Robert Duvall appeared as Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 classic 'Apocalypse Now.' The actor died at age 95 on Sunday.CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
Years after embracing the smell of napalm in the morning, Robert Duvall could still not shake the sheer intensity of Francis Ford Coppola’s chaotic, crisis-plagued set for Apocalypse Now.
“It was a nightmare,” the actor recalled in 1984, especially noting the danger of the gasoline-based napalm that the film’s crew used to backdrop his iconic scenes as Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, the Wagner-blasting warmonger surfer who crystallized the insanity of the Vietnam War. “From a quarter-mile, I could feel that heat on the back of me when that thing began to go.”
Fortunately, Duvall escaped Coppola’s Philippines set unscathed – something that couldn’t be said for, say, his co-stars Harvey Keitel (who was fired) or Martin Sheen (who suffered a near-fatal heart attack).
Yet, Duvall’s anecdote betrays the actor’s unique brand of humility when it came to his onscreen work. Across seven decades, during which he collaborated with nearly every major filmmaker of the past century, from George Lucas to Sidney Lumet to Robert Altman to Coppola (seven times), Robert Duvall did not merely withstand the heat – he was the heat.
The smoldering intensity of a Duvall performance could be felt in roles big and small, quiet and fierce. He was the coiled snake waiting to pounce in the Godfather films. The flattened hero railing against a dead-end future in THX 1138. The ferocious executive who valued ratings above absolutely everything else in Network. The terrifying tick-tock-tick-tock patriarch in The Great Santini. The loquacious Texas ranger in Lonesome Dove. The silent, immeasurably creepy sight gag of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Duvall wasn’t so much a physical chameleon à la his contemporaries Robert De Niro or Al Pacino – he wasn’t starving himself for a role or packing on the pounds. In terms of pure Hollywood looks, he was the least dramatic looking movie star you could imagine, with a visage that could easily, perhaps deceptively blend into the crowd.
Duvall as Tom Hagen in 'The Godfather,' one of his seven collaborations with Coppola.Bettmann/Getty Images
But he did alter and devote the entirety of his being – mannerisms and tics, voice and gait – every time he stepped on to the screen, hyper-conscious of how one false move can derail the entire fantasy of storytelling. His mere participation and presence denoted something of a confidence measure. So long as Bobby was involved, you knew that the film had something worthwhile, something to keep you hooked.
And yet, there was a sense that the actor, who died at 95 on Sunday, could be taken for granted. He won only a single Academy Award, for the 1983 drama Tender Mercies, and isn’t as frequently mentioned in conversations about the 20th century’s greatest actors, most of whom Duvall could count as close personal friends (both Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman were his one-time roommates).
Duvall directed and starred in the 2002 thriller 'Assassination Tango.'Supplied
But there was no one who could touch Duvall when it came to his taste in collaborators and material. Of the classics listed on the American Film Institute’s vaunted “100 Years...100 Movies” list, Duvall stars in six: Apocalypse Now, To Kill a Mockingbird, M*A*S*H, Network and the first two Godfather films. That is more than any other actor.
This sense of disrespect, or perhaps a fundamental underappreciation, could be felt most persistently and frustratingly in Duvall’s decades-long battle to make The Apostle. After writing the script for the film about a charismatic Pentecostal preacher who loses his flock in the early eighties, Duvall encountered a curiously stubborn level of opposition from the major Hollywood studios that so heavily relied upon his talents.
And so, the actor spent the next decade-and-a-half – and US$5-million of his own money – to make The Apostle himself, ultimately producing one of the sharpest, most beguiling character studies of the nineties. (After premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, the film ignited a heated bidding war, with several studio executives bolting from the screening mid-film to start drafting their offers.)
“Every year, I’d say, it’s this year or never. And finally, last year, I said, it’s now or never,” Duvall said at the time of The Apostle’s 1997 release. “I was getting older. And this thing had been continuing and continuing. I had this feeling of maybe it won’t be. But then I’d think, it has to be.”
Duvall with the Golden Globe award he won for his role in 'Tender Mercies' in 1984. He also won the only Academy Award of his career for the role.Lennox Mclendon/The Associated Press
But The Apostle was far from the capstone to Duvall’s career. For the next three decades, the actor – who long professed to keep working as long as he could, forever on the hunt for the next “perfect role” – would continue to experiment and innovate with the vanishing act that was his lifelong pursuit, pushing both himself and those around him to elevate their craft.
Sometimes, that was in movies that needed just a little Duvall-assisted boost to push themselves into the next level: A Civil Action, Open Range, We Own the Night, Widows, The Road and Crazy Heart, the latter of which looped back around to Duvall’s Oscar-certified Tender Mercies. And sometimes, Duvall simply showed up and did a gigantic favour for films that didn’t quite deserve his contributions: The Judge, Kicking & Screaming (the Will Ferrell soccer comedy, not the Noah Baumbach film), Seven Days in Utopia.
As much as it felt that Duvall could fully disappear into his characters, the actor viewed his work as something deeper, more personal. He wasn’t acting to understand others so much as he was hoping to understand himself. “You’ve got to be in touch with yourself, you should be aware of everything,” he told an interviewer back in the late eighties. “You don’t shut out reality. I don’t escape into a role.”
But for so many years, Robert Duvall allowed audiences to escape into his roles, his worlds. From here until the Apocalypse.