‘His Friendship Changed My Life’: 25 Years of Close Friendship with Robert Duvall | film

I He first met Robert Duvall in a muddy field in Maryland in 2001, while filming Gods and Generals. It was a civil war epic for Warner Bros., the kind of production where size alone makes you feel small. I was playing a low-ranking Confederate aide to General Stonewall Jackson. I was young, unsure of myself, and painfully aware of exactly where I stood in the hierarchy of things.

That morning, they put him on the horse.

He sat tall and still in the saddle, dressed like Robert E. Lee—gray coat, gray beard, gray sky above him—and not looking like an actor in costume. It seemed as if it emerged from the ground itself. It was Lee, and what’s more, it was Duval – a distant relative of Lee as well, which somehow made it seem inevitable. He carried the weight of history effortlessly.

I remember standing there in my uniform, the wool damp and heavy on my shoulders, and feeling terrified. Not from him, but from the disappointing reality of the scene. He had a way of making you realize the truth without you even saying a word. We worked all day in this mud. Horses breathe. Cannons in the distance. Additives change in composition. Then it’s over.

I pulled into my honeymoon — a little piece of room somehow called a trailer. It was barely wide enough to turn around, but to me it was a palace. I was grateful to be there. I took off my shoes, my socks wet and stiff, and began to come back to myself.

There was a knock on the door. I opened it to find Bobby’s assistant. “Mr. Duval would like to know if you would join him for dinner,” he said simply.

I tried to hide my shock. Duvall was legendary for calling out actors when they weren’t being honest. He had no patience for falsehood. He protected work fiercely. The idea that he noticed me at all was overwhelming.

Of course I said yes.

We met at a quiet restaurant not far from where we were staying. He was already seated when I arrived, relaxed, unassuming, almost invisible despite being one of the greatest actors alive. He looked at me for a moment and said in a soft, unmistakable voice: “You’re a nice actor. You didn’t hold back on emotion.”

The scene was eventually cut from the film. But that moment was not like that.

He did not go into details. He didn’t need that. In those few words, he gave me something no one else had ever had: permission. So trust in stillness. To trust in self-control. To trust myself.

This dinner began a friendship that would shape the rest of my life. At that time, my acting career was normal. I didn’t get the parts I wanted. I was carried away, quietly losing confidence in the path I had chosen. Bobby saw it before I said it out loud. He told me I should write. He did it himself with The Apostle, released in 1997, one of the most personal films of all time. He understood that sometimes you have to create the thing you are meant to inhabit.

So I started writing. This scenario has become heart-breaking. He was deeply moved by his performance in Tender Mercies – that sweet and heartbreaking portrayal of a man worn down by his life, searching for grace in quiet corners. It remains one of the most honest performances ever captured on film.

Bobby was the first to read the script. Call me shortly after. “You’re going to direct it,” he said. Not a question. statement. “I’ll produce it. Who do you want to play Bad Blake?”

I told him I wrote it for Jeff Bridges, whom I didn’t know. And I wanted T Bone Burnett to produce the music. I didn’t know him either.

“Then write them letters,” said Bobby. Emotional messages. Honest letters so I did.

A year later, Jeff finally read the script. And the rest became part of my life story. But it started with Bobby’s faith. To call him a guide is insufficient. He was as close to a father as I’d ever known him. He had no children, and I think, in a quiet way, we found something in each other that filled a space in each of us.

We talked almost every day. Sometimes several times a day. We talked about Virginia – his beloved state, and about my state. We talked about the movie endlessly. Coppola. Grosbard. Ford. Then Ray. Loach. for me. Dardanine. The world cinema we loved together, where truth was allowed to breathe.

One afternoon at his home in Virginia, he took me into his library—a quiet room filled with books and texts and the accumulated life of a man who had devoted himself entirely to this work. He led me to a corner where two handwritten notes were placed side by side on the wall.

One of them was from Gene Kelly, praising Bobby’s performance in Lonesome Dove. It ended with a nice hint: “P.S. What, no tango?” Bobby smiled as she read it. Tango became one of his great passions in later life, something he shared with his beloved Argentine wife, Luciana. He talked about tango in the same way he talked about acting, not as a performance, but as a reality. As listening.

The other note was from Marlon Brando. Brando praised Bobby as one of the greatest screen actors who ever lived, and ended with words that seemed both personal and very universal: “In the meantime, take care of yourself, make another movie, and stop looking for Tangerine. She doesn’t exist.”

Bobby never explained what Brando meant. He didn’t have to. He wasn’t showing me those letters to impress me. He was sharing something quieter—a reminder that even the greatest artists carry doubt, longing, and a lifelong search for truth.

This research has identified it.

Regarding acting and directing, he used to say: “Never rehearse actors and never have a goal in mind. Start from scratch and let the scene take you somewhere unexpected. If you do your job, it will take you where you are supposed to go.”

He thought so completely. He lived that way as an actor. You see it in The Godfather, in the quiet intelligence of Tom Hagen – advisor To the Corleone crime family – The Silence Behind the Eyes. You see it in Apocalypse Now, in Kilgore’s terrifying calm. You see it in tender mercies, in every pause, and in every breath. And perhaps most importantly of all, in his beloved Gus McRae in Lonesome Dove. He never showed you feelings. He let you discover him.

He never performed. He simply existed.

My wife, Jocelyn, and I were married at his home in Virginia, the land that George Washington himself viewed in 1746. In that house and in my house, we talked about everything. Sports. policy. He was an old-school Republican. I was a liberal Democrat. But we listened to each other. Really listen. There was no performance in those talks either. Just curious. respect. But it was the film that connected us so deeply.

For more than two decades, Bobby has been a constant presence in my life. He saw something in me before I earned it. He protected this fragile early belief when it mattered most.

Years later, she has the honor of directing The Pale Blue Eye, alongside Christian Bale, in the winter of 2021-2022. When I watched him work again, after everything we’d shared, it felt like time was folding in on itself. He was older, quieter, but the truth within him had sunk deeper. He needed less than ever. Glance. Breathe. And it was all there.

We recently talked about another role – a blind man in a story about a wounded civil war soldier who makes his way home through enemy territory, just as Odysseus finds his way back to Ithaca. Bobby understood this man immediately. He knew his tiredness. His dignity. His grace. It was the role he was meant to play. One we could never make.

Robert Duvall’s legacy is secure. He is one of the greatest actors who ever lived. His work will continue as long as cinema itself does. But that’s not what I’ll miss the most.

I will miss his voice on the phone.

His laugh.

The way he made me feel like work mattered, and that I mattered too. I will miss my friend.

I will miss Bobby D.