"Once the festival achieved a certain level of notoriety, then people began to come here with agendas that were not the same as ours. We can't do anything about that. We can't control that"
About this Quote
Fame, Redford suggests, is less a spotlight than a solvent. The moment a festival crosses from beloved to notorious, it stops being an event with a mission and becomes a platform other people feel entitled to occupy. His phrasing is telling: not “success” but “notoriety,” a word that smuggles in the cost of cultural visibility. The festival’s growth isn’t framed as triumph; it’s framed as contamination.
Redford’s intent is pragmatic and protective. He’s drawing a boundary around original purpose without pretending boundaries still hold. “Agendas” is polite, industry-native code for everything from branding plays and political posturing to careerist networking and media narratives that flatten an institution into a headline. By refusing to specify whose agendas, he keeps the critique broad enough to apply to everyone who arrives expecting the festival to serve them.
The repeated “We can’t” does more than concede powerlessness; it performs a kind of resigned leadership. He’s not begging for control, he’s naming a reality: cultural institutions that matter become battlegrounds for meaning. Once you’re big enough to be useful, you’re big enough to be hijacked. The subtext is almost parental: we built something with values, but we can’t decide how strangers will use it.
In context, it’s the classic Sundance dilemma: a scrappy counterweight to Hollywood that, by winning, risks becoming a feeder system for the very machine it resisted. Redford isn’t romanticizing the past so much as admitting the paradox of influence: integrity can start an institution, but it can’t police its mythology.
Redford’s intent is pragmatic and protective. He’s drawing a boundary around original purpose without pretending boundaries still hold. “Agendas” is polite, industry-native code for everything from branding plays and political posturing to careerist networking and media narratives that flatten an institution into a headline. By refusing to specify whose agendas, he keeps the critique broad enough to apply to everyone who arrives expecting the festival to serve them.
The repeated “We can’t” does more than concede powerlessness; it performs a kind of resigned leadership. He’s not begging for control, he’s naming a reality: cultural institutions that matter become battlegrounds for meaning. Once you’re big enough to be useful, you’re big enough to be hijacked. The subtext is almost parental: we built something with values, but we can’t decide how strangers will use it.
In context, it’s the classic Sundance dilemma: a scrappy counterweight to Hollywood that, by winning, risks becoming a feeder system for the very machine it resisted. Redford isn’t romanticizing the past so much as admitting the paradox of influence: integrity can start an institution, but it can’t police its mythology.
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