Gospel Truth

Robert Duvall has enjoyed quite a few career-capping moments since he made “The Apostle,” his self-financed $5-million film about the Rev. Sonny Dewey, a fiery Pentecostal preacher who’s a huckster, adulterer and super-salesman for the Lord.

He got all his money back, “plus some change,” when October Films won a bidding war for the film at the Toronto Film Festival last September. A lifelong country music fan, he spent a day in a Nashville studio last December with Emmylou Harris, singing a duet of “I Love to Tell the Story,” for the movie’s soundtrack. In January he spent a night at the White House, where he screened “The Apostle” for Bill and Hillary Clinton just days after the president became embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

On Monday night, the 67-year-old actor will be at the Academy Awards, where he’s up for a best actor award for “The Apostle,” his fourth Oscar nomination (he won in 1983 for his portrayal of Mac Sledge, the broken-down country singer in “Tender Mercies”).

But when it comes to special moments, nothing rivals the day Duvall was in Lafayette, La., filming an “Apostle” scene with a team of real tent-revival preachers at a local high school. Talk about the magical alchemy of art blending with reality.

After Duvall finished the scene, he found his crew gathered around a Teamster truck driver, who’d been so moved watching the scene that he was undergoing a religious experience. “Something got ahold of him,” Duvall recalls. “It was a personal revelation. The preachers didn’t waste any time. They ran over and jumped in and started laying hands on him.”

Duvall mimics their motions with his own hand, letting it drop like a feather onto the restaurant table. “They started saving him and he accepted the Lord. They went straight from the movie to real life, right before your eyes.”

He chuckles. “That’s when I knew we were onto something.”

Always intense, often ornery, Duvall is at least as complicated as the fractious preacher he plays in “The Apostle.” He made his film debut in 1962 as Boo Radley in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Since then, he’s done TV dramas and miniseries, directed three small films and established himself as a commanding screen presence.

Everyone has a favorite Duvall role. Producer Scott Rudin, who cast Duvall as a crafty lawyer in the upcoming drama “A Civil Action,” recalls being mesmerized by him doing Mamet’s “American Buffalo” on Broadway. Billy Bob Thornton, who appears in “The Apostle” and directed Duvall in “Sling Blade,” says he’s never forgotten the actor’s performance in “Tomorrow,” a 1971 film written by Horton Foote. “I knew then,” says Thornton, “that no matter how great a performance I could ever give as an actor, I’d still be chasing him.”

Duvall has been everywhere. He worked for Sam Peckinpah, starred opposite John Wayne in “True Grit” and played Maj. Frank Burns in “MASH.” He was a 25th century man in “THX 1138,” George Lucas’ first movie; an old Texas Ranger in “Lonesome Dove”; and a newspaper editor in “The Paper.” He’s earned Oscar nominations for his roles in “The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now” and “The Great Santini.” There’s no disputing his range--what other actor could play Jesse James, Dr. Watson, Stalin, Adolph Eichmann and Dwight D. Eisenhower?

In Texas, thanks to the popularity of “Lonesome Dove,” Duvall is such a revered figure that when he was taken to lunch by then-Gov. Ann Richards, he jokingly threatened to move to the state and run for governor. “Don’t do that,” Richards said. “You’d probably beat me.”

“Bobby has a deep desire to capture what’s real about people,” says Foote, who’s written several of his best roles, including “Tender Mercies” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.” “He doesn’t exaggerate or sentimentalize his characters. He’s always searching for the truth.”

Married three times, Duvall has two stepdaughters, but no children of his own. He lives on a 200-acre farm in Virginia with his Argentine girlfriend, Luciana Pedraza, who shares the same birthday as Duvall, as well as his passion for horses, tango dancing and good food.

Wherever the actor travels to a film location, he adopts a favorite restaurant, from Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville, Miss., to Yucca in Miami. He’s such a fan of the Rail Stop, his local eatery in Virginia, that he lets the chef live rent free on his farm so some fashionable New York steakhouse won’t steal him away.

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Duvall’s journeys helped spark his dream project. In the early 1960s, he visited Hughes, Ark., to research a character for an off-Broadway play. But what stuck with Duvall was a man he saw preaching in a tiny Pentecostal church, spellbinding his congregation. “This guy was playing guitar and preaching, with these plump little ladies watching him, talking about butter beans,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘I oughta play someone like him someday.’ ”

Whenever Duvall had the chance, he would stop into local churches to watch preachers in action. He’s been to see the Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant (“He has this great Southern, whooping style,” Duvall says), the Rev. Jasper Williams in Atlanta (“He preached Aretha Franklin’s father’s funeral”) and a 96-year-old minister in Hamilton, Va.

Initially, Duvall asked Foote if he would work on the script. Foote encouraged Duvall to write it himself. In 1984, when Duvall finished the script, he started showing it around. It was turned down everywhere. The actor gave it to a studio head who’d told him he would’ve made “Tender Mercies” if Duvall had only sent it to him first. So Duvall let him read “The Apostle.” The studio chief passed.

“It was a hard sell,” Duvall recalls. “One studio guy said, ‘Everybody talks too much.’ And I told him, ‘That’s what these guys do--they talk from noon to night!’ ”

Finally, in 1996, Duvall’s accountant stepped in. Thanks to the rising tide of superstar salaries, Duvall was often getting $3 million to $4 million for a major supporting actor role. He’d banked enough savings that he could afford to make the movie himself. “I was getting older,” he says. “So I knew it was now or never.”

Shot in seven weeks, mostly in western Louisiana, the film was made with a cast populated by amateurs and musicians as well as professional actors. When Wilfred Brimley dropped out of one role, Duvall replaced him with country singer Billy Joe Shaver. Duvall had seen June Carter Cash, Johnny Cash’s wife, playing a soothsayer in a TV movie, so he cast her as his mother. Rick Dial, who plays a radio station owner in the film, is actually a Lafayette furniture salesman, who commuted back and forth to the set between his store’s summer sales.

Duvall also hired Brother Cole, who plays a one-legged fisherman who befriends the preacher on his travels. “He’s a minister in Dallas,” Duvall explains. “We go way back--I knew him when he had two legs.”

To relax his amateur actors, Duvall gave them improvisation exercises. “I’d give them the situation and a couple of lines and then they went off and did it,” he says. “All I wanted was for them to get into the spirit of it, like they would in their own church. They got so good that it put our professional actors on notice that they were working with some real talent.”

Duvall says he wasn’t overwhelmed by acting and directing at the same time. “When I got stuck, I’d just say, ‘Somebody give me an amen!’ That way I had time to think up what to do next.”

“The Apostle” offers a serious look at religious faith, a challenging subject that Hollywood has rarely addressed except in the most patronizing fashion. “You don’t have to make everything look like ‘The Beverly Hillbillies,’ ” says Duvall. “Hollywood tends to make caricatures out of people who live in the center of the country, but they’re missing a whole culture that’s rich and vital. Hollywood makes movies about gangsters. Why not make movies about preachers? They’re complicated people too.”

The movie has a wide range of admirers, so wide that when out promoting the film, Duvall won endorsements from both Howard Stern and “The 700 Club’s” Pat Robertson. He also got a warm reception when he showed his film at the White House. After the screening, the president pointed to his chest, saying, “That movie got to me--right here.”

Duvall says Clinton reminds him of a “high-level” Pentecostal preacher. “You hear it in the way he talks. He’s got the cadence, that whole Southern raconteur thing. He’d be a good preacher. He can talk for an hour and you feel like he’s just getting started.”

Duvall thinks he’s just getting started too. Unlike most actors his age, he’s still in demand. “Bob has the whole movie in his head,” says Steve Zaillian, director of “A Civil Action.” “He’s always thinking about what’s happening in the scene, and the scene before that. I often let the camera roll and roll before I cut the scene because I’d be so fascinated by what he’s doing.”

Not every director had such a happy time with Duvall. The actor had numerous clashes with Simon Wincer making “Lonesome Dove.” He was so remote during the making of “Tender Mercies” that he never told the production crew where he was staying.

Duvall doesn’t gloss over his conflicts. Though a longtime Coppola admirer, he says bluntly: “Francis throws worse tantrums than any of his actors.” As for Wincer, he says: “It’s not just me. Lots of people didn’t get along with him.” Bruce Beresford, who directed “Tender Mercies,” doesn’t come off much better. “He’s competent,” Duvall allows. “I don’t know what it is about me and Australians. The ones I’ve worked with have an arrogance that doesn’t sit well with me.”

Duvall says he simply asks that directors respect the demands of his craft. “The only time I’ve really had problems is when they’re more concerned with the lighting or the camera than the acting.”

Billy Bob Thornton insists he never had problems. “If you tell Bob Duvall what to do, of course you’re going to have trouble. He’ll tell people, ‘I’m gonna do it my way and if you don’t like it, you can kiss my ass.’ To me, that’s not being difficult. That’s saying, ‘I’ll do the acting and you get the camera to follow me and let me do my job.’ ”

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For Duvall, acting is all-consuming. For his role in “Tender Mercies,” Duvall traveled around Texas, playing in a country band. During “The Apostle,” he would call up friends, doing the voices of preachers he’d met around the country. When he played a retired Cuban barber in “Wrestling Ernest Hemingway,” Duvall holed up in Miami’s Little Havana, drinking Cuban coffee, playing dominoes and dancing with Cuban women.

“You’re always looking for a way into the part,” he says. “I’ve always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it’s like making a chair, except instead of making something out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That’s the actor’s craft--using yourself to create a character.”

Duvall nods his head, in full agreement with this maxim. “Acting doesn’t fly in from a window somewhere,” he says firmly. “It comes from inside you.”