Why Robert Duvall swore he’d never work with Steven Spielberg again: “I know he’s going to get pissed off”
For the last half-century, not many people in Hollywood have had a bad word to say about Steven Spielberg. As well as being one of cinema’s greatest-ever directors and one of its most revered filmmakers, for all intents and purposes, he also seems to be a swell guy.
He hasn’t been drawn into any wars of words, he hasn’t feuded with any of his peers or contemporaries, and he’s barely been subjected to any adverse publicity, apart from when his films miss the mark. Jacques Rivette did once call him an “asshole,” but that was part of a larger rant directed towards someone else.
The same can’t necessarily be said of Robert Duvall. However, his heated confrontations with director Henry Hathaway and star John Wayne on the set of True Grit were almost 60 years ago, and he was entitled to blast The Godfather Part III when he opted against returning because Francis Ford Coppola wasn’t willing to pay him what he thought he was worth.
Beyond that, he’s one of the most respected actors of his generation and has been cited as an influence and inspiration by everyone from Billy Bob Thornton to Tom Hanks, with Bill Murray in the middle. As a man of principle, though, he aired his dirty laundry in public and made it perfectly clear that, because of Spielberg’s actions, he’d never work with his production company, DreamWorks, again.
In 2002, the filmmaker visited Cuba, which stuck in Duvall’s craw. “Spielberg went down there recently and said, ‘The best seven hours I ever spent was actually with Fidel Castro.'” That rubbed him the wrong way, but the kicker was that the Jaws and Jurassic Park mastermind’s team retaliated by saying that the Apocalypse Now alum had no idea what he was talking about.
“Now, what I want to ask him, and I know he’s going to get pissed off,” Duvall’s rant continued. “Would you consider building a little annexe on the Holocaust museum, or at least across the street, to honour the dead Cubans that Castro killed? That’s very presumptuous of him to go there. I’ll tell him that. I’ll never work at DreamWorks again, but I don’t care about working there anyway.”
According to a statement released by Spielberg’s representatives, Duvall’s comments were actually “totally false” and the director “never said it, or anything like it,” offering that his visit to Castro-ruled Cuba was part of an authorised cultural exchange that the United States government had approved.
Clarifying that his trip was “cultural, not political,” the statement added that Spielberg had also screened “eight of his films for hundreds of thousands of Cubans, visited the Jewish community, paid his respects at the Holocaust memorial in Havana, and met with US diplomats stationed there.” The biggest kicker of all was that he hadn’t, and still hasn’t, directed a picture with Duvall in it.
Instead, Spielberg was credited as an executive producer of 1998’s Deep Impact, which was backed by DreamWorks, and the closest they’ve come to collaborating as an actor and filmmaker was when Duvall was offered the role of Brody in Jaws, and he turned it down because he was more interested in playing Quint.
