Anti-Vietnam war film debuts in Venice
‘The Company You Keep,’ an anti-Vietnam war film by veteran American actor and director Robert Redford, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in Italy on September 6.
The military action thriller stars Redford as Jim Grant, a lawyer and former member of the Weather Underground, an American radical militant organization that was strongly opposed to the war in Vietnam.
Thirty years later, his true identity is exposed by Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf), an ambitious young reporter, and Grant has to find ways to clear his name and escape from the FBI.
Redford sympathizes with the militants who considered the war in Vietnam a crime, and believes that they had the right to refuse to go to the frontlines.
The 76 year-old director revealed he could not make the film when the Weather Underground was being forced to join the war 30 years ago, but he can do it now.
When he was researching his film, Redford met the son of a Weather Underground soldier, who had to hide for five years.
“In Bob's (Robert Redford's) generation, they put a gun in your hand and told you to go and run through the jungle and shoot people. You didn't really have a choice.”
'My generation is very different. We are not being asked to do the same things, we're just broke. It's easier to deal with being broke than being asked to kill,” said Shia Labeouf, who joined Redford at the festival.