Out of the shadows: Robert Redford, fly fishing and ‘The Movie’ that changed southwest Montana forever
TRM’s tribute to Robert Redford.
Urban legend has it that Robert Redford was so chagrined by the impact his cinematographic masterpiece “A River Runs Through It” had on southwest Montana he wouldn’t include locations in the credits for his subsequent film “The Horse Whisperer”, shot mostly near Big Timber.
Dennis Aig, who worked on both movies with the Academy Award-winning director, said Redford never acknowledged as much to him personally. Even so, he wouldn’t be surprised if it crossed his mind.
“I actually asked Bob about it once,” Aig, who recently retired as a professor in Montana State University’s School of Film and Photography, said of “A River Runs Through It” and the small-budget, independent movie’s transformative effect on the region.
“He said — and I’m paraphrasing — ‘If I thought the film was going to bring people trampling all over the rivers I wouldn’t have made the film’. No one saw that coming. Everyone from us all the way up to Bob thought they were making a very personal family drama.
“It never dawned on us that everybody would look at it and decide to go fly fishing.”
Redford, also a committed conservationist and champion of Indigenous peoples, died in his sleep Tuesday at age 89 at his Sundance Mountain Resort home in Utah. In obituaries spanning the globe, he is acknowledged more for such hit films as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, “The Sting”, “Out of Africa”, “Jeremiah Johnson”, “The Great Gatsby” and “The Way We Were”, among many others.
“A River Runs Through It”, released in 1992, and “The Horse Whisperer” in 1998 are sidebars to his overall body of work.
Southwest Montana would beg to differ.
“A River Runs Through It” opened the first floodgates into what had been a relatively sleepy region as Orvis-clad anglers arrived in droves. Though Norman Maclean’s novella was set in Missoula and centered on the Blackfoot River, because Redford’s co-producer Patrick Markey insisted on filming in Bozeman and Livingston — with the Gallatin River serving as “the Big Blackfoot” — all trails for the movie’s eventual cult following led to southwest Montana.
Some here still refer to it as simply “The Movie”. Until COVID-19 and the hit TV show “Yellowstone” brought a second tidal wave of migration, time in Bozeman and the city’s evolving persona were often defined as “Before The Movie” and “After The Movie.”
“It definitely put Bozeman and fly fishing on the map,” Aig said. “When you talk about the growth of Bozeman, there are two different phases. ‘Yellowstone’ is what everybody thinks about now, but it really started with ‘A River Runs Through It’. I don’t think there’s any question about that.”
To this day, anglers and movie buffs descend upon the region to check off bucket-list sites they recognize from “A River Runs Through It”, notably the boulder in the Gallatin River where actor Brad Pitt’s character, Paul Maclean, is seen “shadow casting”.
“Tell me about it,” Aig said with a chuckle. “A German crew sought me out to sit on Brad Pitt’s rock.”
Aig and his MSU students were given a front-row seat to the filming of “A River Runs Through It”. They in turn gave viewers a similar seat with the documentary “Shadow Casting: The Making of ‘A River Runs Through It’ for Montana PBS, a multi-award-winning film in its own right.
To help publicize the film with a then-revolutionary “electronic press kit”, Redford and Co. gave Aig and his students mostly free rein to use their “spy cam” to interview actors, writers and others on the sets and capture most of the filming, especially outdoors. Only intimate scenes were off-limits, Aig said.
“We were very involved in the sense that we were doing what Redford called ‘a real doc’,” Aig recalled, noting the distinction from a standard PR film or trailer. “For me, it was an incredible opportunity, and for my students as well because they were working with an Oscar-winning director and movie star. For my students it was a great introduction to professional filmmaking.”
To this day, 33 years later, Aig remains in awe of the influence “A River Runs Through It” has had on the region. The film also won an Academy Award for cinematography and made a household name of Pitt.
“What I found amazing was the film was set in Missoula but everybody must’ve read the credits because we’re the ones that benefited from it,” Aig said. “I just think Bob captured the essence of the place. And the rest is history.”
Did Redford truly refrain from revealing locations in the credits for “The Horse Whisperer” because of “A River Runs Through It”? We may never know.
It likely wouldn’t have mattered, Aig said, noting that while Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It” had been a cult novella Nicholas Evans’ “The Horse Whisperer” was a best-selling novel. Besides, southwest Montana’s discovery was well underway by the time Redford returned with Scarlett Johansson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Sam Neill and Dianne Wiest in tow.
“There was a lot of care to try to protect everybody’s privacy,” he remembers. “But when you’re on a film like that (‘The Horse Whisperer’) there’s no privacy. It just kind of had a different kind of vibe to it. I think Bob was a little more cautious, but he still shot the film there.”
Originally published on bozemandailychronicle.com, part of the BLOX Digital Content Exchange.
So? Could someone make an inspirational budget movie about the Tongariro River?
Turangi has a beautiful scenic river, bigger better looking trout, an entire town of extras who can all cast a line, and to ease the budget to make it affordable, I know of some very good accommodation… Peter Jackson will love it. NZ Government will sponsor it…
