics, because the Algerian War was going on, but I was humiliated.

Q. So is that what inspired your interest in politics?
Robert Redford: Yes, I was ashamed that I didn’t know much about my own country’s politics, and that made me start to learn. I’d learn about it from different points of view, prompted by some of the people around me. And I learned that these French and Italian points of view were very different from the one I had been raised with. I was raised in California during the ’50s and it was after the War, and everything was fine. The sun was shining, we were all healthy and had cars — except us, because we came from a working class neighbourhood — and when I came back to America 18 months later, I was much more focussed, politically and culturally. I also saw how blessed we were, because I went through some parts of Europe where people were really struggling, and having a very hard time. So I became very critical if we began trashing those blessings. Then over time, as I became an actor, and was able to make and produce my own films, from around 1969, by that time I’d developed a critical outlook on my country and wanted to put that on film.

Q. Do you have friends in the political theatre?
Robert Redford: I doubt it!

Q. Well the Tom Cruise character [Senator Irving], he could have been this very black and white villain…
Robert Redford: That would be agit-propaganda and I don’t believe in that. It would have been easy to talk about and criticise this administration, because it’s in a pretty bad way right now but I felt that there are deeper ways of looking at it, which is that we all have some responsibility here, all of us — the public, students, the media — we should look at this in a broader and deeper way. The point of the Tom Cruise character is that the thing that would make him dangerous is that he would just give us a better-dressed version of what we have now. Considering what’s happened to our country over the last six years, the idea was to present him as someone who had an all-American quality, someone who would be popular, strong and dangerous. But if you had made him a moustache-twirling villain he wouldn’t be dangerous.

Q. So he had to give a point of view that’s acceptable?
Robert Redford: Exactly so, all the characters had to do that. The student that I’m talking to says that why should he feel guilty just because his parents have worked hard to give him a better life and he’s just out there enjoying it? Tom Cruise’s character says that it doesn’t matter whether decisions made in the past are right or wrong we have a problem now. And he’s got a point. He wants to win, but then you think why does he want to win? The scene had to twist and turn, but that couldn’t happen unless he had a genuine point of view, so as hard it is, if you go to some conservative states in America, down in Dallas and in Texas, and show this film, they’d back the senator.

Q. Were you concerned that having apparent Democratic sympathies might lead some people to see this film as a PR coup?
Robert Redford: Yes, I always presumed that would be the case. Considering where we are — right now the right-wing bloggers are talking about it even though they haven’t seen it — it’ll be considered a left-wing film.

Q. Are your children more politically aware than you were?
Robert Redford: Because I put it on them? (laughs) No, they are aware, because my children grew up with an emphasis on the environment, because when I became politically active in 1969, it was only about the environment. That wasn’t an easy time, because you had the gas and the oil companies controlling the show in terms of propaganda; if anyone tried to talk about alternative energy they’d be smashed down, called a tree-hugger. So my kids would get that. And we lived the issues; we had a divided life. We lived in New York City, where they went to school, and we had this place out in the country, very similar to the wilderness out in Utah, which is now Sundance, and it was just a cabin. It very high up, very primitive, and they spent part of their time there. So they knew what nature was and that became part of their lives.

Q. What do you think about Al Gore not running for President?
Robert Redford: Well why would he? Unless he felt a moral compunction. But right now the political system so restricts public office, and he right now is having an heroic moment, making money. But he suffered enormously, which was his fault, by not running a good campaign. Yet I do feel as though Bush didn’t win that election; I never believed he won, I think there was stuff that went on there. But he ran the campaign badly, going in there very stiff, while Bush went in as the regular guy, the guy you could go drinking with. I don’t know if that’s what you want from your president, but my country’s very focussed on cosmetics. Anyway, it must have been hard for Gore. But he picked an issue to fight about at just the right time, just as it was coming to public attention.

Q. Would you ever be tempted into politics?
Robert Redford: No way. I’m much better off doing what I do. I’m not good at compromise, and the system is too constipated. I’m only rally active in terms of the environment. In 1985, I had an environmental conference at Sundance and these professors came and showed a slide show on global warming. There were lots of scientists and film industry people there, and when we saw the show it was shocking. That was back in 1985 and no one knew about the issues. So they showed that Kilimanjaro would have no snow, and how the Southern icecap was shrinking. Then in 1989 we held a conference in Sundance called Greenhouse Glasnost and we ended up with a document, signed by the leading scientists in America and Russia, saying how important an issue this was. But we made the mistake of sending this to George Bush Snr, who shoved it in a drawer, so it never really got out. But this was too early, Kyoto came but didn’t have the traction, so it’s only in the last year that it’s become a bigger issue, and that is because of two things. First, Wall Street realised there was money to be made by going green. Two, it finally came to roost that it was a big health issue. That made for a tipping point, and Al Gore came in at exactly the right time with his film.

Q. Who would you like to see in the White House next?
Robert Redford: Someone different from what we’ve got now, which I don’t see at the moment. I don’t see any of the current candidates as particularly inspiring.