Renowned actor and director Robert Redford was the star attraction on the second day of the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit on Wednesday. He took the stage with Adobe CMO Ann Lewnes to talk creativity, technology, reinvention and risk. He’s not a big fan of awards, either.
On reinventing himself:
“[Choosing which areas to branch into] I think has been mostly instinct. That’s part of the creative mind – you operate less by calculation and more by intuition and you follow it. Sometimes it takes you to a good place and sometimes not so good.”
On taking risks:
“I think not taking risks is a risk, that’s how I see it. Taking a risk is what propels you forward. There’s a couple of things that are inevitable. One is the role that change plays. I’ve always felt change is inevitable. If that’s the case then you want to go with it and try make it a positive part of your life. There are sections of society that are afraid of change, and politically I think you can work out who they are.”
On dealing with failure:
“You get a psychiatrist. For example, Sundance as an entity, as a concept, it went through a lot of iterations getting it to where it is, a lot of changes that occurred and bumps along the road and some of them involved failure. Some people see failure as a stopping point, I see it as a step along the road, you use it to your advantage. If used in the right way it will propel you forward rather than stop you in your tracks.”
On measuring success:
“[Awards, box office, ratings] – none of those things. I’ve never been one for awards. I think awards get too complicated because it can get political. To me, the only award I can imagine is something that’s clearly indisputable, like who wins a foot race, that’s pretty clear. When it goes to the film business or anything like that, then it gets tricky because it goes into politics. I’d be honoured when I receive one, but I wouldn’t count on it being a big part of life.
“I think maybe I have a different view of success. I’ve always seen it as something you shadow box with but don’t embrace. If you’re fortunate enough to have it you say thank you, but if you get too connected to the success rather than seeing it as a step along the road, then it can stop you. People forget to use that success to propel themselves forward into some new form.”
On art and creativity:
“I have a prejudice on the role of art in society being an artist. But I think if you boil it down to something very simple, how things are formed, take earth for example, it’s chaos followed by order.
Art is the chaos and business is the order. I was asked to speak at Harvard Business School. They were obsessed with how to make money quickly, focused on the business side of things. I said maybe it would help if you focused on the art side, because that’s where things start, that’s the ideas.
Computers, what the internet can do, it can calculate, many, many ways of seeing something, but creativity can conceptualise that. You need the two together.”
On new technology:
“If I think of new technology, or of groups like this group here, that’s our future. There are early positive signs of technology coming in with the internet, it’s created new possibilities that didn’t exist before – filmmakers can self-distribute, there’s Kickstarter. But again any new technology has a dark side or dangerous side.
But it’s here to stay, so the question is how can you use it and not completely lose what’s normal and natural. New technology is here to stay and it has to be managed, and the way to do that is to make sure art has a major role.”
Frank Chung travelled to Salt Lake City as a guest of Adobe.
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