ROBERT REDFORD - Le Mouching

The first time I saw him in the movies, I was not yet ten years old, and it was in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And then, like all the kids of my generation, he appeared in the films that marked our adolescence… Until the day he made A River Runs Through It, and that changed everything. Thank you, Robert Redford. Without you, no one would be reading these lines.

I was barely thirty years old and I devoured American literature about the great outdoors… I spent entire nights reading Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Henry Thoreau, and Norman Maclean’s book, I mean
THE book: A River Runs Through it! In short, when I closed my eyes, I dreamed of the Rockies, of rushing rivers teeming with fish, of drunken love stories and fly fishing! The reality was different. I was living in Paris in a single room apartment where I was starting a new life, and I only fished with lures in my native Aveyron.

Every time I cast my line into the rivers of Aubrac, I imagined myself as Jim Harrison, or one of the heroes from all that literature that I was so passionate about! Then, in 1992, I went to the cinema and saw: A River Runs Through It!

It’s not that I thought I was Brad Pitt, but this film really moved me. It offered a different interpretation of Norman Maclean’s book, which I had only seen as a story about the powerlessness to help someone who is destroying themselves with alcohol and gambling, the consequences for loved ones, and the ravages of addiction (written in our time, the hero would have turned to crack, coke, and Tinder…). But this different interpretation, focused on the passion for fly fishing, was a revelation for me.

A few months later, I bought a fly rod in San Francisco in a shop run by French Basques, and a month later I was in Montana catching my first trout! The start of a new life!

Then, years later, Le Mouching was born, and without that damn movie, it probably would never have existed. Thank you, Robert Redford, we owe you so much. Thank you for your commitment to always trying to preserve nature, which is constantly being damaged by human greed.

Oh, and whenever I say I fly fish, people always say Oh! like in the movie A River Runs Through it?

Robert Redford’s interview from 1991