Scarlett Johansson Reflects on Robert Redford’s Support in The Horse Whisperer at 13

Scarlett Johansson looked back fondly on her time working with Robert Redford in an interview that resurfaced shortly after his death early on Tuesday.

The legendary star was said to have died in his sleep at 89, though a specific cause wasn’t cited.

Johansson, 40, worked with Redford early on in her career, when she was just 13, on 1998’s The Horse Whisperer, which was her seventh feature film.

Redford directed the drama, which went on to be a critical and commercial hit, and he also played the title role.

Johansson played Grace, a teen girl who is severely injured and traumatized in a tractor collision that leaves her friend dead and her horse maimed, while Redford plays a ‘horse whisperer’ who agrees to help rehabilitate her horse — but only if Grace also participates.

In an interview from that year with the Today Show from 1988, the rising actress described how Redford ‘understood’ her effortlessly because of his skills as both an actor and director.

‘Working with him was amazing. I think it really helped that he was an actor, as well as a director, because we could communicate so well,’ she said. ‘And I guess you can’t really call it actor talk, that wouldn’t be the right word, but it was just a connection between us.’

Johansson went on to explain what made Redford such an expert at eliciting a winning performance form her.

‘A lot of the times, you get a director who can’t really explain what they want to say to you about what they’re feeling about your character, and it gets very frustrating,’ she shared. ‘But we didn’t have that problem on that set because we could communicate so well, so we understood each other.’

In an later interview with Deadline from May of this year, Johansson looked back on Redford’s skills behind the camera. 

‘He was so actor-focused,’ she said of the Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid star. ‘He was so patient and would take the time to familiarize me with where my character was at that moment, what happened, where I was coming from in the story. He would tell me the story, the whole story, all the way up until that point.’

‘It was so helpful. It was so insightful, too, because I was also a young actor. I was working on a big film, and a lot was going on, and he would take the time,’ Johansson continued. ‘He created an intimate space in a big, overwhelming production.’

The Horse Whisperer went on to receive some of the best reviews of Redford’s career, and it also became his most successful directorial effort at the box office after grossing $187 million globally against a $60 million budget.

Johansson went on to follow in Redford’s footsteps by also becoming a director.

In May, her dramedy Eleanor The Great had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

The film, which has polarized critics for its controversial plot and a tone that veers between comedy and drama, stars 95-year-old June Squibb.

Squibb plays Eleanor Morgenstein, a woman in her mid-90s who moves from Florida back to New York after her best friend, a Holocaust survivor, dies.

But when Eleanor tries to keep herself occupied at a local Jewish Community Center, she accidentally sits in on a gathering for Holocaust survivors. 

Instead of coming clean about the mix up, she adopts her dead friends story of surviving the Holocaust as her own, which leads to a snowballing series of lies and misunderstandings.

Redford’s death was reported on Tuesday by Cindi Berger, chief executive of the PR firm Rogers & Cowan PMK.

According to her, the actor died in his sleep early in the morning on Tuesday, September 16, in ‘the place he loved surrounded by those he loved.’

Redford was one of the most famous stars of the 20th century, though he continued to act and direct well into his 80s.

Two of his biggest films, 1969’s Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid and 1973’s The Sting paired him with another great legendary star, Paul Newman.

The latter film also earned Redford his only Academy Award nomination, for best actor.

Despite being blessed with matinée idol looks, Redford never leaned on his chiseled features and perfectly tousled hair, which his All Is Lost director J.C. Chandor claimed was his natural hair in 2013, according to HuffPost. 

Instead, he favored weighty dramas like The Way We Were (1973), tense thrillers like Three Days Of The Condor (1975) and overtly political films, including All The President’s Men (1976) and The Candidate (1972).

Redford made his directorial debut in 1980 with the drama Ordinary People, a commercial hit that won the Oscar for best picture and nabbed him the best director trophy, along with honors for supporting actor (Timothy Hutton) and adapted screenplay. 

Redford was also an advocate for American films beyond the standard blockbusters and multiplex fare, and in 1978 he co-founded the Utah/US Film Festival, which later transformed into the Sundance Film Festival, named after his character from Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. 

Sundance, which eventually settled in the ski town of Park City, Utah, went on to become the largest festival to prominently feature independent films in the US. 

Despite its decades-long connection to Park City and nearby Salt Lake City, the festival announced in March of this year that it would be relocating to Boulder, Colorado, beginning with the 2027 edition of the festival.