Red alert

WITH his Hollywood heart-throb looks and long list of hit films, Robert Redford is the quintessential movie star.

Yet, talking to him, you realise that he's achieved all this without playing by the rules. He's done it his way, but without the sound and the fury that have accompanied more highly-publicised careers.

His arrival at the London premiere of his new film, Lions For Lambs, which he both directs and stars in, was typical of the man. While co-star Tom Cruise spent hours with the crowd outside, Redford slipped quietly into the cinema through the back door. His career has been conducted in much the same way - with minimum razzamatazz and as little self-publicity as he can get away with.

He's 70 this year, which you wouldn't guess from seeing him in the flesh. He's wearing his trademark blue shirt and blue jeans, and holding a pair of glasses that he takes on and off during the interview.

The airs and graces that usually surround a movie star of his magnitude are absent.

Lions For Lambs tells three stories against the background of the Iraq war. The film cuts back and forward between Redford's college professor and a student, Meryl Streep's reporter interviewing senator Tom Cruise, and two soldiers trapped under fire on the battlefield.

Redford doesn't dodge talking about the political aspects. He, like the film, doesn't force his beliefs on anyone, rather provides both sides of the argument and lets people decide for themselves.

He's aware of the limitations of a film. "I wish I could say they did, but I don't think films change policy at all," he says. "There was a time I hoped they did, but I was naive in some of the early films I made. There are points you make in films hoping it might have some impact, but it doesn't.

"That wouldn't change me wanting to do it. If you make it entertaining, make it dramatic, you feel you made some contribution as an artist. But has it changed anything? No."

What movies can change is fashion, and he cites his experience on Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, one of his earliest and biggest hits.

Everyone was against him having a moustache, they said it would kill his career.

"They said why did I want to wear one? I said in the pictures of the Sundance Kid, he's got a moustache.

I had a fight with my agent. It went back and forth, but I said I'm wearing a moustache'. The film goes out and it's a big commercial success, and suddenly it's fashionable to have a moustache."

This may seem much ado about nothing but is indicative of the way Californian-born Redford has handled himself in his life and work. At several points, things could have gone in a different direction, which is why he identifies with student Todd in Lions For Lambs.

"My education didn't start until I came to Europe at 18," explains Redford. "I was never a good student, I wanted to be an artist and an athlete. I was focused on that in terms of performance.

IHAD a good art teacher who said you don't want to be here' and it was true, I wanted to see what other cultures were like. He wrote a letter to an art school in Paris which coincided with the university asking me to leave." Finding that French students were politically informed came as a shock because he knew nothing, considering it a boring subject about boring people. "I made a point to start studying my own country from Europe, and the point of view was very different to what I got when I was in California," he says.

His love of Europe has continued. In the mid- 1960s when he considered giving up acting and becoming an artist, he took his family to live abroad.

When he returned to acting, it was on his terms. At 24, he was offered a TV series, with producers upping the salary every time he said no. Redford opted to do a stage play for $130 a week instead. That was Barefoot In The Park, which led to the film version and really launched his screen career.

He enjoys his time away from the camera, what he calls "trying to have a life". He likes to "step aside" and experience nature. He rides horses, skis, spends time with family and friends, and works on the environment. He hasn't directed for seven years.

He's been developing two or three films that were slow coming and committing a lot of time to Sundance, the institute he set up in Utah to help independent film-makers and which holds an annual influential film festival.

The Lions For Lambs project came to him a year ago. "When I read it, I was torn because it was very smart but I thought it was talking heads, people sitting talking in rooms. I didn't know whether an audience would sit through that," he says. "But when I thought about it, I turned that into a challenge that could be exciting. To take a film that's really about something that to me was pretty significant and make it entertaining. Could you do a film that was dealing with substantial matters and not have it be academic?"

He felt the film couldn't be about the issues in the three stories because they'd be old news by the time the movie was released. It had to be about something deeper. "What are the factors involved in education, the media, politics, the public's responsibility, that led to the situation we are in, which is not a happy situation.

"I can only speak for my country, but I know the actions of my own country have had an effect on much of the world. It has been a difficult time to live through and this film seemed to be addressing the business of personal responsibility. These are questions I didn't feel the film should answer, that would make it didactic, but posing the questions in a dramatic way could provoke thought."

If Redford had chosen to go into politics, you feel that he'd have done a good job. He talks intelligently and compassionately about the factors that have shaped his beliefs and criticises those he feels haven't done the right thing for his country.

AT a personal level, I saw something deeper yet all too familiar in the arc of my life which began in the Second World War. I was a little kid and had family that was fighting.

Having been through that, I thought I've lived through times in my life that had the same consistent pattern - McCarthyism, Watergate, Iran and now this.

"If you look at each of these times, I can see a consistent pattern of similarity and sensibility. The mindset was exactly the same every time - extreme conservatism, narrow and mean-spirited - and whenever that got power you had dangerous times.

That's what interested me. You couldn't make a film about propaganda but you could make a film that would make you think."

He knows he'll be attacked for his film, just as happened when he made All The President's Men, about the reporters who exposed the Watergate scandal. "It always happens from the same group.

I expect it on this one oh well, it's a leftie film or a propaganda film'. You get hit with a stick from the far right."

■ Lions For Lambs (15) opens in cinemas on Friday.