"The same condition prevails now, only worse," Redford says. Worse, because there is no counterculture. Instead, there is what his character in Lions calls a "windsock" culture, of people flapping in the breeze.

Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan (also the scribe of the Middle East thriller The Kingdom), Lions is a "support the soldiers/end the war" film that frames its real-time story in three loosely connected confrontations.

In Afghanistan, two of Malley's former students (Peña and Derek Luke), now soldiers, struggle to survive a firefight. In Washington, a hawkish senator (Cruise) sells his new war initiative to a dubious journalist (Streep). In Los Angeles, the professor lights an activist fire under one of his students (Garfield), a fratboy he disparages as "a windsock."

"The opposite of a windsock culture would be a windmill culture," Redford explains, hands rotoring. "I think there's political energy out there and I'm trying to harness it." He will not comment on the notion voiced by some at Penn that as All the President's Men helped write the epitaph for the Nixon administration, so, too, could Lions for Lambs do that for the Bush presidency.

He also rejects the idea floated at the Zellerbach that Lions for Lambs was made to influence the 2008 election. More students voting would be good, he says, but electoral politics are beside the point.

"I probably won't support a candidate, it's too depressing. . . . the national stage is too clogged and compromised," says the actor, who contributed to John Kerry's 2004 primary campaign. "I work for congressional candidates."

Well, then, what is the point?

He cites a scene in Lions in which his character challenges the student to reflect upon whether he has done the most with his gifts. So, does Redford think he has done the most with his?

"I've tried," he says meekly, more lamb than lion. For him, success has been something to wrestle with. As he put it early in his career, success "isn't something you embrace."

Let the record speak. Like Clint Eastwood, for the last four decades Redford has alternated between films to appease Hollywood studio heads (Indecent Proposal, anyone?) and ones to please himself (Quiz Show).

When he felt underutilized as an actor ("God, in Out of Africa I felt like I was in a box," he groans), he used himself differently.

Through the Sundance Institute, he has been the godfather of American independent film, and through the Institute for Resource Management, a catalyst for the environmental movement.

(Though it must be said that his The Milagro Beanfield War, A River Runs Through It, and The Horse Whisperer were more eloquent briefs for protecting the purple-mountain majesty than any institute.)

Though he's too robust to be thinking about epitaphs now, he has an answer at the ready when asked for one: "Can I get back to you?"

Redford on Film

As a moviemaker, Robert Redford wears many hats. As an actor, he's the mythic American figure. As a producer-actor, he's the real guy trying to change the system. And as a director, he's made films about healing broken families.

Mythic Redford

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) Charismatic outlaw Sundance robs banks with Paul Newman's Butch and loves Katharine Ross' Etta Place.

The Way We Were (1973) Redford is the all-American apathetic, who is beloved by political activist Barbra Streisand.