Robert Duvall & Billy Bob Thornton

Interview, March, 1998 by Elizabeth Weitzman

RD: And some of the Southern white religions should be just as valid in the liberals' eyes as black religion. The black church is accepted, but often in a patronizing way. A lot of blacks have the same outlook as whites about certain social issues from a religious point of view.

You know, I got more spirituality from one meeting in the church of this ninety-six-year-old black preacher near my home in Virginia than from any picture I've seen of the Dalai Lama or Mahatma Gandhi. I don't know what the Richard Geres would say about that, but this guy was a very spiritual man and the most impressive preacher I'd ever met in my life. Now, he was politically incorrect, but he would be excused because he'd been subservient to whites all his life and he'd got another set of standards. I remember one Sunday I was sitting there and he said, "Ain't no thieves going to Heaven, ain't no pimps going to Heaven, ain't no robbers going to Heaven, ain't no homos going to Heaven!" You can't say that now. But he said it. It was pretty interesting. But if a white guy said that - ooh, look out.

EW: When you make a movie that deals with religion in such an intimate way, does your personal sense of spirituality necessarily affect the movie you're making? And do you feel more spiritual or more connected to religion?

BBT: I think a little bit of both.

RD: Certainly it elevates the human experience, emotionally and culturally and spiritually, a few notches when you work in a situation like that.

EW: I know this is a very big question, but is there an overarching quality you could pinpoint that draws you both so strongly to the rural South on a visceral level?

BBT: Well, I think it's magic. It's a very supernatural place. Supposedly, the South is very close-minded. There's not a lot of emphasis placed on runway models, but I think the South is a lot more open-minded to the spiritual aspects of life. Maybe, as Bobby was saying earlier, not a lot of Southerners follow the Dalai Lama, but they're certainly open to ghosts and things like that. I think the imagination is very alive down there. You feel more of a sense of soul, or the spirit, in the South. That may sound like hogwash, but that's the way I feel.

RD: The genuine manners you see in the South, the friendliness and openness: Those are nice things. Except if you get up in the hill country - they're a little more closed.

BBT: Oh, absolutely. There's a lot of those people in the sticks that don't want you back there. I used to repossess furniture and TV sets and things like that, years and years ago, and we used to go out to a settlement outside of Malvern [Ark.] where they were all relatives; everybody out there had the same last name, which the community was actually named after. Boy, they didn't want you out there. At all.

EW: One last question: What do you think was the immediate point of association for you, the thing that initially attracted you to each other?

BBT: Well, I had the advantage of having watched Bobby for a long time.