Robert Duvall Remembered by Tender Mercies Director Bruce Beresford

Following the death of the legendary actor Robert Duvall on Sunday at the age of 95, Bruce Beresford, the Australian filmmaker who directed Duvall in 1983’s Tender Mercies, for which Duvall won the best actor Oscar in 1984, shared his memories of Duvall exclusively with The Hollywood Reporter. As you can read below, Beresford — whose credits also include 1979’s Breaker Morant, 1986’s Crimes of the Heart and 1989’s Driving Miss Daisy, which won the best picture Oscar — remembers the actor as “surly” but “absolutely great.”

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I never saw Duvall again after Tender Mercies. It was on in Cannes, but I was filming something else, so I never got to Cannes. And then we were both nominated for Oscars, but I was somewhere else filming.

The film was written by Horton Foote. Horton had written other roles for Bob. In fact, Horton suggested Bob for his first film, To Kill a Mockingbird. And Horton wrote Tender Mercies specifically for Bob.

I had the script sent to me by the Hobels [Philip Hobel and Mary-Ann Hobel, founders of The Cinema Guild], a very nice couple in New York. I found out later that they had offered it to a lot of American directors, who turned it down, and then they saw my film Breaker Morant and sent me the script. I thought it was absolutely wonderful, so I called them up and said, “I’ll do this, it’s great!”

Duvall was already attached — that was the first thing they told me. I’d seen him in a lot of things. I knew he was a great actor. He was very polite when I first met him. He never had an awful lot to say. He spent a lot of time in Texas learning the accent that he used in the film and mixing a lot with people from that area.

He was opinionated. It was very strange, really. I’d pre-plan the scenes and say “We’re doing this” and “We’re doing that” — you know, I worked out all the choreography of the moves and the camera angles — and he tended to be rather surly. He’d look at it and he’d say, “Oh, is that it?” And I’d say “Yes.” But no matter what it was, he did it extremely well — it always looked better than I imagined it would.

But he had some oddities. I mean, one day he wanted us to take the [boom] microphone away. He said, “What’s that doing there?” I said, “Bob, that’s the microphone that’s recording you.” And he said, “Mac Sledge [his character in the film] never had a microphone hanging above his head.” And I said, “No, he didn’t, Bob, but you’re not Mac Sledge. You’re an actor and we’re making a film.” But he still insisted that the microphone be removed, so we then filmed for a couple of hours with no sound — it was late in the day, so I left it — and the next morning I brought it back and we just went on as normal. He never mentioned it again.

Another day, we were filming a very important scene with him and Ellen Barkin [who played his daughter] in the living room, and Bob looked out the window, sort of froze and said, “What’s that light doing out there?” I said, “Well, that’s lighting us, Bob.” And he said, “But the light comes through the window anyway.” And I said, “Yes it does, but not enough. And also, the sun moves. In half an hour, the sun will be over the top of the house, or on the other side, and we want to light it so it’s consistent through the whole scene, which will take all day.” He very grudgingly accepted that, but he looked at me as if I was making it all up!

I don’t know what that was all about. I thought to myself, “This guy has made over 50 films. He knows about lights and microphones.” Generally, though, he just went through the scenes the way I planned them, and I knew from the very beginning that he was giving an amazing performance. I remember the very first scene, which we shot in the little motel room where he [the character] is drunk on the floor and getting up — as he [Duvall] did the scene, I could feel the skin crawling on the back of my neck, and I thought, “This guy is absolutely great.”