ALTHOUGH there is tango music in the air and Latin American art on the walls, Robert Duvall’s current home in West Hollywood is not his home at all. The 73-year-old film legend is renting it for three months while he makes a Will Farrell football comedy. I might otherwise have found him in his farmhouse in Virginia or in Argentina, this tango fan’s adopted country.
Since Open Range, the movie I am here to discuss, hymns the last days of the Wild West’s itinerant free grazers, and since Duvall is one of Hollywood’s more inscrutable loners, meeting in temporary accommodation seems appropriate enough.
I am welcomed by his Argentine girlfriend, Luciana Pedraza, a dancer whom Duvall last year cast to some effect in a movie called Assassination Tango and is now beginning a career in documentary film-making. She is beautiful in a no-frills way, dark hair drawn back from a face that has the complexion of olive oil. They share a birthday: January 5. It is just that he has celebrated it 42 more times than she has. They have been together for eight years. She is 31.
Bobby and she get on well, she explains as we wait for him to emerge and she makes coffee. He has his moods and he’s competitive (always interested in who is best at anything), but that’s OK. They do not worry about the age gap. When he appears I nevertheless perform a double take. Dressed in a leisurely ensemble of beige slacks and beige sweater, he looks almost old enough to be my grandfather, never mind hers. Yet he holds his own with Kevin Costner in the tense shoot-out scenes at the climax of Open Range and, with the aid of a toupee and a moustache, convincingly seduced Pedraza in Assassination Tango.
I wonder if he minds playing progressively older roles. “No, I don’t mind. I get more parts now than ever. I mean, I always knew after The Godfather I would do OK. I don’t know if I planned it, but I figure it’s a delayed thing, like ten years from now I’ll be doing even more. De Niro, Pacino, Jimmy Caan, they were getting all those big parts early on. I wasn’t so much. Maybe I even hung back. I don ’t know. I’ve always been a late bloomer and I’ll keep blooming, hopefully, till the end.”
We have removed ourselves to an airy room overlooking a shallow swimming pool which ricochets occasional shafts of Californian sun. Duvall gnaws at a wedge of gum as we talk, the conversation displaying a tendency to drift towards things that interest him rather than me, namely sport, foreign movies, where you’ll find the best steak houses and tango. He is comparatively unfussed by his own talent, yet without his supporting performances in To Kill a Mockingbird (his film debut playing the mute Boo Radley), in M*A*S*H, The Godfather, and Apocalypse Now, American film history would simply not have been as rich. Without Colors and The Apostle, which he directed, its IQ would have fallen even further than films such as Deep Impact and Gone in Sixty Seconds have encouraged it to go (he was in those, too). And he is a man of multiple gifts: he not only won an Oscar as the washed-up but redeemable country singer in Tender Mercies in 1983, but wrote the songs for it. I ask if Open Range’s theme of rootless men spoke to him, given that his childhood was spent moving from naval base to naval base with his father, that he has been married three times without siring children and that acting is a nomadic profession. He agrees at once.
“People talk about knowing guys from the third grade. I don’t have that. Because of the way we did move around I don’t know people from the past that much. And a movie set, for instance, is tremendously fickle. You make close friends for eight to ten weeks, then you never see each other.
“England is probably different because London is close to everywhere, but here there’s 3,000 miles between movies. Gene Hackman lives in New Mexico. I live in Virginia — which is a lot like the English countryside, beautiful — and Dustin Hoffman has 68 homes all over the world.” In the Sixties they all lived within a couple of streets of one another in New York. “My brother, me, Dustin and about three or four other guys. There was a Jewish cantor lived in an apartment near by and Hackman lived downstairs.”
The open range of parts he has taken has also militated against the illusion that we, the public, know him. Celebrating this variety, The New York Times in 1980 called him “the American Olivier”, an epithet that has stuck. The qualifying view came from David Thompson, who wrote in his Biographical Dictionary of Film that Duvall was neither beautiful nor forceful enough to carry a big film. Had he won the Oscar he was nominated for in The Apostle, his study of original sin beating in the breast of an evangelical preacher, the argument would surely have been settled in the Times’s favour.
I am surprised that his performance as Boss Spearman in Open Range was overlooked this year. Instead, the film won kudos for Costner’s supposedly daring casting of the 45-year-old Annette Bening as his own love interest. He boasted: “I like the lines on her face.” I tell Duvall the choice was inspired. He asks why. Because, I say, 49-year-old Hollywood leads like their female co-stars to be 20 years younger.
“But that’s what he wanted,” he protests. “He was thinking of Faith Hill, the singer, and then finally David Valdes, the producer, said, ‘No, let’s get somebody with a little depth.’ Not that she’s that old.” I don’t think he is causing trouble. He is just unimpressed by politically correct casting. Faith Hill, tall, blonde and 36, would have been fine by him. He’s no Hollywood liberal.
“No, no, God, no. Mink-coat liberal I call it. No, I’m not. I try to do my own thing. I’ve voted both ways in my life. I am not totally conservative because conservatives would not like my stance on things like woman’s choice. I’m still up in the air on affirmative action, although Nixon introduced that. But this town, where is affirmative action practised? You show me black, Hispanic heads of studios, head of agencies. Not many. This is a club town, real double-standard stuff.”
Of course, he has personal reasons to quarrel with age-appropriate casting. His second and third wives were 20 years his junior and he met Luciana, the daughter of a trucking firm owner, when she was 24. He was buying pastries at a bakery store in Buenos Aires when she approached him on the street and started “chit-chatting”. Did she recognise him from the movies? “No, but somebody she was driving with did so she invited me to a little open tango tea store. That was two days before I finished there. I came back a month later to see her.” So he fell in love almost immediately? “Yeah. I figure, after two or three failed marriages, why not somebody on the street?”
