Robert Redford embraces movie technology

Robert Redford agreed to star in ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ to ”experience” new technology.

The veteran actor appears in Marvel’s superhero sequel as Alexander Pierce, a senior leader at S.H.I.E.L.D, and was attracted to the project because he was keen to see developments in filmmaking at first hand.

He explained to Entertainment Weekly: ”One of the reasons that I did it was I wanted to experience this new form of filmmaking that’s taken over where you have kind of cartoon characters brought to life through high technology.

”The Avengers series is a product of high technology playing a major role in the new order of filmmaking so I wanted to experience that – I just wanted to know what that was like and I had that opportunity, so for me it was like stepping into new terrain just to experience what it was like.”

Redford – who is joined by Chris Evans in the title role, Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Cobie Smulders, Hayley Atwell and Samuel L. Jackson in ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ – thinks the way technology is changing moviemaking can be seen in the selection of films that showed at his Sundance Film Festival in Utah this year.

He said: ”You can see how technology has affected not only documentaries but films as well – a lot of the films in the festival this year are using technology as a subject matter like a film called ‘I Origins’.

”Using technology to develop thematic plots — that never existed when we started, so technology has moved the needle quite a bit — it’s probably debatable how much or how good it all is but it’s happening and it’s given filmmakers a chance to make films cheaper and even [given them] more access to tools to work with.”