Film star Robert Redford says he's retiring soon from acting to focus on directing.
In an online interview with his grandson Dylan Redford, the 80-year-old star says he's getting tired of acting. "I'm an impatient person so it's hard for me to sit around and do take after take after take," he says.
He notes in the interview — published in the blog of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis — that he has two acting projects in the works: "Our Souls at Night," with Jane Fonda, which he calls "a love story for older people who get a second chance in life," and "The Old Man and the Gun," with Casey Affleck and Sissy Spacek.
"Once they're done, then I'm going to say, 'OK, that's goodbye to all that,' and then just focus on directing," Redford says.
Redford won the Oscar for directing in 1981 for "Ordinary People," and an honorary Oscar in 2002.
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More