"He's making a lot of money, he's having a belle époque, a heroic moment," he says. "It must have been really hard for Gore to suffer all that [losing the presidential election], so he found another thing to come back with: the environment. He had a lot of money behind him, because in Clinton's administration there was a lot of money. With that he was able to build himself a new campaign and pick an issue. And he picked an issue that just happened to arrive at its moment in time." The less-than-subtle subtext is that Gore is an arriviste, while Redford has been out there, a grizzled loner, bearing the jibes and right-wing clobbering before the environmental cause was fashionable. Asked why he thinks Gore is not going back into politics, he says: "What's most important - to be a hero to your country and go save it . . . or do you want to be happy and rich and be a hero and not get into the political scene?"