"Well, things weren't quite as severe as we expected. But what happened was that exhaustion set in halfway through, and finally it became a question of whether everyone would make it. Our energy was long-since spent. We finally made it, on a lot of tea and rum and not much sympathy. But a lot of rum."
For Redford, the work must have been worth it. "The Downhill Racers" is the first film he's personally been involved in producing, although as an actor he's on the brink of superstar status. He has two potentially big movies ready for release:
"Willie Boy," a western co-starring Katharine Ross (of "The Graduate"), and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," co-starring Paul Newman. His next film, like "Downhill Racers," reflects his active, outdoor image. It will be "Little Fauss, Big Halsy," a comedy about professional motorcycle racing, and it will costar Michael J. Pollard.
All this began far Redford nearly a decade ago, when he won the Broadway starring role in Neil Simon's "Barefoot in the Park." Screen roles followed, including leads in the movie version of "Barefoot" and "The Chase." So now, with "Downhill Racers," Redford was indulging a personal interest in skiing by backing one of the most elaborate attempts to film the sport. What they came back with was about 300,000 feet of film, a lot of it shot by Joe Jay Jalbert, a former racer with the University of Washington who functioned as a skiing cameraman. "At the risk of blowing my own horn," Redford said, "I think this is the best footage of skiing I've ever seen. The trouble with most movies about skiing is that they make everything seem abstract. You see some cat doing fancy stunts, and then you cut to somebody else who falls over, and the audience laughs because he fell over. And that's supposed to represent skiing.
"I wouldn't be interested in a film like that. I wouldn't want to see it, and I wouldn't want to make it. The important thing about a sport is the people who devote their lives to it. The sport is just background. What we're after in 'The Downhill Racers' is a movie about the specific lifestyles of the ski people. Politics surround this sport, like any business. People are cruel to each other.
"And the sport is cruel, too, although usually you think only of the beauty of it. In live TV coverage of skiing, you get some idea of the cruelty and the hardness of it, but in the movies it's made so beautiful.
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