The phrase ‘authentic swing’ evidently struck a chord, because it crops up a lot when Redford talks about it - Redford and anyone else closely connected with The Legend of Bagger Vance. “It sounds like it’s only about golf,” says Will Smith, who plays the title character, a sort of guardian-angel caddy who eventually restores the hero’s faith in himself, “but it’s that part of every one of us that is the most real.

“It’s very subtle,” Smith adds with a grin, “and I’m not always comfortable with subtlety: I like it loud and clear. But, for that reason, it was good to play a character who isn’t big and funny and is a lot more subdued… to explore other aspects of myself and to emote in a way that’s different from any of my past work.”

“Will is a talented guy: that goes without saying,” Redford elaborates. “His talent is obvious. Using that as a foundation, I knew he could do whatever I asked of him for the role. If somebody’s willing to try something different and has faith in you and you have faith in them, then there’s a trust there. It gave us a nice framework to work from.”

Smith may be the title character, but the ‘hero’ of The Legend of Bagger Vance is Rannulph Junuh (Matt Damon), a boy from Savannah, Georgia, who starts out with everything and is a golfing genius to boot. Then, in one brief moment during World War I - a sequence which lasts less than a minute on screen - all Rannulph’s ideals are shot away. He returns to Georgia without his ’authentic swing’ - without his soul - and loses his girl (Charlize Theron) in the process.

“It sounds like it’s only about golf, but it’s that part of every one of us that is the most real”


Will Smith (seen, above, talking on
set with director Robert Redford)

She, meanwhile, is struggling to protect her father’s life-long dream and all-consuming investment, the Krewe Island Golf Resort, from ruin. It is a mission that becomes progressively harder as the unbridled prosperity of the Jazz Age - during which most of America’s great golf courses were built - begins to give way to the grimmer realities of the Depression. In the end, the two strands of the story come together in the final contest, pitting Rannulph against two all-time golfing greats, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen. Jones and Hagen were real-life golfers of their day, the one graceful and restrained, the other flamboyant and money-oriented. And it is with that tournament, amid the lush greenery of Kiawah Island off the Carolina coast (which stands in for the film’s fictional Krewe Island), that the movie comes to its climax.