The Weight
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What I Saw, Heard, and Felt as Sundance Bid Farewell to Park City—and Robert Redford
“What I’m saying is, if you want to go, I won’t stop you.” At the final Park City edition of Sundance last week, my 14th consecutive one, I contemplated this line from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid daily. That’s because a gorgeous, Western-style artwork painted on plywood by local artist Ryan Williams stood not far from The Library Theater, displaying the dearly departed Sundance Kid Robert Redford (who passed away last September at age 89) next to these famous words spoken by his character. The quote felt like a homegrown farewell steeped in bittersweet resignation, an ingenious marking of […]
by Tomris Laffly on Feb 4, 2026 -
“These Guys Don’t Miss”: Padraic McKinley on Directing Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe in The Weight
When Padraic McKinley first received The Weight screenplay from producers Nathan and Simon Fields, he loved the atmospheric world it summoned forth. Original screenwriter Matthew Booi, along with Leo Scherman and Matthew Chapman, had created something special with this Western-adjacent Depression-era crime-thriller. But as a longtime editor across film and TV (Igby Goes Down, Dexter), as well as a producer with strong instincts about story and pacing, McKinley knew the screenplay still needed work. Ethan Hawke had a similar feeling about the original script. McKinley asked him to play lead character Samuel Murphy, an incarcerated man desperate to reunite with […]
by Tomris Laffly on Jan 27, 2026
