Director James Redford is coming to town Friday, and he's bringing "Spin," the debut feature film he shot in Southern Arizona.
Redford, along with actor Ryan Merriman, will be in Tucson Friday for the premiere of "Spin." The event, which costs $25, starts with a 6:30 p.m. reception dinner at the Loft Cinema, 3233 E. Speedway, and follows with an 8 p.m. screening. Tickets can be purchased at the Loft, or by calling 322-5638.
Redford, who is having the film distributed by a small independent company, said "Spin" will also open in Salt Lake City, Boston and New York this weekend. He hopes the film's release will expand if it does well in those markets.
He chose to come to Tucson this weekend in order to help the film succeed here and pay tribute to the community.
"I'm looking forward to coming," Redford said in a telephone interview last week. "I loved it down there."
The film is the story of a Tucson teen-age boy, played by Merriman, who must cope with the absence of his father, who died in a plane crash. The young man struggles to fit in at a new school and with a surrogate family. It's also about so much more. Let's let Redford, whose dad is the famed Robert, take it from here.
"It's a drama based on sort of subtle, intimate emotions played out against a huge backdrop," Redford said.
"It's a great opportunity, a project like this. I felt like less was more in general in terms of how to sort of build up various elements of dysfunction and abuse, along with the socioeconomic tension among the individual people."
Check out our review in Caliente today.
According to James "Jamie" Redford, directing the movie "Spin" was little more than "a happy accident."
Yes, he is the son of actor, filmmaker, entrepreneur, outspoken environmental activist and Sundance Film Festival honcho Robert Redford. And up to now, the 42-year-old James Redford has made his living as a screenwriter on such made-for-TV movies as Tony Hillerman's "Skinwalkers" and the 2001 feature "Cowboy Up."
And Redford says he never really had any directing aspirations until the novel "Spin" landed in his lap -- a best-selling book by Donald Everett Axinn about a Caucasian youth raised in a Latino family and the interracial romance that follows. "I pretty much consumed the book -- and knew I had to see this made into a movie," he said during a telephone interview. ("Spin" opens locally today.)
"When finally I met with Donald," Redford said, "I was only planning to write the screenplay, not direct it. But I guess he thought otherwise. He started talking to me about specific scenes and shots, and then I realized, yeah, I guess I am making this movie.
"Obviously, given my background, I've been around movie sets. But I still really had no idea what I was doing. I look back now on it and wonder, 'What in the world was I possibly thinking?' "
Redford admits that he could have used some pull -- as well as his famous last name -- to get the project made. "But that was something I wanted to avoid. I believe in working for your own breaks. Besides, if this had been a big, major-studio production, I'm afraid we might have had to make compromises or had to change the story.
"After all, this is not the type of material Hollywood makes into movies anymore. Unless they could get one of their young stars to do it. But I was more interested in getting the right person for the part. And to do Donald's novel justice."
That "right person" was actor Ryan Merriman, who stars in the coming-of-age drama as Eddie Haley, an orphaned boy who is raised by his uncle's Latino ranchhand and his wife (Ruben Blades and Dana Delany).
"From the moment we met him, we knew this was our Eddie," Redford said. "He's got a timeless quality that allows him to be believable if the story is contemporary or if it's set in the '50s, like our film is."
Also, Redford said Merriman had the right chemistry with Paula Garces, the actress playing his love interest in the film, as well as with Stanley Tucci, who plays Eddie's Air Force pilot uncle and reluctant father figure.
"Ryan really can work with anyone," Redford said. "He's a fantastic young actor who's going to have a long, successful career, and we were fortunate to get him this cheap. I'll always feel great about having given him one of his first big breaks."
In addition to his film and television work, Redford is also a strong proponent of organ and tissue donation. He runs the nonprofit James Redford Institute for Transplant Awareness (www.jrifilms.org) and produced the 1998 documentary on the subject, "The Kindness of Strangers."
"Unfortunately, there's been a really negative stigma attached to organ donation because of the way it's been treated in the media and in film and television," Redford said. "But it's not all shady back rooms and black-market operations -- not in this country. I know it sounds like a cliche, but it really is the gift of life."
And Redford should know. He was diagnosed with a liver ailment more than 10 years ago, and if not for an organ transplant, he might not have survived. "There's nothing like a healthy dose of your own mortality to show you how things really are," he said with a laugh. "But seriously, I still have my life because of the generosity of another person."
Consequently, Redford and the film's producers held a fund-raising screening of the film last weekend in Utah County. "We're doing anything and everything we can to spread the word about organ donation."
Redford actually wrapped production on "Spin" in 2003 and says he's now already looking forward to future projects, whether or not he directs them. He and Axinn are talking about collaborating, and he's already at work adapting another Tony Hillerman novel for television.
"I seem to be on a bit of a roll here," Redford said, "and it'd be foolish for me to stop. Besides, I'm loving what I'm doing right now."
PHOTO CAPTIONS:
James Redford gives direction to Ruben Blades on the set of "Spin" in Arizona.
From left, Ryan Merriman, James Redford, Dana Delany and Stanley Tucci at the premiere of "Spin" in Provo.
James Redford gives direction to Ruben Blades on the set of "Spin" in Arizona.James Redford
"I think we're all desensitized," says Jamie Redford, responding to a answer to a question about what is implied rather than shown in his PG-rated family drama Spin. "I don't think there's much left to see or say regarding violence. In this particular movie, with this story, I don't think it would add anything. What you don't see is more effective. The idea of restraint was a very important thing to me."
With a title like Spin, in the current political environment, the first-time director's indie debut might reasonably be taken for one more cinematic salvo in the election wars — especially given the outspoken politics of Redford's iconic father, Robert.
Actually, Spin, adapted by the younger Redford from Donald Everett Axinn's debut novel of the same name, is an intimate coming-of-age drama set in 1950s small-town Arizona. Starring Ryan Merriman, Stanley Tucci, Dana Delany, and Paula Garcés, it tells the story of an orphan named Eddie (Merriman) whose parents were killed in a flying accident, and who was left by his uncle (Tucci) to be raised by a Mexican employee (Rubén Blades) and his Anglo wife (Delany), a schoolteacher.
If this plot summary isn't ringing any bells, you're not alone. Axinn's novel isn't exactly an Oprah Book of the Month title. In fact, it's obscure enough that when I looked it up on Amazon.com, other than bare product details like the publisher and page count, there was no further information — no plot summary, no editorial reviews, no customer feedback.
Where did Redford run across the book, and what made him decide to make this his first film? "I met Don Axinn through a mutual friend," Redford tells me via cellphone from Manhattan, where he's just finished doing a TV interview. "He said this guy was determined to make a movie on his book. Which is something that you hear. That and a nickel will get you on the bus." Not in Manhattan, I don't tell him.
"And when I met Don, he had a few scripts that had been developed, I read those first. But I passed on it initially because I felt that just couldn't connect to the material." But then Redford read the book, and found himself drawn to novel's themes of characters surviving broken families and its sense of the time and place. So Redford, who already had a few screenplays to his name, including another adaptation of a novel, decided to retell Axinn's story himself.
At 42, Redford acknowledges that he hasn't exactly rushed to try to follow in his father's Hollywood footsteps. "My life has been anything but usual," he says. Alluding to the lifesaving liver transplant he received in 1995, which led him to found the James Redford Institute for Transplant Awareness, he goes on, "There was a long stretch of time where I had some serious health issues that were a lot more important to me than whether I was making movies… Directing was something that I knew I would want to do at some point when my health allowed for it and the right material came along."
Another issue, says Redford, was his own family. "Moviemaking is an enormous burden on a family," says the husband and father of two children (a boy, 13, and a girl, 8). "My wife and I both felt that till my kids got to an older age where they were both in school, even thinking about directing didn't really work for us."
Why the title Spin? For the protagonist, a young aviator, it has more than one meaning. "Don's explanation of the title is that this boy is in a spin, that he's sort of lost, without his rudder to anchor him… the airplane and the loss of the rudder is sort of a metaphor for personal issues that the boy is facing."
Despite touching on some difficult themes, from losing parents to child abuse, Redford's film is remarkably low-key, with nothing that could remotely be considered exploitative or gratuitous. At one point Eddie gets into a locker-room scuffle with a teammate, but there's no dramatic Hollywood brawling. Later, another teammate takes an interest in the same girl as Eddie, but he isn't treated like a villain scheming to take the hero's girl, and there's no romantic-triangle melodrama. At the same time, Eddie's responses are immature and petulant, but there's hardly an attempt to shock the audience with bad-boy behavior.
"Family movies have devolved in some ways to where they're very black and white," Redford comments. "When you hear the idea of a family drama, it's pounded into us by marketing forces… you almost know what the story is before you enter the movie theater. In most movies, the character going after the hero's girl is almost invariably evil. I felt that Spin presented some opportunities to mix it up a little bit."
There are also other opportunities to mix things up a bit. If Spin is a family drama, it isn't the story of a typical family. Eddie is raised neither by parents nor relatives, nor is he adopted; and his love interest, a Mexican girl named Francesca (Garcés), is raised by an abusive widower father.
Yet there's hardly an anti-family or anti-marriage slant. Eddie's guardians are a loving and happily married couple who have a child during the course of the film. And Francesca's father may be abusive, but her extended family in Mexico, with whom she comes into renewed contact during the course of the story, are loving and supportive.
"I wanted to show that family is a force of humanity as well as a force of genetics," says Redford. "Looking at my own family history over the last couple hundred years, I had family that pushed handcarts across the prairie in the 1800s, and I've seen in their diaries how many second and third marriages there were due to illness and death, and how families were constantly having to evolve and change, but were capable of surviving."
Resisting applications to contemporary debate about the definition of family, Redford says, "If somebody walks into this movie and says, this makes me feel better about my situation, which is unusual but has a lot of love in it, then that would make me really happy. I think that's as far as I can take it in terms of the message of the film."
Despite its unusual situations, Spin it isn't at pains to establish all its relationships from the outset, and it took me awhile to work how who the characters all were. "I think some people will enjoy that and embrace it and other people probably won't," says Redford. "I feel that the power of this movie is that if you let it unfold slowly it would work into the audience over the arc of the story rather than everyone knowing what the ending is going to be ten minutes in.
"In a time when information moves across our screens all day long at the rate it does, this was an opportunity to work at a difference pace. I really enjoyed being able to try that in this movie, and to try to tell the story in a series of images as much as dialogue."
Does Redford have a favorite from among his father's movies? "I think Quiz Show is probably the most powerful one for me. I think the ethical questions that movie explores are so complete and thorough and so well done. I think that stands out to me as a film that I often think back on." Quiz Show, Redford says, exemplifies the kind of moral and ethical questions that he wants to explore in his own films. "Asking questions about life is something I'm always going to be trying to do in my work, about what is it all about, really."
Spin isn't the only project Redford has worked on set in the American southwest. He's also adapted a pair of Tony Hillerman mystery novels for PBS's Mystery! — a project he enjoys in part because of the novels' Navajo milieu. "I love the PBS series that they do with the Tony Hillerman novels, because PBS is committed bringing the native American — well, I guess it's now Indian, we're back to Indian now, because it's evolved — there's a museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. When I started talking about Tony Hillerman and PBS movies, it was native American, but it's gone back to American Indian.
"We're helping American Indians bringing their voices to film and television. It's a very cool thing, it's a great opportunity. I'm far from American Indian, but with my love for their southwest and my respect for their culture, I consider it a privilege to be involved in these projects."
What, if anything, has Redford learned making his first film? "I had heard how large a role marketing and distribution strategy plays once you're done with a film, I'd heard about it, but I think going through it for me to really appreciate and understand making an independent film the actual making of the film is only half the process. There's mind-numbing amount of strategizing, Making the movie is about a lot more things than making the movie.
"I guess it's a long way of saying I don't really have any plans of being a producer.