Film-maker Scott Cooper describes how his small role in a civil war drama starring Duvall led to a happy, lifelong friendship with the great actor, who died earlier this week
I
first met Robert Duvall in a muddy field in Maryland in 2001, on the set of Gods and Generals. It was a Warner Bros civil war epic, the kind of production where the scale alone made you feel small. I was playing a low-ranking Confederate aide-de-camp 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 placed him on the horse.
He sat tall and still in the saddle, dressed as Robert E Lee – grey coat, grey beard, grey sky above him – and he didn’t seem like an actor in costume. He seemed as if he had stepped out of the earth itself. He was Lee, and more than that, he was Duvall – a distant relative of Lee, too, which somehow made it all feel inevitable. He carried the weight of history effortlessly.
