A River Runs Through It is a 1992 American period drama film directed by Robert Redford, based on Norman Maclean's 1976 semi-autobiographical novella.

It stars Craig Sheffer and Brad Pitt as the Maclean brothers, Norman and Paul, alongside Tom Skerritt, Brenda Blethyn and Emily Lloyd.

Set in and around Missoula, Montana, the story follows two sons of a Presbyterian minister, one studious and the other rebellious, as they grow up and come of age in the Rocky Mountain region during a span of time from roughly World War I to the early days of the Great Depression, including part of the Prohibition era.

John Maclean, a Presbyterian minister, from whom they learn a love of fly fishing for trout in the Blackfoot River.

Six years later, during the Prohibition era and the Jazz Age, he returns and finds that Paul has become a skilled fisherman and a hard-drinking investigative journalist working for a newspaper in Helena.

Norman attends a Fourth of July dance and meets Jessie Burns, a flapper whose father runs the general store in Wolf Creek.

Paul arrives with his date, a similarly hard-drinking Cheyenne woman named Mabel, who is treated as an inferior by the white crowd.

The desk sergeant says that Paul has angered local criminals by falling behind in his debts from a big poker game at the Lolo speakeasy.

Norman shows Jessie a letter from the University of Chicago offering him a faculty position in the Department of English Literature.

In 1976, the same year the novella A River Runs Through It and Other Stories was published, Richard Sylbert optioned the film rights to it, with William Hjortsberg attached as writer.

[1] Robert Redford, who had read the novella in 1980, said he was "immediately captivated by it", appreciating Maclean's depiction of the American West and feeling a strong connection to the Scottish immigrant protagonists, being of Scottish-Irish heritage himself.

However, Maclean died in August 1990, before production even began on the film, leading to surviving family members including his daughter and son-in-law to discuss the script instead.

In October 1987, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner reported that Redford's Northfork Productions would produce the adaptation; John Sacret Young was initially attached as screenwriter, but neither was he mentioned in further updates, nor is he credited onscreen.

[1] Screenwriter Richard Friedenberg was initially skeptical about adapting the novella and turned it down, fearing he would write a "fishing movie".

Wanting to preserve Maclean's language from the original, Redford made the decision to add narration using lines from the novella verbatim.

Michael Nathanson, worldwide production president at Columbia Pictures, kept close contact with Redford for one and a half years before the studio was shown a rough cut of the film.

[10] It was reissued on Blu-ray in July 2009 by Sony Pictures with six extra features including 17 deleted scenes and a documentary titled Deep Currents: Making 'A River Runs Through It' with interview segments of the cast and crew.

The site's critics consensus reads: "Tasteful to a fault, this period drama combines a talented cast (including a young Brad Pitt) with some stately, beautifully filmed work from director Robert Redford.

He wrote: Redford and his writer, Richard Friedenberg, understand that most of the events in any life are accidential or arbitrary, especially the crucial ones, and we can exercise little conscious control over our destinies.

"[19] The following quote from the film, which is not present in the novella, is displayed at the base of the statue of Michael Jordan at Chicago's United Center: