EXCLUSIVE: To most of us movie watchers, Robert Duvall was that consummate actor whose range was displayed in his work as the steely lawyer Tom Hagen in The Godfather, the abusive fighter pilot father Bull Meecham in The Great Santini, the napalm-loving commander in Apocalypse Now, the cowboy with a heart Gus McCrae from Lonesome Dove, and the businessman who turned down Godfather III because Al Pacino was getting paid five times what he’d been offered.
To Landman star Billy Bob Thornton, Duvall was a surrogate father who gave the actor and filmmaker a grudging kind of love and approval that he never got from his real dad. The one whose own dreams failed and who took it out on his sensitive son. There are others who filled that father/mentor role for Thornton – Bruce Dern and Sam Elliott are others – but there was no one quite like Duvall to him. The passing of Duvall at 95 leaves perhaps the biggest hole since his best pal John Ritter died suddenly in 2003 after they became close working together in Thornton’s Oscar winner Sling Blade and Bad Santa.
We thought the best way to honor one of the great actors of his generation would be for Thornton to share with Deadline readers stories of their times together. I get him going with mention of my only meeting with Duvall. It came in Toronto during TIFF when Ivan Reitman introduced us. After asking if I was a journalist and getting a yes, Duvall said, “you look like a pulling guard to me.” I could have died and gone to football heaven, right there.
“He had such a wit about him, right up to the end,” Thornton said. “My band was on tour last year, and we opened for The Who in Miami and then had a date in Newark. We had a couple days drive and he had always asked me to come to his farm in Virginia. Me and the guys went to this unbelievable place. Bobby was always hilarious in his very dry and sometimes cutting way. His wife Luciana took a video of me standing there by Bobby. He’s in a chair and she says, ‘Bobby, aren’t you happy that Billy came by to see you?’ Bobby goes, ‘why would I be happy about that?’ And this is my mentor, here.”
His influence on Thornton goes back to Duvall’s haunting screen debut in To Kill A Mockingbird.
“I’d seen him in episodes of Twilight Zone, Gunsmoke, stuff like that, where you’d look back and go, I’ll be damned, that’s Bobby, or Burt Reynolds, or whoever. But the first thing that I was struck by was Boo Radley. And it’s not a coincidence, and I didn’t think of it consciously, but there’s definitely a little bit of Boo Radley in Carl on Sling Blade,” Thornton said. “That really struck me, that a guy could do a performance like that and not say anything. This was before I ever even thought about acting. As the years went on, I would see him in everything. I liked that Bobby was the kind of guy who, if he did something that he didn’t like or he didn’t like the director, or he didn’t like the actors he was working with, he would tell you. He didn’t hold back. He didn’t have much of a filter. I used to tell my friends who knew him, not as well as I did, but when they were about to work with him, they’d say, you got any tips about working with Mr. Duvall? I said, yeah, here’s one. Don’t ever tell him any of your personal business. Because there is a good chance he’ll tell David Letterman about it on national television. So, if there’s an actor you don’t like, don’t tell Bobby, because he will tell everybody on the talk shows he does. I learned that the hard way. I don’t recall who it was, but there was some actor and I said he was overrated. I was like, oh, damn it.”
Thornton said he and Duvall got close in the ‘80s. They shared the same WMA agent, who thought they had a lot in common, even though their upbringings could not be more different. Thornton was from Arkansas, who suffered from anxiety, OCD, dyslexia and other maladies that sent him into sports and the arts because he saw no alternative, with zero encouragement from his father. Duvall was born in San Diego, but moved around because his father was a Navy Admiral. Like Thornton, Duvall fell into acting because it was the only thing he did well. Only here, it was Duvall’s dad who encouraged him to focus on that passion.
“I loved his story about his dad being an admiral,” Thornton said. “He was born in San Diego, but he seemed like such a Texan, and turns out his family were from Texas and Virginia and all this stuff. And then when I first started working on Sling Blade before that, Bobby had asked me, he said, ‘I want you and Tom Epperson to write me a movie. He had seen One False Move, which Tom and I wrote. I said, cool, do you have an idea of what you want it to be? And he goes, ‘I want to play a Black man.’ And I said, well, Bobby, that’s kind of a tall order. And he said, ‘yeah, but you guys will figure it out.’”
Last thing Thornton wanted was to let down a man who had already become a mentor.
“So we wrote this movie called A Family Thing, with James Earl Jones and Bobby and Michael Beach and all those people,” Thornton said. “It was about a guy who finds out years later that his mother is actually Black. And so he was part Black. And James Earl Jones was his half-brother. We pulled it off, and a lot of people love that movie. Bobby loved it. So we were shooting Sling Blade at the same time they shot A Family Thing. We were down in Benton, Arkansas, and they shot in Chicago and Memphis. I thought, well, I want Bobby to play my dad in Sling Blade. It’s just one scene. Maybe I can get him down here. And so there’s Bobby, pulling up in a stretch limo from Memphis. Now, I’d done a documentary but this was my first feature as director, and my crew was a bunch of kids. I’d written this, was the star, and we had no money. Bobby said, yeah I’ll come and up pulls this limo in the front yard of the old house where we shot. I told the crew, listen, you never know with Bobby. He doesn’t want you to be screwing around while he’s trying to do a scene. So everybody, be quiet, be respectful. Don’t make any damn noise. Don’t crank up a van, don’t drop something. Just give me a half an hour to get this scene done. And then you can act like idiots again.
“Now, we had no transportation department. We made the film for $980,000. We had no dressing rooms, no trailers, no anything. We changed clothes on the set. And so Bobby changed into that union suit he’s in, he changed into it right there on the set right by the chair where we did the scene. I had a sandbag there where I’m supposed to walk in, because I wanted to not have to worry about looking down for my mark. We’re shooting Bobby’s coverage, and we only did two takes of it. And I walk in there as Carl and Bobby’s right in the middle looking for his dog, which he came up with in the moment. I told him, just mutter some stuff that didn’t make any sense. And as we’re right in the middle of it, all of a sudden, a damn car starts up right in the front. He used to tell me, at some point in every movie, you got to let them know who’s the boss, and the way to do that is to blow up every now and then.”
Thornton took his mentor’s advice to heart, right at that moment.
“I kicked the sandbag, nearly broke my ankle and started yelling at everybody,” he said. “I’m not a yeller, but I yell at the crew, because I was so nerved up about Bobby being there. And so anyway, it turns out it was his driver that started the car up in the front yard, to move his car. So I apologize to the crew for chewing their asses out. But he did that in a couple of takes. And then after that he said, well, look, I did you a favor. Now you got to do me one. And then I went down and did those two scenes in his movie The Apostle. He’d fallen in love with Rick Dial, who was my old friend from elementary school and who played the heavyset guy that owns the Fixit shop in Sling Blade.”
Duvall must have really liked Thornton’s pal, because he eclipsed the veteran actor on Duvall’s call sheet.
“I always had a clue that Rick could do this, and so I go down to repay the favor in The Apostle, and there’s Rick, in seven scenes, and I had two. I said, Bobby, what the hell? I said, I give you my damn actor, never been in a movie before, and you give him seven scenes, and I got two? He goes, he’s a natural. I said, I’m not a natural? He goes, yeah, but he he needs this. This is going to be good. And besides that, I don’t want you playing the deejay. I want him playing the role.”
They worked together numerous times over the years, including The Stars Fell on Henrietta, about oil guys in Texas in the 1930s.
“Bobby just loved Abilene, Texas, because he was obsessed with meat, barbecue and steaks and everything like that,” Thornton said. “His obsessions were tango, and meat, and acting. Bobby and I would every day go and watch the Rattlesnake Wrangler collect snakes that were everywhere, and Duvall loved to watch the creatures get caught and slither into a large canvas bag.
It’s important to note that being told how to execute the craft of acting was not on that list. It was best to just let him cook.
“This was back when the oil wells were made from wood and stuff, and the first scene we did, Aidan Quinn we got coveralls on and we’re all oily and stuff. We’re supposed to walk to this little shed where Bobby had this cat in the movie, and it was dying. He’s sitting there talking to his cat, just patting his cat talking to it. And Aidan and I were supposed to walk in, and say, come on, it’s time to just let the cat go. We’re supposed to go and pick him up off his knees and take him out of the shed. Aidan and I are watching him, for quite awhile, just talking and talking to this cat. James Keach the director, he cut and he comes over to me and he goes, guys, when are you going in there? You missed your cue. I said, oh, sorry, sorry about that. And we walked outside and Aidan said to me, did the same thing happen to you that happened to me? I said, yeah. We were so mesmerized by his performance with this cat that we started listening and got lost in it, and forgot we were in the damn movie and forgot lines and didn’t even go over there. I thought, okay, if a guy can take you so deep into a scene that you just think you’re watching and listening to him, that’s my guy right there. This movie would’ve been the first thing I ever did with him; it came out later, but it shot before A Family Thing, and Sling Blade. And I’ll never forget that. Actors, I studied Duvall and Gene Hackman and Fredric March, and Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy. Those were the guys and Montgomery Clift. Those were the guys that influenced me right there.”
Not that Duvall was ever going to dispense lessons on acting.
“The funny thing about him is he didn’t really like to talk about acting,” Thornton said. “He didn’t like to talk about the process of it. And I never have either. I think I got a lot of that from him. He would tell you stories, about what happened on the set, like how Brando had him put the words on his chest so he could read his lines. Bobby would tell you stuff like that, or he’d tell you about some girl who was around that screwed everybody on the set or something. He loved gossip. He loved to gossip. So he would never talk about acting with me. He would call me Mighty Billy Bob, and the Hillbilly Orson Welles. So he would give me a compliment that way. He would talk about his experience on a movie or, I didn’t like this director, but this actor is really good and things like that. He would always pump me for information about stuff. He goes, ‘Hey, when you did that movie with so-and-so, did you fu*ck that girl? Which one? Not the main one, but that other one you were with all the time? He always wanted to know. He would tell me stories about when he and Jimmy Cann were together in New York and all the hijinks that they did. But there were some things he didn’t like.
“A perfect example is when we were doing that movie The Stars Fell on Henrietta. Brian Dennehy played the heavy in it. We’d been working for two or three weeks before Dennehy he shows up in this white suit. It was this wardrobe he was supposed to be in because I think he had something without us that day. But we’d been over there in a scene where they had an explosion and all these pipes hit me and Duvall and we’re laying on our backs and the oil’s pouring down on us. We’re supposed to act like we’re knocked out. It was a big scene. And Bobby wasn’t happy that day because Jimmy Keach kept saying, you guys are blinking your eyes! You’re supposed to be knocked out. It wasn’t oil pouring on us, it was colored water coming from this rain tower. Even though it was hot outside, the water was cold. And Bobby said, well, how the hell do you think we’re supposed to stay still? This shit’s running in our eyes, as cold as hell. He was mad already that day. So anyway, Dennehy went straight to number one on the call sheet. I was sitting there in my little director’s chair right next to Bobby, and then he came and took the other seat. I think Brian was probably a little insecure working with Duvall, trying to make an impression on him.
“He started talking about the Irish Theater, and he said, yeah, I just got back from Dublin and I did this, and then the Chicago Irish Theater and this and that and the other. And he just kept talking about these Irish plays he’d been doing. Well, Bobby didn’t say a word. He was sitting there because Bobby doesn’t like to talk during the day, except at lunch because he loved lunch. We just sat there. Bobby didn’t say a damn word to him as he went on probably 20 or 30 minutes about the Irish Theater. Bobby just nodded his head every now and then. Finally, Brian finally took a breath and quieted a moment. And Bobby said, ‘I don’t like plays. I never did.’
All the time Thornton spent directing Duvall, he couldn’t remember a single disagreement with the man. They had a certain formula together that worked magic.
“Never had a disagreement,” Thornton said. “See, I was always Bobby’s boy, so he and I always got along. We’re shooting Sling Blade, and he’s playing [Carl’s father] and came up with all that stuff about looking for his dog when I was trying to tell him he shouldn’t have done what he did to me. And he came up with all that stuff. And then when I did his film The Apostle, when I repent in front of the bulldozer that I’m going to bulldoze the church with down in Louisiana there, I asked Bobby, these lines right here…that’s all you want me to do, and then I go get back on the bulldozer? Well, he had all these women, these African American women who were church women who were choir and were all religious women there around us and a few guys. And he said, let’s just see what happens. That whole scene is improvised. There were a few lines out of the script that were there, but he said, just do what you feel.
“That’s where Bobby and I really hit it off, the fact that you do what you feel in the moment, and I’ll never forget that. And then he and I have a fight out in the yard at night. There might’ve been a stunt coordinator there. But he said, well, don’t worry about that. He goes, let’s just see what happens. We’re about to roll around on the ground. We’re just going to see what happens. But that’s the way we did it. And so I would say the thing that I learned from Bobby the most was, and this has been true throughout my career, if it says cry in the script, I’m not going to cry if I don’t feel it. And I have cried in scenes before, and broken down in scenes where it didn’t say to. Those are the moments where people like yourself, journalists or critics or whoever, they respond to those scenes and that they feel real, like it actually happened. I had one in Landman season two, where I had a scene where I had to keep from crying. It’s me and my son in a truck, and I didn’t want to give up that Tommy Norris is not going to cry, but boy, you can damn sure see that I was fighting it back.”
The scene came when Norris’ son Cooper [Jacob Lofland] told his gruff dad he loved him. Fighting back tears were more effective than turning on the water works. That is Duvall’s enduring gift to Thornton, he believes.
“The other thing about Bobby, which I have in common with him, is that he didn’t really become well known until he was older,” Thornton said. “He and I both were probably in our thirties before we became a household name or something. We’d talk about that and how fortunate we felt that it happened that way, as opposed to getting success when you’re 20. We’d had that life experience of the struggle and figuring out who the hell you are before anybody ever knows who you are. And I think that’s a good thing to have in your pocket. Charlie Durning was another guy like that, who came to success way later in his life. I think that’s a good thing.”
The other thing was, if you are directing Duvall, it was always best to remember that notes are things that come out of a trumpet, not suggestions that can be misconstrued as telling him how to act.
“I did this movie with Robert Downey Jr and Duvall called The Judge,” Thornton recalled. “We shot it over in Boston, on a big stage. Bobby had a tent there where he and Luciana would hang out near the stage instead of walking all the way back to the trailer. This was a big production. We’re in the courtroom and there’s all these extras in the gallery where people watch the trial. Bobby’s in there, I’m in there, Downey’s in there, Vince D’Onofrio, Dax Shepherd, Jeremy Strong. So the background actors are in front of a bunch of people who have been doing this a while. There’s a scene where Bobby’s supposed to have a heart attack and collapse. David Dobkin was the director, and I need to preface this by saying I love the guy, I’ve worked with him before and he’s a very good director.
“But see, I knew Bobby very well. The rest of them didn’t know him so well. So I was always on pins and needles, like please don’t fu*k with this guy. We get to the scene. Well, Bobby started almost like he was having a seizure, and he bangs his hands on the table and is frothing at the mouth and all this kind of stuff. Well, Dobkin calls cut. And I thought, oh shit, here we go. And so he comes over and he goes, Bobby…now, first of all, I don’t know how fond Duvall was of people calling him Bobby who didn’t know him well. And so he comes over, he goes, Bobby, listen. You’re supposed to be having a heart attack. I think you just pass out. You just fall to the ground. Duvall goes, ‘so you’re telling me how to do my job?’ He said, I want you to just…I don’t even know if I should be saying this….aw hell, Duvall gets up and he starts stalking around the room. Well, the background actors look like deer in the headlights as Bobby let loose. He goes to David, “You Billy Wilder motherfu*ker, and all this kind of stuff as he starts stalking around the room and just chews Dobkin’s ass out. And like I said, David’s the nicest guy, and I was like, oh God, I knew this was coming. So Bobby walks off the set and he went down to his tent there with Luciana, and the producers were all in a circle, just shitting themselves. I walked by the producers and they said, can you help us out here? Is he going to come back? And I said, guys, don’t worry about it. It’s going to be fine. I said, I’ve seen this before. That was about a three and a half, or a four. I said, I’ve seen an 11. He’s going to be fine. He’ll talk to Luciana, she’ll calm him down. They’ll start talking about where they’re going to eat tonight. He’ll come back and act like nothing ever happened. We waited about 20 minutes and sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.”
Thornton said that such disagreements didn’t harm Duvall’s performance, and maybe sometimes the extra edge made them better. That included Tender Mercies, the one time that Duvall won the Oscar for Best Actor, playing the washed up country singer seeking redemption.
“The Billy Wilder thing came from his not loving those kind of movies like Some Like It Hot,” Thornton said. “Bobby was very particular about the directors he liked. He famously didn’t get along with Bruce Beresford on Tender Mercies, but when you look at that movie, you could never tell. It affected me greatly. It was life changing for me. And there was a movie I directed that I wrote with Tom Epperson, where Bobby plays my dad, called Jayne Mansfield’s Car.”
The film is a Southern gothic dysfunctional family drama in which Duvall played a father who was spurned by a wife who remarried and moved to England. She dies asking to be buried back home, and her UK family comes to bury her, clashing with her first family. Duvall’s character never came to grips with her exit, and he inflicts on his sons an obsession with racing to and studying fatal car crashes.
“It’s a movie worth watching, because you’re going to see not only the story of how my dad was to me, but the weird fascination that my dad had with car accidents and the aftermath of them,” Thornton explained. “He used to take my little brother and me out to see the aftermath of car wrecks. So Bobby is playing the father of me and Kevin Bacon and Robert Patrick, and John Hurt, Francis O’Connor, all these wonderful actors are in it. There’s a couple of scenes in that movie that show his influence on me, and the ease, and the pain that we had when we worked together, more than probably anything I ever did with him.”
Pain?
“The pain of him having to be in the position of being the father, and knowing the pain of me growing up with a father who’s like the one he played in the movie. My father was a combination of Bobby’s character in that movie and Dwight Yoakam in Sling Blade, and there seems to be a father thing running throughout my career. But see, these other guys were my fathers, and that has continued to this day with Sam Elliott, Duvall, Bruce Dern, and Hackman, who I never worked with, but knew. When you’re growing up and especially when you’re an athlete like I was, you want acceptance from older men, but at the same time, you’re terrified of them. So I never got over being terrified with these older guys that I was around. I’m so nervous around them and yet want their acceptance so much. And it shows in this movie. It also talks about the effects of war on the psyche of a person and how it affects the family. This was a movie that nobody saw. If you’re not from the South, you probably wouldn’t understand, although the father son theme does run throughout life with anybody in the world. Even though that wasn’t the big movie I did with him or anything like that, that’s the one that probably shows the way we work together better than anything else.”
I wondered if Thornton ever expressed just how much Duvall meant to him.
“Well, he was my mentor, and not only was my mentor continues to be, I loved the guy,” Thornton said. “Bobby was like dads of the era probably when you were growing up and I was growing up. They weren’t really emotional, or forthcoming with their feelings.
“I loved Bobby so much that years and years ago, I wrote a letter to him, telling him how much he meant to me and how he had changed my life. He never mentioned he got it, never told me he’d gotten it. And in the movie Jayne Mansfield’s Car, I used that. There’s a scene in there where I talk to him about, once I wrote you this letter, and you never even looked at it. When we did the scene, he still didn’t say anything about it. Like, Hey, is this about that letter you wrote me that time? Nothing.”
But deep down, both men knew the letter got read, and that the sentiment had landed.
“Oh, for sure. Oh, there’s no doubt it did. I love the guy, and he is responsible for a lot of the reasons my kids have shoes on their feet and, and that we can live a lifestyle where I can take care of my family. And that’s no joke. But I just have to tell you one more thing that’s funny.
“So his wife Luciana, who’s a sweetheart, we call her the saint…well, I’ve told you about my eating habits, bad stomach, and I’m allergic to everything. I used to eat meat with Bobby, and he turned me on to a place called the Perini Ranch when we’re doing The Stars Fell on Henrietta, outside of Abilene, Texas. And he knew Tom, the owner. It was the best food I ever had in my life. It was magical. But at the time, I’d gained weight then for all these roles that I did in a row, Tombstone and other stuff, and I’ll never do that again. I grew up skinny. I can’t do that. But I was miserable all the time.
“So Bobby takes us to the Perini ranch, and Clint Eastwood who produced that movie, came with us. We ate this magical food, and I had a filet of steak and all that stuff. And at that time, I was wild about barbecue and steak and all these things. So Bobby always kept that thought in his head about how much he and I loved steaks and barbecue. And then I finally went to this holistic doctor who said, dude, you can’t eat meat. You got type AB Negative blood. You don’t have any digestive enzymes, you better stop this. And so I did.
“For probably about 26, 28 years, I had to pretend I liked meat around Bobby. Because it would’ve devastated him if he’d known I hadn’t eaten a steak since 1995. Luciana and I would give each other sideways glances, or she’d be behind him and looking at me because Bobby would take us out to a restaurant. He loved to eat a steak, just seared on each side like you’re eating seared tuna. So, basically raw meat. He liked to order for the table and get a giant steak for everybody to have some of, and I had to pretend I was eating it. For well over 25 years. I didn’t want to disappoint him.
“I would have to find ways to do that. If his dog Gus was around, I’d feed it to the dog under the table. But every time he would say, Billy Bob, you got to try this barbecue. It’s the best barbecue. He had a different best barbecue place every week, that was the best in the country. One time it’s in Austin, Texas, then the next week, he’d say, the best barbecue in the world in a little place in Hattiesburg, Mississippi called whatever. New ones, all the time. So anyway, I did argue with him over in Memphis and Texas. One time I told him I liked Memphis Barbecue better than Texas, and he hit the roof. But anyway, one way or the other, Luciana would be sitting at the table and Bobby would say, I want you to try this steak. And we were in Boston at a restaurant, and I’d ordered quinoa salad, and Bobby, he said, what the hell does that you got there? I’d say that’s just my salad. I’m waiting for my steak. Of course, I hadn’t ordered a steak.
“And Luciana could barely contain herself. She’s laughing behind him. And then he would tell Luciana how much I love the same steak he does and all this kind of stuff. So essentially, I was an imposter about meat for 25, 30 years, but Bobby never told him until the day he died. And I never told him that I didn’t eat meat anymore.”