Redford soon going back to his day job — acting

Robert Redford says it's time to "get back to work."

This is his way of announcing that his tenure as founder and frontman of the Sundance Film Festival is nearing an end. And he's about to recommit to his day job: acting and directing.

"I never really intended 23 years ago to find myself that pulled over into Sundance," explains Redford, 66, who introduced the festival's opening film, a surfing documentary called "Riding Waves," Thursday night in Park City. "I had the idea and I designed it, but I thought I could transfer it to somebody else to implement."

For a lot of reasons that didn't happen, and his career as actor ("Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Sting") and Oscar-winning director ("Ordinary People") suffered. "It all turned out to be far more difficult than I ever imagined," he continues in an exclusive interview.

But now Sundance is "firmly on its own feet," Redford reports, and its mission — to support independent films and filmmakers and to give audiences alternatives to glossy, studio-produced movies — isn't in danger of being subverted. So he can return to that long-delayed sequel to "The Candidate" (1972) and other pet projects, such as a Western called "The Outrider" and an adaptation of Neil Gordon's "The Company You Keep," about going underground in the radical '60s.

As proof of his new focus, Redford is appearing onscreen at the festival for the first time in its 17-year history (the Sundance Institute was founded in 1981 and took over a Park City-based film festival six years later). He plays a kidnapped businessman in "The Clearing," co-starring Helen Mirren and Willem Dafoe. "It's a psychological thriller about a complacent family whose life is disrupted when this very harsh thing happens," Redford explains. "As the situation kicks into high gear, we sit back and watch how various people deal with it."

According to festival director Geoffrey Gilmore, Redford had to be talked into premiering "The Clearing" at Sundance. "We argued and struggled a bit over it — Bob didn't think it was appropriate" to showcase one of his own movies, says Gilmore. "I told him this was a great way of answering his critics, who say he runs an indie festival but doesn't act in indie films. This time he did."

Actually, besides "The Clearing," Redford is involved in three other festival entries. He is executive producer of "The Motorcycle Diaries," about the young Che Guevara (Gael Garcia Bernal), and, via the Institute's summer labs, he helped shepherd Chris Eyre's "Edge of America" (with James McDaniel as a black basketball coach on an Indian reservation) and Jacob Kornbluth's "The Best Thief in the World" (a slice-of-lifer about a city kid testing the limits).