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Robert Redford pumps ‘Unforeseen’ in Austin

By Michael Barnes | Friday, March 28, 2008, 05:44 PM

You could hardly ask for two more articulate speakers on behalf of a movie, this one a poetic documentary about Barton Springs and urban development that has swept the world’s film festivals and won the hearts of critics.

Director Laura Dunn spoke of her inspirations at the Alamo South earlier today. As a relatively recent Austinite, she relayed her interest in researching the project thoroughly, getting to know the environmentalists and the developers (including Gary Bradley, given a more than fair shake in the movie), in taking the words of poet Wendell Barry, especially his “Santa Clara Valley,” as her starting point and encouraging cinematographer Lee Daniel to do the same while “unframing” nature.

“My hope is to inspire and reinvigorate those who have battled (for the Springs) while informing the newcomers,” Dunn said about her hope to capture “The essence of what’s going on in Austin.”

Then she invited Robert Redford up to the stage. Grounded, magnetic, a better expository speaker than most politicians, Redford talked about what attracted him to the project: Terrence Malick’s invitation to join the team as executive producer, his own childhood learning to swim at the springs, his activism in the 1980s and ’90s in favor of the aquifer’s preservation, his long support of documentaries as films, not just megaphones, as well as Dunn’s unusually fair-minded and aesthetically persuasive technique.

“I’m very proud of this movie,” Redford said about “Unforeseen,” which opened today for a theatrical run at the Alamo. “This film is a microcosm of what’s happening all over the country.”

At one point, activist Brigid Shea pointed out, as she has at screenings, that “Unforeseen” does not document the SOS struggle minutely enough and Dunn didn’t show enough of Bradley’s dark side. Dunn and Redford need only have said that the rhetoric of changing minds not already converted to the environmental cause requires something other than the movie that Shea could make, but their respectful comments expanded on that.

“The environmental movement needs to accept there’s a new way to do things,” Redford said, emphasizing the broad coalitions now possible for protecting the environment.

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