Kevin Lally on Film

The director Mark Rydell died on August 13, 2026, at the age of 97. Rydell began his career as an actor, earning fans in the 1950s for his role on the daytime soap opera “As the World Turns.” (It was my mother’s favorite soap, and I actually remember him from my summers off from elementary school.) He also turned in a memorably chilling performance as a volatile gangster in the 1973 Robert Altman classic The Long Goodbye. When I met him in 1984, he was coming off the huge success of On Golden Pond, which earned him an Oscar nomination for his direction. As you’ll see below, his follow-up film, The River, was a massive undertaking—not a success, but it did earn an Oscar nomination for its lead actress, Sissy Spacek, working alongside then-matinee idol Mel Gibson. Rydell would later guide Bette Midler to her second Oscar nomination in For the Boys, and he served with Martin Landau as one of the West Coast artistic directors of The Actors Studio. 

Mark Rydell’s grueling shoot on The River is a far cry from what he calls the “enchanted summer” of his last film, On Golden Pond, when he directed the Academy Award-winning performances of Katharine Hepburn and the late Henry Fonda. The River is surely the most physically demanding of the sudden rash of Hollywood films about the struggle of America’s farmers, with a script that calls for not one, but two massive flood scenes.

Since, as Rydell observes, “audiences no longer accept the artificiality that used to be associated with Hollywood,” those floods had to be real. Rydell and his crew made aerial surveys over eight states before they decided that eastern Tennessee offered the perfect topography for their manmade “natural disasters.” Universal Pictures, the film’s distributor, bought 440 acres of land adjacent to the Holston River, on which it built the farm where most of the story takes place. The production then secured the cooperation of the Tennessee Valley Authority in releasing the water from a dam scheduled for repair. An artificial dam of boulders built across the Holston was employed for shots of the river rising ominously along the embankment, and a large pit was excavated and flooded for scenes involving the actors and extras.

“It was a massive engineering achievement,” Rydell says. “We built a hydraulic door, and the force of the water once we had raised the level of the river and lowered that door was 86,000 gallons of water per minute. There had to be a lot of attention to safety, with the rain towers pouring rain down on actors who were in water and mud up to their necks.”

Despite these physical challenges, Rydell says he had no hesitation about filming Robert Dillon and Julian Barry’s script “once I got hold of how deeply connected its characters were and what its ideas were.” The story of a young couple, Tom and Mae Garvey, fighting both the elements and the takeover of their land by an ambitious developer, The River is a warning, Rydell says, about “the tendency of progress to dehumanize.”

“The Garveys are very much the kind of family who made this country strong,” he continues, “and there is a danger of losing sight of that in an effort to make a dollar. Without waving any political banner, I think my sympathies are clear. Anytime you lose the independent, you lose something important. It’s that kind of individuality, that kind of tenacity, even stubbornness, that we should respect and admire.”

As a native of the Bronx, Rydell admits that “on the face of it, I would seem to be the least likely candidate for leadership on this kind of picture. But the kind of thing I do understand, that’s been the cornerstone of my work, is the human element, the human conflict.” Nonetheless, the director spent several months researching farm life, and the entire cast and crew joined him in Tennessee one month prior to production to familiarize themselves with the region and its people.

“The farmer is close to the real values of life and death,” Rydell observes. “His life depends on the weather, the sun, the growth of a corn crop. We who live in urban environments are kind of separate from those fundamentals. It’s fascinating to see, it’s so primitive, and it had a very strong effect on me. Some of our crew even moved to Tennessee after the picture left. Isn’t that amazing? A Hollywood crew!”

Rydell says the feedback received from the area’s residents fueled everyone’s enthusiasm. “It’s inestimable how much I owe the people of Tennessee for their help in revealing themselves and surrendering to our company,” he says. “In the auction sequence, these people understood that it was the truth we were telling, that it wasn’t an exploitative film. Once they got that, they turned themselves inside out for us. The extras made a contribution which was immense—the feelings were powerful, genuine. That month-long rehearsal period which I insisted on—so that these people could have an effect on the film company as well as we having an effect on them—was invaluable. Mel Gibson [who stars with Sissy Spacek] learned to be as effective running a bulldozer as farmers who spent their lives on them. Sissy made that home into her own—she slept there, she didn’t allow the crew to come into the kitchen unless they wiped their feet, she made that bread and baked those pies. You can feel that.”

At the time of this interview in November, Rydell said he had neither seen nor read anything about the two competing “farm films,” Places in the Heart and Country, but stated his belief that “our film can stand on its own.” Generously, he adds, “We should be grateful that serious people are paying attention to a serious problem in this country. I don’t know what will happen to our film as a result of the other films, I hope they all help each other. Robert Benton, Richard Pearce, Jessica Lange, Sam Shepard, and Sally Field are all genuine artists, they strive to have real impact. I don’t see how that can hurt.”

One thing all three films share is star power, and Rydell speaks warmly of his two leads. “Sissy is a joy,” he beams. “We don’t have a better actress in this country. She is quite remarkable, open, available, with none of this star stuff that you get from people who are less confident. And, as a result of her marriage and becoming a mother, she has discovered the permission to be a sexual woman. She’s been masquerading as a boy all her life in tomboyish roles, but you really feel her womanliness here. Mae Garvey is a totally capable and equal partner, a woman who’s able to grow a crop, raise children, slug her husband when he’s becoming obstinate and ridiculous, or nurture him out of impotence with understanding. She’s a truly emancipated woman.”

As for Gibson, Rydell says, “Mel’s a very sexy guy—during dailies, you’d hear audible moans from women, because he’s so gorgeous. His face has animal strength and at the same time sensitivity—the combination is very unusual, like Steve McQueen and Montgomery Clift blended together.” 

Rydell was reluctant to cast Gibson because of his Australian accent (Gibson’s father emigrated from upstate New York to Australia when Mel was 11 so that his sons wouldn’t have to serve in Vietnam), but the Australian star actively pursued the role and worked diligently with dialogue coach Julie Adams. “As an ex-musician,” Rydell says, “I’m very sensitive to anything artificial in dialect and he damn well convinced me. I thought that kind of determination was worthy of attention, especially from so exciting an actor.”

Rydell is also an ex-actor and he has immense respect for the actor’s craft. “It’s such a brave profession,” he observes. “In order to do it properly, you really have to expose yourself. We learn as adults through culture and environment to insulate ourselves from injury, to wear some armor against life. The actor’s job when he starts to train is to peel away all that armor and get down to the raw flesh again and to respond like a wound to salt. People like Fonda, Hepburn, Sissy, or Marsha Mason, they’re willing to take those adventurous choices, to risk personal injury to get to the truth of a part. And they are injured—when they weep, they really suffer.”

That sensitivity to the actor’s needs has attracted some of the biggest film legends to Rydell projects, not only Fonda and Hepburn but John Wayne in The Cowboys and Steve McQueen in The Reivers. Rydell’s guidance also helped bring Oscar nominations to a young Marsha Mason in Cinderella Liberty and to Bette Midler in her film debut in The Rose.

Rydell’s breakthrough film, of course, was the 1981 runaway success On Golden Pond, which he says “gave me an international artistic passport. Much material comes to me now that wouldn’t have come to me before. There’s no question that success breeds opportunity. The trick is to use it properly.”

Looking back on his feature film career, which began with the 1968 D.H. Lawrence adaptation The Fox, Rydell says, “I haven’t made any pictures that don’t matter to me. I don’t know how these people who make exploitation films do it, how they can go to work every day. I always feel I’m in a different business than them.

“It takes me two years to make a film. What’s tormenting is the in-between time, when you have the opportunities to make films but you have to find the thing that matters sufficiently, that will be the fuel for two years of labor. You have to lead so many people to a common vision and keep them enthusiastic about it. You damn well better love that material.”

Pictured: Mark Rydell on location for The River. Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures. The River is available to stream on Prime Video.