SUNDANCE, Utah â Maybe when you play Death on âThe Twilight Zoneâ at the start of your career, mortality doesnât faze you.  âItâs all part of the deal,â Robert Redford deadpanned.  He didnât think about dying while he was making his new movie about it, J. C. Chandorâs melancholy marinerâs tale, âAll Is Lost.â He thought about enduring.  âIâm interested in that thing that happens where thereâs a breaking point for some people and not for others,â he said over morning coffee recently in the deserted Owl Bar at his resort here. âYou go through such hardship, things that are almost impossibly difficult, and thereâs no sign that itâs going to get any better, and thatâs the point when people quit. But some donât.â  Thatâs also what drew him to an earlier story: his 1972 tale about a 19th-century mountain man battling the wild, âJeremiah Johnson,â shot on Mount Timpanogos where we were sitting.  âYou just continue,â Mr. Redford said. âBecause thatâs all there is to do.â  Like Mr. Chandorâs talky 2011 Wall Street drama, âMargin Call,â set on the day a Lehman-type firm struggles not to go under, the taciturn âAll Is Lost,â due in theaters Oct. 18, is an existential horror story about trying to survive the worst moment of your life â in this case a crippled boat at sea â as panic rises.  Mr. Redford has made a career of playing what he calls âintrinsically American guysâ going up against implacable forces: He battled the banks and Pinkertons in âButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,â Indians and grizzlies in âJeremiah Johnson,â a superficial political system in âThe Candidate,â the Irish mob in âThe Sting,â the C.I.A. in âThree Days of the Condorâ and âSpy Game,â Richard M. Nixon in âAll the Presidentâs Men,â big business in âThe Electric Horseman,â and, his most formidable adversary, Barbra Streisand, in âThe Way We Were.â  Hollywood is no country for old men. Yet at 77, the subject of considerable Oscar talk (David Thomson in The New Republic described his performance in âAll Is Lostâ as ânoble, vulnerable and harrowedâ), Mr. Redford is soaring as the solo star of a movie that evokes the elegiac spirit of âSailing to Byzantium,â by Yeats, one of his favorite poets. Yeats wrote about sailing âthe mackerel-crowded seas,â coming to terms with the agony of aging and contemplating how the soul can rise above a heart âfastened to a dying animal.â  Mr. Redford likes to write poetic observations himself. Leaning back in his chair, slender and fit in jeans and Tony Lama cowboy boots, he recited one he had written: âYou look up and you realize, what a beautiful day, the leaves are turning and youâre starting to feel confident. Youâre feeling full of yourself until you realize youâre drooling.â  He laughed, that great Redford laugh. The thing thatâs easy to forget about Mr. Redford, with his serious pursuits and perfectionist strivings, is that he can be really fun. We talked for three hours next to the 1890s rosewood bar from Ireland commissioned by the real Hole-in-the-Wall gang. Sitting beneath a sepia picture of him and his pal Paul Newman glowing as Sundance and Butch Cassidy, he tells a story about fame.  âItâs right around the time where Iâm beginning to think Iâm a pretty big deal,â he said. At a curb in Beverly Hills, âthereâs a car coming with a bunch of teenage kids in it. I see theyâre freaking out inside and trying to get their windows rolled down. I step back. Iâm ready for it. âRobert Redford!â they scream. âYou are such anâ â here he drops in a vulgarity for jerk. He grinned. âThatâs probably what I would have done at that age.â  Mr. Redford grew up in Los Angeles, a wild child breaking away from a remote, hard-to-please father, the real Rebel Without a Cause caught up in drinking and drag races. (He even went to the same high school as Natalie Wood.) Breaking into Bel-Air mansions, he and a friend were the Bling Ring before the word bling entered the popular lexicon.  Bob Redford was popular with girls early, winning a Charleston contest at 13, but the other boys grew jealous and âvicious.â  âPretty soon it became a regular thing where guys would pass me when I was with a girl and say âARF! ARF! ARF!,â and I could see that the girls were bothered,â he said. Finally one of his friends explained that ARF was the Anti-Redford Federation.  âI was so hurt and shocked,â he said. âFrom that point in my life, I retreated into a more loner place. I was then forever shy of going out and expressing myself, and I would do it in my art.â  After his mother died when he was 18, he left the University of Colorado and went off to be a starving art student in Italy and France. The girls he met in Paris in 1957 did not find him attractive; he was mocked for knowing nothing about the Suez Canal and American politics.  âI got kicked in the teeth by Paris,â he said.  He started to read the newspaper, trying to see beyond American sloganeering and explore âthe gray area that was underneath the red, white and blue.â Just so, his longtime collaborator, Sydney Pollack, said that the actorâs allure came from the darker shades lurking beneath his golden facade.
Robert Redford, who battles the elements in a lonely voyage in J. C. Chandorâs âAll Is Lost,â finds solace in poetry, nature and a lack of vanity.