Entertainment weekly posted an interview with Robert Redford where he spoke on why he agreed to work on the upcoming Captain America: Winter Soldier film from Marvel. In essence he was attracted to the idea of a CGI-driven film. He wanted to see what the process was like to be a part of computer generated fantasy. Those weren’t his words, specifically, but you get the idea.
The interview has been making the rounds to all the comics-related sites, so we won’t re-hash it here. The important thing is that Robert Redford, at his age, is open to experimentation, which we at Quantum Pop think is fairly exceptional. It’s all too often that one sees the stars of yesterday get swept aside because they don’t understand how their art is changing, be it music, film or anything else.
Film is a visual language. Like many spoken languages, the exact dialect shifts and mutates as society changes and trends come and go. We see this all the time with music. Music is a language, but Renaissance music is a different dialect than Punk, which is itself a different dialect to, say, Trance. Likewise, the dialect of film has changed, at least for the big budget films. Redford recently starred in the film All is Lost, which was a decidedly low-budget film with a very personal and emotional story of dwindling hope. This requires a specific visual language that is similar to, but differs significantly from, the upcoming Captain America film. The latter being heavily CGI-driven, and far more spectacular in visual presentation.
For Mr. Redford to be willing to learn new things means that he will be able to pick up on the dialect of this type if technologically-backed film, and perhaps bring some of it into the other dialects that he works in more frequently. That sort of thing is good for everyone concerned as cross-pollination is vital to creative growth.