The Sundance Kid

For more than three decades, Robert Redford has been a major Hollywood star.

For more than three decades, Redford also has kept his distance from Hollywood, spending much of his time on his ranch in Utah.

Over the years, that ranch has consumed him, drained him and kept him from doing a lot of acting in movies.

With two new movies out, he's as busy as he's ever been, which is surprising when you realize that next year, the "Sundance Kid" can start collecting Social Security.

Asked by 60 Minutes II Correspondent Charlie Rose to describe his feelings about his approaching 65th birthday in August, Redford says, "Well, I'll run out of gas long before I run out of ideas of what to do. So there'll never be a shortage of that. It's just whether my mind will be around to fulfill it, and my body will be around to enjoy it, that's all. I mean, there's no – I don't have retirement in mind."

He won't retire because he loves acting. What he has never liked was Hollywood, so he found a place to escape to in the mountains of Utah and he named it "Sundance."

" I bought two acres of land here for $500 in 1961," Redord recalls. " And I bought it because when I saw it, I thought this is the most exquisite piece of land I've seen in a long time."

Now, he owns more than 5,000 acres, as far as the eye can see. What started out as a personal quest or a peaceful retreat became something else – as Redford describes it, "preserving a piece of nature, for a piece of humanity."

"I didn't know that politics would, in fact, enter the picture, because I thought preserving it would be far easier than it turns out to be," he says. "But so be it."

To cover a huge mortgage and tax payments, Redford poured millions made from his movies into Sundance, but discovered it wasn't enough.

So, ironically, this staunch environmentalist, who uses his celebrity to protect undeveloped land, has become a developer.

"Well, geez, the development, that's the antithesis of what I got it for," Redford says of "Sundance." "I said, 'Wait a minute, there's something here that can be gained.'

"We can do it in a different way. And because development is a fact of life, let's not kid ourselves, it is part of who we are, and a big part of who we are, sometimes too much so – what if you … tried to create a model that showed, in the interests of what we develop and what we preserve, that you can have it both ways in an equitable way.

"Starting that road turned out to be way more difficult than I ever dreamed," he adds. " I mean, it is – to learn that it's far easier to develop than it is to preserve was like a shock to me. But I was committed, so there you are."

To make ends meet, Redord developed part of the land into a ski resort. He wanted to keep it small, even though business advisors urged him to expand by adding more hotel rooms. Instead, he started a catalog business that sells clothing and home furnishings.

Still, he wasn't breaking even and the load became even greater in 1981 when he created the Sundance Institute as a workshop for independent film makers.

"That was a real struggle, " Redford says. "Because it was non-profit. People said, 'Well, what am I giving you money for? You make a lot of dough, I read about you, I read about what you've made.'

"They said, 'Go pay for it yourself.' I gave the thing I could give, which was the land.

Something amazing happened. And it was evolutionary… I suddenly realized, when I saw the energy of these artists coming here to work, and I realized it had a lot to do with the environment that they were in. I thought, 'Oh, that's it.' The marriage of the natural environment and art."

Redford wanted to support and encourage independent filmmakers. He started the Sundance Film Festival, and the Sundance cable channel to showcase movies outside the Hollywood mainstream - the very mainstream that had made Redford a star.

Redford admits being called a star rattles his cage. Then he adds, "But look, I'm only human. How can I not be flattered and taken with the idea that suddenly you're considered a movie star? You're a little kid growing up with an image of what you felt was a movie star. And then, it's, 'I'm one of them?' "

Redford says it's hard getting used to the idea that he's the "guy on the screen that I used to make fun of.

" I used to go to make out in the theatre and take a girl there that – I was more interested in making out than I was in what was on the screen. So I was trying to be the wise guy and say, 'Oh yeah, you – darling, okay.' And so I'm now that guy."

Redford was one of the biggest stars of the '70s, but in the '80s and '90s, he found himself having to give more of his time to Sundance. He also began directing.

He says it was wearing him out and keeping him from his first love, acting.

So now, at 64, for the first time in years, he is starring in two movies back-to-back - The Last Castle and Spy Game.

He is having fun. "I've always had fun as an actor, " he says. " It's not easy. And it's in a way a – a kind of agony…because of the threats to your concentration, your focus. I mean, there's a lot of – it's not easy."

But the bottom line? "There is something wonderfully fun about it," he says.

Redford has made acting look easy since 1969, when he burst on the Hollywood scene with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

Back then, few people had heard of Robert Redford. But one who had was the one who suggested him for the film - Paul Newman.

When Redford joined the cast, Newman recalls, Newman was playing Sundance, and somebody else, possibly Marlon Brando, was slated to play Butch. All that changed after a week of rehearsal with Redford. "We knew we were onto something pretty good," Newman says.

Redford remembers the time as "the most fun I've ever had making a film." As a bonus, he and Newman became fast friends.

"I admire him, " Newman says of Redford. "He's not sucked in by fashionable things. And he keeps his life to himself. And he's very comfortable inside his own skin, I think."

The two are alike "to the extent that we're both private people," Newman says, though he readily admits Redford "is more private than I am."

The bond has lasted over 30 years and survived some rather extravagant practical jokes, like the time when Redford bought his friend an unusual birthday present and had it delivered to Newman's home.

"I went to this junkyard and I asked him to see if they had an old Porsche that had been destroyed, and they did, " Redford recalls. "They found an old Porsche that was totally flat.

"And," explains Newman, " he must have had it brought in on a hook and just dropped in the driveway. So I had it compacted and boxed."

Newman had the old car squeezed into a large metal cube, put in a box, and sent to Redford's house.

"And about two weeks later," Redford says, picking up the story, "I came up for the weekend, I came up to the house. And I opened the door and I went into the foyer, and there was this big box, and I noticed that the box itself, the weight of the box had begun to crush the floor."

Newman estimates it must have weighed 1,400 pounds. "It took four of us to carry it into his house," he says.

So what did Redford do? "I didn't say anything," Redford says. "I didn't acknowledge getting it."

Adds Newman, " So in the final analysis, you see, he won."

It's been a quarter of a century since Redford's second partnership with Newman in The Sting, but they still are looking for the right vehicle for another collaboration.

"The opportunity hasn't come around, " Redford says. "It just hasn't. Surprises me, 'cause Hollywood's pretty big at formula stuff. If it came and it was right, we would both agree on it, we'd just do it. But it hasn't come. It's not like we don't want to. We would like to."

Now Redford is appearing in Spy Gamewith a new partner from a new generation, Brad Pitt.

His advice to Pitt and other younger actors, Redford says, " is to make sure you have another life.

"Have another life bcause it keeps you open to a bigger part of yourself, rather than shrinking back down. Have another life because this is a tough business. It's a cruel, often brutal business to your psyche. Have another life to spare yourself. Have another life because – think of how beautiful it is when you bring that other life into your main life. That's been my main thing, " he says. "And that's what it is for me."

The "Sundance Kid" is a grandfather now, with three grown children and a private life he prefers to keep private. He considers his "other life" to be at Sundance. That is where he seems happiest.

He's still got dreams and ambitions, though. "I want to play the flute," he tells Rose, then laughs. "It's not gonna happen."

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