David Gessner at the American Scholar:
The script excited Redford from the start. It was, he said, “closer to the real West than anything I’d ever read or seen.” It was written by John Milius, working off Vardis Fisher’s 1965 novel Mountain Man and the 1958 biography Crow Killer by Raymond W. Thorp and Robert Bunker. That the film took place in or near the mountains Redford had grown to love added a deeply personal resonance. Consider what Jeremiah Johnson says when he eyes the land where he will build his new home: “River in front. Cliffs behind. Good water. Not much wind. This will be a good place to live.” Redford could say pretty much the same about the A-frame house he built at Sundance before fame really hit. This was a story that spoke directly to him, a mythic story of turning your back on the known world and finding an unknown one. Of starting out as a greenhorn, new to the wilderness, but gradually learning what is needed to survive, then thrive. In a life of artifice, here was the authentic.
“Finally, you don’t ‘act’ a movie like Jeremiah Johnson,” he later told his biographer. “It becomes an experience, into which you fit and flow. It was grueling and I was changed by it, no question. We re-created a way of life that real people lived in these real mountains, the same now as they were then. You learn by immersing yourself in their reality.”
more here.
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