Duvall Hits The Trail Again

The Los Angeles Times features a story on Robert Duvall's return to the Western genre with the filmed-in-Alberta movie, Broken Trail.

From the article:

Duvall considered marketing the story as a feature or one-day network TV movie before landing at AMC, which has never bought the notion that the western is dead, having stopped speaking to audiences more inclined to watch antiheroes than heroes and who find their escapist clashes between civilization and a lawless frontier in sci-fi tales set in space. Or maybe it was simply counterprogramming that led AMC to embrace westerns and John Wayne, licensing 32 of his films. In any case, the network was eager to back its first original project.

"We were looking for a big event that would be our first big event," says AMC President Ed Carroll, who gave the go-ahead for shooting the two-part Broken Trail last summer in Alberta, Canada, with the confidence that Duvall would "lend immediate credibility" to the debut effort but also understanding that AMC was getting "a perfectionist … who has a strong point of view."

Translation: This star-producer would not sit quietly by if a network suit decided that TV required a happier ending, say, than he believed appropriate.

Duvall is not generally a believer in those. The 90-year-old Foote recalls the one line in Tender Mercies for which the actor, in character, allowed himself tears. It goes, "I don't trust happiness. Never did. Never will."

So that was one issue, how much happily-ever-after. Also how much gunplay. "You gotta have a shootout in a western, I suppose," Duvall says, but "you can't overdo that. They weren't such deadeye shots, those guys."

Full article and video clip available at the link above.

Broken Trail premieres tonight (Sunday, June 25) on AMC at 8PM/7C.
Photo: Joshua Roberts / For The Times.