Creativity Regained

 

Finally I landed here, at Sundance. And in this place most people associate with celebrity and conservation, I discovered the purest example of sustained innovation and creative organizational culture I had yet seen.

The not-for-profit Sundance Institute nurtures creativity in writers and filmmakers; folks you'd think wouldn't need the assist. But you would be wrong. Just consider what those filmmakers were putting out, chiefly under the aegis of Hollywood, before Redford, in true change agent style, forged the marketplace for independent movies. Films like Sex, Lies and Videotape may have wedged open the door, but without a constant flow of new -- and not just new but exciting -- products that door would have closed. For independent film to become a movement, later an industry, artists had to recover their voices, or learn they had them in the first place. It is the same challenge facing engineers, designers, and others who staff R&D efforts in industries and companies suffering from an idea drought.

For more than 20 years the Sundance Institute has churned out original ideas with the regularity of sausage. I wanted to know how it did that. So I spent five days at Sundance, sitting in on workshops with filmmakers, interviewing staff members at length, and talking with successful alumni.

Most important, I listened to Redford.

It is routine, in matters of art, to say the creation mirrors the mind of the creator. Sundance is not a work of art -- it is an organization with employees, budgets, and multiple commercial and noncommercial arms -- but it mirrors Redford's mind as exactly as if he had dreamed it and then drawn it upon waking. To understand Sundance, therefore, one must first understand Redford. And in getting to know the man, I glimpsed Sundance's first lesson for entrepreneurs: that the key to a constantly innovating organization is a constantly innovating founder.

Redford is always restless, and his appetite for fresh thought is enormous. "When you have the good fortune to have success in your life, I've always thought that is precisely the time you should reinvent yourself. You should go right back to zero as though nothing had happened and start again," says Redford. "Because you can get real stale. You can fall in love with yourself or get to that danger point when you could ride on that success or try to repeat it. Repetition makes me very nervous."

Redford created the Sundance Institute, in part, to combat the deadening repetition that he saw stifling the film industry. But it was his instincts for nurturing creativity in others that has made it thrive.

Like all entrepreneurs, Redford has been guided by a vision. Unlike most, he doesn't compromise it.

That may sound hopelessly unrealistic to most founders, who would argue -- reasonably -- that for the overwhelming majority of folks who aren't Robert Redford financial and commercial pressures are tough to withstand. But Redford feels those pressures too: "It's been a struggle, and it continues to be a struggle. I've learned a lot of hard lessons," he says. And of course when he began to envision Sundance back in 1966, Redford wasn't Redford either. The young actor built his first log cabin in the Provo Canyon as a kind of sanctuary. As his attachment to the valley grew, Redford worried about the future of the land -- threatened by development -- and of the industry in which he worked. America's entertainment culture was becoming increasingly impoverished: Redford saw independent film as its best hope. In Sundance, he envisioned an organization that would be a double sanctuary, a creative vortex where art and nature could flourish.

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