By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

“Follow the money.”

That is one of the most legendary lines ever from a Hollywood movie, spoken by Hal Holbrook in the role of “Deep Throat,” a Nixon administration whistleblower in “All the President’s Men.”

Deep Throat secretly met with reporter Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, advising Woodward as he investigated the Watergate scandal with Post colleague Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein exposed a web of corruption in the White House that ultimately forced President Richard Nixon to resign.

Woodward was played by Robert Redford, the legendary actor, director and activist, who died this week at his home in Utah, at the age of 89.

Democracy Now! Frequently interviewed Robert Redford over the years. In 2012, he reflected on that role:

“To me, stories that were worth telling were stories about what’s the truth beneath the truth that you’re given, or you think you know. And I think that, like All the President’s Men, was, what’s the truth? What’s the story about two guys that did something other people weren’t doing that managed to take down a top figure in government? How did that work?”

Renowned for roles in films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and The Way We Were, Redford won an Oscar for directing Ordinary People and numerous other awards over his storied career. But what mattered most to him was independent film.

Pursuing truth and confronting power was central to Redford’s long career. The power of Hollywood studios inspired him to found The Sundance Film Festival, as he explained on Democracy Now! in 2015:

“What if we can start a development process where young artists can have a voice, help them develop their skills so they can at least get their films made?’ That was the labs that started in 1980. Then, once that happened…there was nowhere to go, because the mainstream had not allowed any space for them. That led to the idea of a festival. Originally, it was just a community of filmmakers coming together to share each other’s work. And maybe if we were lucky, somebody will come.”

And come they did. The Sundance Film Festival is the largest independent film festival in the US, drawing upwards of 120,000 attendees for ten days in late January to the tiny mountain town of Park City, Utah. The festival may be a victim of its own success; this January’s festival will be the final one in Park City, after which it will relocate to the larger city of Boulder, Colorado.

In 2010, Redford explained on Democracy Now! that, despite the festival’s growth, he and his staff were committed to its original mission:

“What came to my mind was a T.S. Eliot poem that I’ve always been fond of that begins with ‘Let us not cease from exploration.’ And then it goes in a circular line, where it ends with ‘so that we may return to the place we started and see it as if for the first time.’ That was the idea: Let’s go back to our roots…to remind us of who we were, when, and what we did, taking new chances and carving new areas. That’s what this festival is all about.”

Redford was also a committed environmental activist. He told us in 2015,

“I worked on an oil field as a kid, in the Chevron oil fields in California. So I’ve had a lot of experience with oil. I think it should stay in the ground now. I think that we are so close to polluting the planet beyond anything sustainable.”

And in 2016, not long after returning from the major UN climate summit in Paris, where he worked on organizing elected mayors and indigenous populations for climate action, he added,

“I’ve been more radicalized over time as I’ve seen the consequence of how the environment has been treated. Climate change is a big part of that.”

Robert Redford and his son James co-founded The Redford Center, a non-profit dedicated to environmental impact filmmaking. James’ untimely death from cancer in 2020, at 58, deeply impacted his father. In their online statement after Robert’s death this week, The Redford Center wrote, “His work has elevated voices that might otherwise have gone unheard and moved generations of filmmakers, organizers, and citizens to take bold action for the environment…Bob showed us that hope is a discipline and that creativity can be a force for justice.”

Redford’s friend, co-star and longtime climate activist Jane Fonda wrote online after learning of his death, “Bob made a real difference in all good ways. He represented an America we must now fight to protect. I am very sad today. Cried all morning.”

Independent media was Redford’s calling. As the crackdown on dissent intensifies in the United States, no doubt Robert Redford would repeat the call of the early 20th century labor activist Joe Hill: “Don’t mourn. Organize!”