With Wild Horses, Robert Duvall returns to the director’s chair after a 13 year stay of absence. Though he attempts to craft an unlikely movie with meaning inside the confines of a thriller/western, the film gets away from him. From our review;

“The proof-of-concept for Wild Horses is in the pudding: Robert Duvall in front of and behind the camera, festival “it” boy James Franco and once teenage heart-throb Josh Hartnett saddled at his side. Even though Duvall hasn’t directed a film since 2003’s widely panned Assassin Tango (what. a. terrible. name.) there is promise in the idea of the diverse trio hidden beneath cowboy brims mugging through difficult family dynamics. Duvall, Franco and Hartnet aptly square off but there is just so much wrong with Wild Horses that it’s hard to overlook its bumbling, clueless ways.” (Full review here)

Though we touch on the film and its “terrible” roots – his words not mine – Robert opens up about the awards season, his favorite films of the last few years, foreign film, young actors, his directorial style and roles that he’s offered now that he’s well into his 80s.

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Over the last decade, you’ve been somewhat choosy with your roles, and as a living film legend, you must get offers left and right?

RD: Well, some.

Not as much as you might think?

RD: Not as good.

Well still, even with what is coming down the pipeline, what in particular really attracts you to a project, or a film, or a filmmaker these days?

RD: The character, first. The character and the writing. And then the director, and then the overall script. But maybe if I can do something a little bit different with this character then I did before. Maybe. A little different. It’s always the character that is the initial impetus.

And when you’re looking at characters, are you mainly looking for someone you relate to, or do you mainly look for ways to experience something you haven’t already?

RD: Both. Yeah, just something different. Like I told people before, it really had been presented to me, and then it wasn’t. I wanted to play something related to Don Quixote. And when I did ‘Lonesome Dove’ Mark Tree was influenced by Cervantes, I had heard. Man on horseback, saving ladies, that kind of thing. Sometimes when you plan something, something else comes around the corner and surprises you that just takes over what you’re planning, so you never know what’s around the corner. This guy’s got a script for me to read – have you seen ‘Wild Tales’, by the guy Damian Szifron?

Yeah.

RD: Wow, what a film!

It was awesome.

RD: And now he has a film western, he wants to do. I owe it to him! He wants to go up and everything. But you know, I do have the rights to ‘The Days The Cowboys Quit’, the novel by Elmer Kelton, the great Texas playwright. He was one of the greatest Western writers of all time – a lot of people in Texas don’t even known him. He’s a great writer who died recently, who wrote a novel, a true story, about some cowboys who went on strike, which they never do. They don’t unionize for anything! But they want to strike, because the big ranch owners wouldn’t let them have small bands of horses and cattle. So AMC is going to do it as a two-part miniseries.

Is that something you would be directing, or starring in?

RD: Oh, no. I’m back off of it. I’ve had enough for a while. No, I would play a part, and help produce, and help attract good actors, because there are so many good actors. Young actors now are better than ever.

Who do you like, in particular?

RD: Well, the performance last year by McConaughey – Brando couldn’t have done better than that. Whether or not he’ll ever be that good again, I don’t know. His older brother is a good friend, he’s coming today – Rooster McConaughey, crazy fellow. Lot of good guys! I saw a thing the other day about Brad Pitt doing a part when he was young. People knock him, everybody criticizes him, but he was wonderful, Brad Pitt. And now Joaquin Phoenix could be good, in a certain way. There’s a lot of good actors around. To me, they’re better then ever – black actors, white, Spanish, this, that. There’s more of a chance for people to go into it. I saw this little film here, two years ago, ‘Dynamiter’, better than some of the big Hollywood pictures. They picked people off of the street to be in it – it’s very pure. So I like small films. Like ‘The Apple’, by the seventeen-year-old girl from Iran. She was seventeen years old! Anyone can pick up a camera, anywhere in the world, and do something.

Just last year you were nominated for your second Academy Award but at this point, when you’ve done the ceremony so many times…

RD: I have been a lot.

But it’s been fifteen, sixteen years?

RD: It’s been a while.

But is that something, when you go back into it, are you kind of exhilarated, or are you kind of over it?

RD: No, it’s exciting. I want [my wife] to experience it as well – it’s great, to have her there with me. It’s fine. It was so interesting, because I was sitting there, and this guy sitting behind me, this Russian guy who did this nice film, he was practicing his victory speech. It was great, because the script won! ‘Leviathan’.

A beautiful film.

RD: It was. Very moving. Ida was my favorite movie of the whole year.

There were some fantastic foreign films last year.

RD: A good second place was ‘Wild Tales’.

‘Force Majeure’ was also excellent.

RD: That was pretty good. I saw one recently, from Denmark, a couple of weeks ago.

So, you being both an actor and a director, what are some of the added challenges for you, when you’re doing both. I know that ever since ‘Angelo My Love’, back in 1983, you’ve been starring in all of your directorial debuts.

RD: Since then. I did one other, before then.

The documentary, ‘We’re Not the Jet Set’.

RD: I was the only professional actor in that. I used Egyptian actors, not Romanian, but Egyptian nationals. I always think that being a good actor comes from being a liar, or being a truthful person. But that Egyptian is amazing! It’s still action and cut. Instead of having some guy out there saying, “What do you think?” to the director, “Okay, let’s move on.” I don’t have any of that. I’m there by myself. I kind of trust myself. I’ve done it enough that I can kind of trust my instincts. I don’t even like to look at the monitor that much.

Really? Do you just kind of go by the feel of the take?

RD: Yeah. I know when something is right. I’m superstitious. By the time you get back to the monitor, maybe it’s no good. It looks good for me!

What is it that usually throws you off? “That wasn’t the right take. Let’s do that again.”

RD: Little things. “It’s okay. Let’s try it again.” When myself, or the other people are going too much offhand. Even the big, emotional scenes in life, sometimes, you do things. There’s always something offhand. Let the process take you to the result. I worked with a director once, an old-school, who said “When I say ‘Action’, you tense up, goddamn it!” Imagine saying that to Stossi, when he’s playing the bears? There’s a difference between intensity and tenseness. There’s a difference. But that’s unique to me. A lot of them – when I direct, I went back to tell the folks. I don’t do tests. He was like a mentor, without even talking to him. I saw actors who weren’t as good as they were in his movies, because he got them to be very natural. So I try and do that – to try and let them, like a horse, to give them some sort of freedom.

Speaking of horses, tell us about Wild Horses.

RD: It’s something I inherited. A guy from around here had written a screenplay that was not very good. There was something about it, I liked it. Because of the part of a lady Texas ranger. There were actually only three in Texas in real life. It was very chauvinistic. They have women rangers now. And I wanted her to play a woman ranger, even though she had played one in ‘Tanglewood’. That’s when she took up jiu jitsu and law enforcement and everything. Studying to play the part. I took a look at the movie, and I kept that on my ranch – I have a ranch in the movie. It’s a Western, but not just a Western. It’s a family thing. Fifteen years ago, it was different. I kicked my son off the ranch because he was gay. Which, you know, things were different then. Now, years later, he comes back to the family, to read the will and set things right, and there’s been a disappearing person. The day he left, his young lover disappeared. It’s almost like there’s been a crime, but no one can prove anything. So when he comes back, for the second time, the woman who lost her son, who disappeared, I got Luciana Padraza, do you know that actress, was in ‘Babel’? The woman who lost the baby in the desert? She has her own theater company in Florida. I went and found her and put her in the movie. She plays a woman whose husband dies, and he says, “When I’m dying, I want you to re-open the case, and find out what happened to our son who disappeared.” And with the Texas rangers, with a closed case, a cold case is never really cold. It’s always open. So she goes to her, because she’s a woman ranger, to re-open the case, to find him, and she said she would help. That’s when we find out what happened, what I might have done to make that young boy disappear. And it’s kind of like uncovering that, but without being heavy-handed. That’s what it’s about mainly, and the family.

So you said you thought the script itself wasn’t very good, but there were compelling elements?

RD: It was terrible. You don’t have to say not good.

It was terrible?

RD: It just didn’t work. She was going to start a fire in it. It just didn’t work. I wanted to keep the lady ranger. I just wanted to make it. We worked on it, and worked on it, and worked on it. I had Billy Bob Thornton read it, and give me his opinion. To get it okay. We raised some money, and had a lot of problems – the money, who’s in charge, we only had twenty-three days to film it. With the Judge, we had sixty days. We only had twenty. We just had to jump in and do it. We did it in Utah, for Texas, because it was cheaper. But Skull Valley, Utah looks just like West Texas. At one point we used real Texas Rangers, because they’re great natural actors, because the undercover work they do anyway. So we did this scene on the Rio Grande and he texts some real Rangers in Rio Grande City, Texas, this ranger in Utah texted them, and said, “What part of Texas is this?” I said, “Rio Grande City,” he said, “No, Utah.” So we found parts of Utah that sufficed. It was kind of a family drama, a family thing, a little bit of a crime. Once again, offhand. When you look up the word tale in the dictionary, tale can mean a lot. A tale can mean a lie, but a tale also means a story, a small story of fiction. So that’s where I took a quote from the Bible, “A tale that is told.” That’s what I said for the movie: “A tale that is told.”

Was the gay character already in the original script?

RD: Yes.

And you kept it?

RD: I kept that.

Because it’s a very current subject, I guess. People have been more open to it. You said he kicks him out because he’s gay.

RD: That was part of the original script. I had to give him something. He was a nice young man. We kept that in there. We got Franco, he does all these movies about gay guys. He can take a paragraph like this, and learn it in ten seconds. So that’s why I think he can direct four movies in one year. Because of his memory. And then we got Josh Hartnett to be in it. We got Pedraza. We got Angie Cepeda from Columbia. So we had a very good cast.

How was your collaboration with James Franco?

RD: It was okay. He’s a handful! He’s a legitimate handful. I worked with him years ago, and he seemed different then. He could ride horses better than anyone in Hollywood. He’s a very talented guy.

How do you get Josh Hartnett out from not doing films, and just doing television shows to do this? I haven’t seen him in anything for years.

RD: I wanted to get him because he’s serious. So we had him smile, we had improvisation, we got him out and laughing and he had different colors. So we just kind of called him up.

So you just sent him the script?

RD: Yeah. And he said okay. I’m coming in tomorrow! He’s a talkative guy. But Franco more! I’ve known Franco for years now. So I went to see him in a Broadway play, and I liked him, and I gave him the script. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. I was like, “Oh, come on! New York!” He looked at me like I was a frickin’ doorman. Hundreds of people waiting outside of the theater for Franco. He’s got twelve-million people on his Twitter list, or whatever you call that. The only guy with more is Downey.

Do people still recognize you on the street?

RD: Me? Especially in Texas. From ‘Lonesome Dove’. But Franco, that’s another thing, and Downey.

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The proof-of-concept for Wild Horses is in the pudding: Robert Duvall in front of and behind the camera, festival “it” boy James Franco and once teenage heart-throb Josh Hartnett saddled at his side. Even though Duvall hasn’t directed a film since 2003’s widely panned Assassin Tango (what. a. terrible. name.) there is promise in the idea of the diverse trio hidden beneath cowboy brims mugging through difficult family dynamics. Duvall, Franco and Hartnet aptly square off but there is just so much wrong with Wild Horses that it’s hard to overlook its bumbling, clueless ways.

In the opening moments of the film, Duvall discovers his youngest son (Franco) in the arms of the Spanish stable boy and threatens them both at gunpoint. There’s mumbling and grumbling to such a degree that I wasn’t sure whether Duvall’s character was supposed to be senile – he’s not – and soon he fires two shots from his handgun – the fire time, the barrel doesn’t even register a visible flare but a shooting noise rattles through the room. Inattention to detail like this abounds in Wild Horses. In a real d-bag, deep-Texas, sternly backwards move, Duvall threatens his son at gunpoint, effectively booting his candy ass from the ranch once and for all.

The film picks up 15 years later when a “lady sheriff” (Luciana Duvall) is assigned a cold case involving the disappearance of the aforementioned stable boy. Turns out that he was wiped from the face of the earth following Duvall’s barnyard discovery. How coincidental. Before long, Ms. Lady Sheriff comes sniffing ’round ol’ man Duvall’s ranch asking nosy questions like, “Do you know what happened to that boy that was buggering your son that you banished?” Rather than sift through a convincingly maze-like web of mystery, Wild Horses keeps the “who killed the stable boy?” card in its back pocket until the final scene of the movie. It’s excruciating getting to the end because by the time we’re only quarter of the way there, we think we know that Duvall did it and don’t really care either way.

Admittedly, there are some fine performances from Duvall and Franco, particularly when the two face each other down and attempt to reconcile their broken relationship, but the script is so poorly written that you are left wondering why Franco even signed on in the first place. I’m nearly convinced he only took the role so he would play a gay character.

In my interview with him, Robert Duvall admitted that the first draft of the script was “fucking terrible”. I don’t know what happened between that iteration and this but it’s hard to imagine something even more messy, poorly written and almost entirely fake feeling than Duvall’s final edit of the material. To make matters worse, Duvall cast his younger, much more Argentinian wife in the lead role of “Lady Sheriff” and she is all but incompetent in the part. She can barely hack her way through her lines but tasked with taking on a Texan accent, she flubs and fumbles her way into a full-blown cinematic safety. She chokes worse than the Seahawks on the one-yard line.

From a directing standpoint, Duvall is almost incapable of framing an interesting shot. It feels more like he planted the camera in an arbitrary position, yelled “Action”, did the scene and rolled the print. There is no indication of forethought, visual complexity or composition. When mounted on a horse looking down on the outcast son, Duvall doesn’t even take advantage of the natural opportunity to frame himself looming large in the corner of our line of sight, lording over his once rejected offspring, meant to look small and unfocused.

No, every shot is the product of a camera somewhere for no reason telling a story that does need to be told, but not by the people assembled here. The tale of a father and son – particularly a conservative, Texan one – trying to sort through what it means to have a gay son/have a father that believes that being gay is “evil” is one rich with dramatic potential. To see it so egregiously executed and sufficiently botched as it is here is borderline painful.