Why Robert Duvall always hated the most iconic line of his career: “It’s a little much”
Not many actors can say without a shred of doubt that they’ve spoken one of the most iconic lines of dialogue in cinema history, but Robert Duvall could. The late actor has rarely been bereft of impressive filming credits, but that extends to cinema’s finest scripts, too. Unfortunately, the downside is that he spent almost half a century hearing it everywhere he goes.
Ironically, even though he was a regular collaborator of Francis Ford Coppola, having appeared in The Rain People, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and George Lucas’ THX 1138, which the director produced through his American Zoetrope banner, he wasn’t exactly the first name on the filmmaker’s list when Apocalypse Now began casting.
The movie has gone down in history as one of the most impressive releases of the 1970s, setting cinema on a new path of creative storytelling. It will easily go down as one of the most beloved movies of Duvall’s career, even if he wasn’t necessarily the first choice to be cast in it.
Every aspect of the seminal war story has entered Hollywood folklore, from its arduous casting process to its nightmarish production right through to its monumental status in cinema history. It’s one of the most famous films in history for a number of very good reasons, but Duvall could have quite easily missed out had Coppola gotten any of the candidates he was initially eying for the part of Bill Kilgore.
Gene Hackman was attached to the role during the earliest stages of the process, but even after that, Duvall was reluctant to sign on unless some rewrites were made. In the first drafts, the character was called Wyatt Khanage, heavy-handedly evocative of the word ‘Carnage’. Kilgore isn’t much better, but still, the actor wanted to tone down a part he felt was a touch too extravagant and over-the-top than the performance he had in mind.
If there’s one soundbite from Apocalypse Now that everybody knows better than the rest, it’s Duvall’s “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” It’s become such an accepted part of the cultural lexicon that it continues to be repurposed and parodied more than 45 years after the film’s release, which has proven to be a double-edged sword for the guy who said it.
When Talk Cinema asked Duvall if he knew it would take on such a life of its own, Duvall answered in the negative. “No, sir. I had no idea,” he admitted. “John Milius wrote the original script. It was a little much. In the first draft, I was called Colonel Carnage. They had me in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, which was ridiculous.”
Regardless of how he managed to dodge that particular bullet and prevent the character from becoming a caricature, Duvall continued to be haunted by the smell of napalm for the rest of his career. In the decades since Apocalypse Now, he’s notched over 70 film and television credits and won an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmys, and four Golden Globes.
And yet, he was never able to outrun the shadow of his most famous onscreen quote, with Duvall often bristling at the way “people still come up to me and say the line like only you and they know it.” Of course, everybody knows it, but the actor who was the first to say it had long since grown weary of strangers treating it like some kind of personal in-joke that nobody else could possibly understand. But such is the power of a mammoth star and a wondrous Hollywood icon.
