Robert Redford's directing is strongest when actors complicate the moral lesson. We rate the patience and restraint of Quiz Show highly, though his willingness to let people talk can keep a scene going too long.
Fi1m perspective
Ralph Fiennes makes Charles Van Doren so agreeable in Quiz Show (1994) that judging him takes an effort. Beside him, John Turturro's Herb Stempel is awkward company, and Redford does not smooth away the difference to make the fraud easier to condemn. We felt uneasy about how readily we favoured Van Doren, because Fiennes makes his composure more persuasive than it deserves to be. This is Redford directing well: letting a performance expose an unfair judgement we have already made.
He began directing with Ordinary People (1980), working intermittently behind the camera alongside his acting career. The period drama A River Runs Through It (1992) is another of his better-regarded films. The Horse Whisperer (1998) brought a change: for the first time, he starred in a film he also directed. The later work drew more uneven reviews, with The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) receiving a lukewarm response. The assurance of Quiz Show is no reason to recommend the whole catalogue indiscriminately.
Paul Attanasio's screenplay is crucial to what works in Quiz Show: its quick exchanges make room for vanity, wit and embarrassment. Redford gives those exchanges time to register and rarely reduces anyone to a spokesman. Paul Scofield's Mark Van Doren is dignified without being merely self-important, which makes judgement harder still. Redford understands that the fraud will be more troubling if the people involved remain worth listening to, and he trusts the actors to make that difficulty felt without explaining every implication.
Stu Linder's editing keeps the talk moving without hurrying the actors, while Mark Isham's music sensibly leaves their voices foremost. But Redford sometimes lets a conversation continue after the useful disagreement has finished. At 133 minutes, Quiz Show could lose some talk without losing much meaning. The patience is welcome until we can see that a scene has nothing more to tell us. Start with Quiz Show for the actors, and forgive it the conversations that should have finished a minute earlier.
Biography
Robert Redford was an American actor, director and producer. Born Charles Robert Redford Jr. on 18 August 1936 in Santa Monica, California, he died on 16 September 2025. He began his career on stage in the late 1950s and made his film debut in War Hunt (1962).
Redford starred in films including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973). He directed Ordinary People (1980), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director, and Quiz Show (1994), on which he also served as producer. In 1980 he founded the Sundance Institute, which established the Sundance Film Festival.
