Matt Damon as Rannulph Junuh and Will Smith as Bagger Vance survey the fairway of life.

GETTING INTO THE SWING

The Legend of Bagger Vance - which opened in North America earlier this month - is only Robert Redford’s sixth film as a director. It’s in the classic Redford mould, though - a story of triumph, of coming back from adversity, not unlike the 1984 film which gave him one of his biggest hits as an actor: The Natural. And, like The Natural, Bagger Vance is a sporting tale.

But that’s not what attracted Redford to it. In fact, he abandoned an early idea of starring in the film precisely because it was too like The Natural. “I’ve sort of been there,” he said. In point of fact, it was because The Legend of Bagger Vance was so different from the last film he directed, The Horse Whisperer, that his interest was aroused. “That was a heavy trip,” he admitted recently to the Los Angeles Times. “Even though it had some positive aspects to it, it was about healing. It involved damaged animals, children, and was a hard, heavy movie to make.

So I thought, next time, I’d like to do something quirky. Entertaining but quirky…” The solution arrived on his desk courtesy of producer Jake Eberts, who had worked with him on A River Runs Through It. It was a novel by Steven Pressfield about a golden boy who loses his faith in himself and humanity as a result of World War I, then regains both in a magical tournament against the two greatest American golfers of the twenties and thirties.

Pressfield had been influenced by the Bhagavad-Gita, building mythical elements into the tale. And Redford, it turns out, has always been fascinated by myths. “When I was young,” says the director (who grew up the son of a milkman in Santa Monica, California), “mythology was huge for me - larger-than-life characters in bigger-than-life situations. That and movies were my main entertainment, and the strongest underpinning in either is a good story. I have a permanent belief that good storytelling will survive any change in time.”

But, in an age in which every other movie seems to try and build in a mythical dimension, something more specific persuaded Redford to take a closer look at this particular story. Casting around for a way to describe what The Legend of Bagger Vance was really about, Eberts came up with the phrase: “It’s about a man who’s lost his authentic swing”.