When Kevin Costner went back to westernshe called in old hand Robert Duvall as the perfect co-star. Steve Pratt reports.

KEVIN Costner was talking to the movie insurance people when he saw a news bulletin flash up on a TV screen in the office. Running across the bottom of the screen was a report that Robert Duvall had fallen off a horse and injured himself during the filming of the western Open Range.

Coster was alarmed for several reasons - he was directing the film and Duvall was his leading man. The story wasn't entirely correct as filming hadn't actually begun.

Veteran actor Duvall had hurt himself during his preparation for getting back in the saddle as the cattle-droving boss. Fortunately it didn't delay the movie. "Two months before we started shooting I got bucked off a horse and broke six ribs," says Duvall, who's in his early 70s.

"The horse was broken well, but something happened when he got back to my farm in Virginia. He started bucking one day, and I was on the ground so fast and so hard I was just out of it.

"For six weeks I was like trying not to sneeze because of my ribs. I mended in time and I even took the physical examination, the stress test for insurance purposes, for Open Range still with the broken ribs."

He admits to being "a touch" nervous about getting back on a horse again after the accident. Fifteen years ago, when making the award-winning TV mini-series Lonesome Dove, it would have been a different matter as he was riding two to three hours a day.

"They have very good cowboys and very good ranchers in western Canada, where Open Range was made, and they picked me out a nice horse. So it was okay."

The role in Costner's western - as an old-time cowboy who clashes with a ruthless rancher over cattle grazing rights - was written with Duvall in mind. He read the script and phoned Costner back within a few hours to say he'd do it.

"I knew I understood that kind of guy, back to the days when I was a kid on my uncle's ranch," he says. "Everyone wants to do westerns. You (the British) have Shakespeare, the western is ours. I knew I could play that guy. My uncle said I could have been a rancher had I chosen to be that as a profession."

He names his favourite western as Lonesome Dove, the 1991 TV series adapted from Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. "Let the English play Hamlet and King Lear, I'll play Augustus McCrae. That's my Hamlet," he says.

His other westerns include True Grit, for which screen cowboy legend John Wayne won an Oscar. Making that with director Henry Hathaway seems to have been a more difficult experience than being directed by Costner in Open Range.

"It was very difficult working with that kind of director. It was not that easy a film to do, although it was wonderful working with John Wayne. I feel I'm a better actor than I was then. Now I can carry more of a sense of those kinds of characters on to the screen than when I was a younger actor fighting with a certain kind of old school director," he says.

Duvall has directed films himself, but is happy to put on his acting hat and be instructed by someone else. "You have to fall in line with how this person works," he says. "Several times Costner said to me, 'what would you do, you're a director?'. I said, 'no, it's your film, you know what you're doing'. You're a hired hand rather than having total control like he had."

Duvall, who counts such films as Apocalypse Now and The Godfather among his credits, doesn't see retiring in the near future. "I still like the business. As in your country repertory actors like to do different things, I like to do different parts. I feel like I do that. So far, after many years, I have not lost my enthusiasm," he says.

There seems no sign of him slowing down. He's currently making a film with Will Ferrell, then a modern day western, followed by a movie with Andy Garcia. All of which must make him one of Hollywood's busiest actors.

One line that haunts him is "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" spoken by his military man in Apocalypse Now. People do come up to him and say it as if they are the only two people who know it.

"When I was doing the research for The Apostle, all the preachers would say they didn't go to the movies and then one of them said, 'I heard he had a famous line - I love the smell of gasoline in the morning'."

* Open Range (12A) opens in cinemas tomorrow

Published: ??/??/2003