THE JUDGE directed by David Dobkin, written by Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque, with Robert Downey Jr., Robert Duvall, Vincent D’Onofrio, Vera Farmiga and Billy Bob Thornton. A Warner Bros. release. 143 minutes. Opens Friday (October 10). For venues and times, see Movies.
Robert Duvall’s theory of acting is remarkably simple.
“You gotta be you underneath,” he says. “That’s the secret. That’s what Brando was so good at. You just gotta jump in and do it, you know. Just see where it goes, like how we’re talking and listening, listening and talking. Go from there.”
Duvall is talking. I am listening. We’re in a boardroom at the Shangri-La the day after his new movie, The Judge, opened the Toronto Film Festival.
A rare drama from director David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers, Fred Claus), The Judge pairs Duvall with Robert Downey Jr. as father and son. It’s brilliant casting, because Downey does the same thing Duvall does: you can always see Robert Downey Jr. flickering underneath his characters. To watch the two actors together is to watch their entire histories collide within the frame of the story: The Great Santini versus Tony Stark, Tom Hagen versus Sherlock Holmes.
And though the legal aspect of the script gets a little lumpy – Downey’s big-city lawyer comes home for his mother’s funeral and gets stuck defending his father on a dubious murder charge – its emotional beats are utterly authentic.
“He’s the kind of guy who’s not gonna trick you,” Duvall says of his billion-dollar co-star.
Duvall doesn’t trick you either. He’s an actor who brings integrity to every performance. Whether he’s playing an emotionally damaged country singer in Tender Mercies or an aging astronaut in Deep Impact, there’s a humanity to his characters that speaks to lives lived and regrets considered.
The only exceptions are his roles in Apocalypse Now, where he took it up to 11 as the demented Lt. Col. Kilgore, and the Will Ferrell sports comedy Kicking & Screaming, where he reimagined The Great Santini’s Bull Meechum as a children’s soccer coach.
I ask Duvall how he shapes his characters around himself. Does he think about specific qualities? Does he do research? Does he like to rehearse?
“You figure it out on your own,” he says, sipping from a glass of water. “I can rehearse or not rehearse, it depends. You just come in and do it. You know each other, you trust each other, you know each other’s people.”
On The Judge, they rehearsed.
In a separate interview, Dobkin tells me he wanted to make sure the cast’s chemistry was coming along, so he gathered Duvall, Downey, Vincent D’Onofrio and Jeremy Strong for an improv session in the judge’s household.
“We did a family scene in the living room,” Dobkin explains, “and every 10 minutes I would whisper something in someone’s ear. Whatever conflict you threw into the room, they started to behave perfectly.”
The session ran for an hour and a half.
“It was amazing,” Dobkin says. “Duvall was throwing Robert out of the room at one point. I was just like, ‘Maybe this is a scene. Maybe that’s a scene.’ Everything was good.”
I ask Downey about the session later in the press day. “Yeah,” he says emphatically, “it was the greatest.”
“I think it was as much my idea as anybody’s,” says Duvall, laughing. “I said I’d like to improvise with everybody, and it went on for, like, an hour and a half. I just wanted different subjects. It was really nice. We all kind of melded it helped solidify things as the characters, as ourselves.”
The rigidity of his character in The Judge – an aging lion facing mortality and senescence with as much fury as he can muster – is at odds with the man at the table. Judge Palmer barks orders Duvall shares ideas.
He talks about food: “What they really have good in Argentina is the gnocchi – every Friday night. And they cook it more al dente some people cook it too soft.”
He talks soccer: “Lionel Messi, he’s a great, great player. It didn’t happen for him in the World Cup. I felt bad for him, but the Germans were awful good.”
He talks about his approach to directing movies: “I like to kind of follow the road of a Kenneth Loach, from England: very real. That movie Kes, from way back, was wonderful.”
As it happens, he’s just finished directing a movie, a western he co-stars in with James Franco and Duvall’s wife, Luciana Pedraza. He loved it. He got to ride a great horse – “the Secretariat of stock horses, the best horse this cowboy’s ever been on” – though insurance issues meant he didn’t have as much time in the saddle as he’d have liked.
“What I could have done easily 20 years ago, I can’t if I’m directing a film,” he says. “So we got the double, a great cowboy, to ride him. Then we cut to me coming up to the river crossing to confront a certain issue. So I rode at the beginning and the end, but not the middle part, you know. You have to get a double.”
The last time we talked, in 2002, Duvall was at TIFF with Assassination Tango, his directorial follow-up to The Apostle and the product of a lifelong fascination with the tango. Is he still dancing at 83?
“Not so much now,” he smiles. “Some. I don’t have a lot of intense hobbies now like I used to have.”
His performance in The Judge has the feel of a summation. Dobkin has built the role of Joseph Palmer on the actor’s not-inconsiderable history (see sidebar).
So what will he do for an encore?
“We’ll see,” Duvall says. “I’ve got the rights to a terrific novel by Elmer Kelton – some people call him the greatest western writer of all time – called The Day The Cowboys Quit. They went on strike against some big ranch owners who wouldn’t allow them a small herd of horses or cattle.”
He tells me a little more of the story, and Kenton’s own history.
“He wrote for the stockman’s gazette, [Livestock Weekly],” he says. “Understood the land, the people.”
Is Duvall looking at this as another chance to direct?
“No, no, no,” he says. “But I want to get it off the ground. They wanted me to star: ‘You have to play [the hero].’ I said I don’t want to play a major part. I’ll play a cameo.”
Right now, though, there are more pressing issues – like whether he’ll have time to hit Lai Wah Heen before he goes home.
“I love their Chinese food,” he says. “Terrific. Whenever I think of the festival, I think of that restaurant. Is that near here?”
Interview Clips
Robert Duvall on that Western he just directed:
A little bit of Duvall talking about food, just because:
Director David Dobkin on what Duvall brought to the movie:
Co-star Robert Downey Jr. on navigating the emotional territory of The Judge as an actor, and a key tip Duvall gave him:
Dobkin on using the chemistry – and the history – of Duvall and Downey together:
Don’t miss: Robert Duvall’s top five roles.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
