E2 Interview
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SUNDAY, AUGUST 8, 2010
PATTERSON CLARK/THE WASHINGTON POST
“Crazy Heart,” which won two Os- cars this year and whose writer- director, Scott Cooper, credits Du- vall as a mentor. Even though Duvall has en- joyed a long and respected career in Hollywood (by way of the High- lands, where he lives), he’s more likely to rhapsodize over Iranian films as anything he’s recently seen at the multiplex. “Have you seen the movie by
Robert Duvall: A lifetime of commanding characters
Nearing 80, the actor still searches for roles to challenge him
by Ann Hornaday Everything Robert Duvall says,
whether it’s about meeting his wife or doing a play or making a crab cake, tends to turn into a yarn worthy of a Robert Duvall movie. Ask him about “Get Low,” the
quiet Depression-era drama opening locally Aug. 13, in which he plays an eccentric recluse who stages his own funeral, and he’ll wind up talking about the mule in the movie, a championship ani- mal that hails from Front Royal and can “pray, go to the mailbox and play the piano” (and also rear, the only stunt required of her this time out). Ask him about working with Sissy Spacek, who plays some-
thing of a love interest in the film, and he explains the proper pro- nunciation of her name (“Spa- check. It’s a Texas-Czech thing”), notes that they live not far from each other on farms in Virginia, then ends with a disquisition on the joys of properly cooked meat. “One thing I like about Argenti-
na, they only cook with salt; that’s it.”
And that leads to a story about how he met his wife, Luciana Pe- draza, on the street in Buenos Aires while filming the TV movie “The Man Who Captured Eich- mann” in 1995. “Eichmann got ex- ecuted in Israel and I got her,” Du- vall quips mischievously. “She’s much younger than I am,” he adds. (Duvall will turn 80 in Janu- ary; Luciana is 38.) “But we have the same birth-
day, January 5th. When I met her father he said, ‘I don’t know whether to call you Father or Son!’ ” Duvall — in a natty jacket and blue oxford shirt that makes those familiar eyes even more
piercing — speaks in a self-in- terrupting, Southern-inflected shorthand that recalls his folksi- est characters. After perusing the menu at
Fahrenheit, the Ritz-Carlton res- taurant in Georgetown, he orders a Caesar salad and tap water. It’s a sweltering day and Duvall has spent the better part of it doing press for “Get Low.” The movie, directed by first- timer Aaron Schneider, takes its inspiration from the real-life story of Felix “Bush” Breazeale, who lived in Tennessee in the 1930s. Duvall plays Felix Bush, an old-timer who, bedeviled by ru- mors that have swirled about him for years, asks the local funeral di- rectors (played by Bill Murray and Lucas Black) to stage a serv- ice so he can hear the stories told about him firsthand. Duvall, who dons an Old Testa- ment-worthy beard through the first part of the film, delivers a performance that is being praised as Oscar-worthy. And in many ways Felix eerily echoes Duvall’s big-screen debut as Boo Radley in “To Kill a Mockingbird” nearly 50 years ago. Duvall became close friends with “Mockingbird” screenwriter Horton Foote, and they went on to work together on several films, including “Tender Mercies,” for which they both won Oscars.
When Duvall got the “Get Low” script, by Chris Provenzano and
When he meets young filmmakers, Duvall says, he gives them some advice: “ ‘Look, Hollywood’s a mecca, but it’s not the final answer.’ ”
C. Gaby Mitchell, he told Foote about it. “I kept saying, ‘It’s a lot like your films, with a little more edge,’ ” Duvall recalls. In March 2009, while he was filming “Get Low’s” climactic scene, word came that Foote had died. “It was like full circle for me, it was so spooky,” the actor says. “But I think he would have liked ‘Get Low’ a lot.”
Working with first-time direc- tors has been lucky for Duvall: He produced and had a small role in
the 17-year-old Iranian girl called ‘The Apple’?” he enthuses at one point. “Beautiful film. Just beauti- ful.” Some of his more recent fa- vorites include “The Secret in Their Eyes,” “The Maid,” “Gomor- rah” and “The Hurt Locker,” which he calls “my movie of the decade.” Just the other night, he says, he and his wife went to see the ac- tion comedy “Knight and Day,” starring Tom Cruise. “It’s okay but they were shooting everybody,” he says with a pained look. “Kill, shoot, kill. I guess that’s what peo- ple like but, I mean, Jesus. I’ve al- ways liked his acting — he’s a good guy, too. Good guy to work with. Nice man, decent guy. I don’t know. . . . There’s just so much killing. Killing, killing, kill- ing and more killing.” When he meets young film-
makers, Duvall says, he gives them some advice: “ ‘Look, Holly- wood’s a mecca, but it’s not the fi- nal answer. You pick up a camera anyplace in the world, you can make a movie. . . . My theory is, it’s from ink to behavior. I don’t care if you have just a video cam- era as long as you have the behav- ior.’ ”
And it’s exactly Duvall’s com- mand of behavior that has made him one of the most consistently great movie actors, whether as the Irish consigliere to an Italian Mafia don in “The Godfather” movies or a bellicose colonel in “Apocalypse Now,” a pathological- ly cruel father in “The Great San- tini” or a broken-down country singer in “Tender Mercies,” a fiery Pentecostal preacher in “The Apostle” or Gen. Robert E. Lee in “Gods and Generals.”
After all those movies, all those indelible roles, can he choose a fa- vorite?
“I would guess ‘Lonesome
Dove,’ ” he says, referring to the 1989 TV miniseries in which he played the expansive former Texas Ranger Gus McCrae. “I’ve been in movies that were A-to-Z better directed than ‘Lonesome Dove,’ but it was the overall arc of
the story that meant so much. It’s like a Bible in Texas. “And ‘The Godfather’ is pretty seamless,” he says in the day’s big- gest understatement. “A third of the way through [filming] ‘The Godfather,’ I said, ‘I think we’re in something that’s going to work here.’ ”
But Duvall is less interested in looking back than in what’s com- ing up, and he excitedly shares some prospects: Terry Gilliam has asked him to play Don Quixote opposite Ewan McGregor in “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” the director’s latest attempt to bring the Cervantes classic to the screen. Billy Bob Thornton has sent him a script for “Jayne Mans- field’s Car” — a period piece about a dysfunctional family — that Du- vall compares to Tennessee Wil- liams. And Scott Cooper, fresh off the success of “Crazy Heart,” re- cently met with Brad Pitt to direct a script about the legendary Hat- field-and-McCoy feud that any- one would agree Duvall was born to star in. “It’s a great script . . . and I mean great,” he says. “Like American Shakespeare.” All are promising projects and all will live or die by financing, availabilities and the whims of the filmmaking fates. It’s a world of contingencies Duvall knows well. He almost didn’t do “Get Low” because he was committed to another project, he says, “but then I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to do this now.’ ” In a similar spirit of forward movement, he’s head- ed to Texas to film “Seven Days in Utopia,” based on the book “Golf’s Sacred Journey,” with his “Get Low” (and “Sling Blade”) co-star Lucas Black. “It’s kind of a faith-based film,”
he says, adding that his golf pro character was at first so impec- cably Christian that he offered some notes on the script. “I said, ‘Give me a few demons. He’s too white bread. . . . There’s only one Jesus, and he drove the money changers out of the temple, so you’ve got to make [my character] a little human.’ ” Rewrites or not, Duvall is likely to get that job done all by himself.
hornadaya@washpost.com
ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM Watch the development of a
time-lapse sketch of Robert Duvall by staff artist Patterson Clark, created with the Brushes app on the iPad, at
washingtonpost.com/style. And read Duvall’s thoughts on some of the memorable films of his career with our photo gallery.
Disney and CAMERON
MACKINTOSH present
FASHION At a Paris shop, a little sweat equity goes a long way by Jenny Barchfield
paris — In the realm of haute couture, where seamstresses con- coct handmade gowns that cost as much as a car, one atelier has caused a sensation by purveying a different kind of made-to-meas- ure.
Call it do-it-yourself chic. The atelier, called the Sweat Shop, is a kind of Internet cafe
FINAL 2 WEEKS! MUST END AUGUST 22! OPERA HOUSE
ONLINE:
kennedy-center.org CHARGE BY PHONE: (202) 467-4600
VISIT: Kennedy Center Box Office TTY: (202) 416-8524
Theater at the Kennedy Center is presented with the generous support of Stephen and Christine Schwarzman. Mary Poppins is made possible through the generosity of The Adrienne Arsht Musical Theater Fund.
where Singer sewing machines re- place computers, and would-be fashion designers and creatively inclined clotheshorses pay by the hour to stitch their own garments. The brainchild of a Swiss make-
up artist and an Austrian clothing designer, Sweat Shop opened in March, as France was still reeling from the global economic crisis and unemployment in the country stood at more than 10 percent. “It seems like a strange thing to
say, but the crisis turned out to be the perfect timing for us,” said Martena Duss, the atelier’s Swiss- born co-founder. “After years of having this attitude that was all about consumption, people are now about recycling and saving and being creative.” It costs $7.90 per hour to use one of the Singers, but some prior sewing experience is required. For novices, Duss and her co-owner, Sissi Holleis, offer sewing classes five evenings a week. Because home economics classes have long been absent from the French pub-
lic school curriculum, the lessons are Sweat Shop’s most popular of- ferings, Duss said. Beginners all start with the same simple projects — a pillow or abag — but after that, clients come with their own fabric and ideas. “The most frustrating thing for people is that they just don’t real- ize how time-consuming it’s going to be,” Duss said. “They come in here thinking they’re going to make a wedding dress in a single afternoon, and it’s like, ‘Um, no, that’s just not possible.’ ” Sweat Shop has attracted con-
siderable attention from French fashion magazines, and 80 per- cent of its clientele are women 25 to 35 years old, said Duss, adding that, for some reason, “there are lots of men in the knitting classes.” The shop also attracts a fair share of people passing through Paris, as well as some veteran seamstresses, such as the 80-year-old Swedish woman who spends nearly every afternoon there. The shop has already proven a
much bigger success than Duss and Holleis envisioned. “We were a bit nervous because there isn’t much of a do-it-yourself culture in France,” Duss said. “Maybe it’s because there’s so much perfection all around, with haute couture and haute cuisine, but French people are generally reticent do things that may not be perfect.
“But now, I think people are ea-
ger to express themselves and be their own designer and person- alize what they wear. They don’t all want to be going around in the same H&M T-shirt,” she said, add- ing that she and Holleis have got- ten franchise offers. “For the moment, we’re taking it
slow. This is like our baby, so we want it to have time to grow up a little. But we sometimes joke that our goal is to have three stores in three years,” she said. A top destination for the first
new branch? Possibly New York, she said.
—Associated Press
©Disney/CML
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