“A terrific guy”: Robert Duvall’s favourite co-star of all time
Flicking through Robert Duvall‘s castmate history is like reading a who’s who of Hollywood royalty.
Duvall’s glittering film career that spanned half a century saw him working with some of the most acclaimed directors and actors in history. Whether it was on Francis Ford Coppola’s epic The Godfather series or the notorious Apocalypse Now, starring alongside Diane Keaton and Marlon Brando, or on more recent projects, collaborating with comedy royalty Will Ferrell or blockbuster titan Tom Cruise, Duvall has seemingly worked with them all.
On that list, Brando feels like the obvious pinnacle of Duvall’s career, for every actor who has shared a set with the elusive legend has remarked that the experience was the peak of their career, but it was a contemporary cinema star with whom Duvall worked on the 2009 film The Road, that he revered as his very best collaborator, about which he said, “I never worked with a better guy than Viddo [Mortensen]. Wonderful actor and just a terrific guy”.
The film tracks Duvall and Mortensen, as their characters battle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world, with the latter’s character playing a father who must protect his son from a group of cannibals who have menaced the streets. In what was a heartfelt scene that emotionally pinned this story together, which showed the true magic of their collaboration that existed.
As their characters sat across from one another at a campfire, Duvall decided to go off-script and test the improvisational quality of Mortensen. “It needed something,” he remembered, explaining, “I’m not gonna ask permission from the director because he may say no. It wasn’t in the script or the book. I gave my character a song that he was looking for on the road that he couldn’t find, and wondered where he was. He’s looking for his son. And I improvised that scene as the camera rolled, and it gave me something very emotional and very, a great inner thing which worked.”
Duvall remarked how Mortensen’s performance allowed him to go to that emotional place, while the latter remembered marvelling at the improvisational ability of this great Hollywood legend. Sitting across from him in the scene, he allowed Duvall’s monologue to unfold and watched this master at work, from extremely close quarters.
He recalled, “We were just sort of sitting talking as they were setting up the camera and getting the fire ready for another take. We talked about, ‘Well, let’s forget everything, let’s just do one for ourselves. Let’s just let things happen’. There was nothing calculated. It was just like, ‘Let’s just open our hearts’, I guess, without saying it that way as much as we can and see where it goes.”
He corroborated that despite not being a scripted moment, it added a layer to the moment, “He just threw me that line: ‘I had a boy once’, and I suddenly realised, ‘Wow, OK’. And I just went with him, you know?”, and the result was “magic”, leaving Mortenson enraptured with Duvall’s performance.
Ultimately, it was Mortensen’s ability to facilitate that improvisational performance that largely placed him at the very top of Duvall’s collaborative rankings, despite having worked with some of the biggest names in cinema history.
