Robert Duvall died last week and I was lucky enough to get to photograph him a few times. I was a huge fan of his work and I was so grateful for the brief moments I got to spend with him. I wanted to write something in his honor, but you can read about his incredible career anywhere and I didn’t know him well enough to tell you about who he truly was as a person. Instead I will use his passing to tell you a few stories about my handful of interactions with him as well as a few unrelated stories about one of my all time favorite jobs which gave me access to some of my favorite actors and filmmakers, none more often than Robert Duvall.
In 2010 I was covering South By Southwest for a bunch of alt weekly newspapers that were all owned by Village Voice Media (The Voice, LA Weekly, Miami New Times, SF Weekly, etc). I had been going to SXSW for many years at that point, originally because I managed a band in college, and then in 2008 and 2009 as a photographer, but I had mostly only paid attention to the Music part of the festival. But in 2010 the Voice was sponsoring a few parties at SXSW that year including a SXSW Interactive party, so my media pass wasn’t just for the Music part of the festival. It covered all three parts of the fest, Music, Interactive and Film. And that’s when the press emails started. Because so many bands play the festival SXSW didn’t give out media contacts, but that was not the case for the film fest. I started getting email after email inviting me to interview the directors and actors of different films. I had an idea… I started writing them back saying that I didn’t want to interview anyone, but I wanted 5 minutes to take their portrait. It worked and for the next five years I would shoot an apparently very popular gallery of SXSW Film Portraits for Village Voice Media.
And that’s how I came to meet Robert Duvall. That first year people were a bit weary of the idea I think. These days media outlets set up photo booths at festivals and award shows at the time, but I don’t think people really got the idea until I could link them to my 2010 gallery. I remember being excited to meet Mark Duplass, mostly because we had a bunch of friends in common, and I thought it was really cool that I got to photograph Kinky Friedman (it’s fine, you can google him). I got to shoot some bigger celebrities on the red carpets (MacGruber premiered at SXSW that year) but the only really big names I got to photograph were all in the same film: Get Low.
Get Low starred Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek and Robert Duvall and all three of them were going to be available to me for a quick photo shoot. (Sissy Spacek side note: I once wrote a Carrie porn parody for my ex who directed it. It was AVN nominated!) I couldn’t believe I was going to meet any of those actors, much less all of them. Their shoot was my first one of the day and I was staying north of downtown at my buddy Mike’s place. He was at work and I didn’t have a car so I called a cab and 30 minutes later it still hadn’t showed up. I called the film’s publicist to tell him what had happened and he was surprisingly cool about it. I guess he saw the vision for the shoot and told me to come that afternoon at the end of the day. I was so relieved.
When I got there to shoot I was stressed the fuck out. Their day was running late and the publicist said I would have literally five minutes. I on the plus side while I waited I got to hang out with Sissy Spacek’s musician daughter while who was a total babe (and I actually ran into her in NYC a few months later). When it was finally time for the shoot I was introduced to the cast and that’s when Bill and Robert absolutely ripped into me for being late. They were joking about it, and in retrospect it was hilarious but at the time I was so fucking nervous. I had photographed a bunch of celebrities at that point in my career, but it was all at events or in other social settings where I was a lot more comfortable. Not only was I photographing three massive celebrities, all of whom I loved, but because it was the last thing of the day all the people working on the press junket were just standing around watching me do the shoot.
I took them outside behind the hotel and now I had even more people watching. I lined the three of them up for a group shot and then tried to take solo photos of them as well but they were just talking to each other and other people around them and joking around and I was honestly too intimidated to tell them to do anything. Bill was easy because he was just kinda putting on a show, but Robert and Sissy were so close together that it was hard to get solo shots. I got in really close to them and Sissy said “You’re so close!” and I was like “don’t worry I have a wide lens” and she said something along the lines of “I look terrible wide!” I showed her the photo I took and for some reason she absolutely loved it.
Later that day Get Low premiered and I decided I would shoot the red carpet. I hate shooting red carpets, I have no interest in getting the same photo that twenty other photographers have, but if you want to see a big movie at SXSW you have to wait in a line for an hour or more, but they let all the press in after the red carpet so whenever I wanted to see a movie I would just shoot the step and repeat instead of waiting in line. Sissy Spacek showed up first and when she saw me on the red carpet she ran over to me and gave me a big hug and then announced to the other press that I was an amazing photographer. I cannot tell you how good that felt and it’s honestly the only reason I am telling you this part, but don’t worry there’s a funny Robert Duvall tidbit as well. Robert was next up and while he was posing Bill Murray showed up. He of course was making a scene and all the photographers stopped pointing their cameras at Robert and aimed them on Bill, myself included. That’s when Robert Duvall quickly flipped off all the photographers and every one of us missed it. He started laughing so hard and made some joke about how we should have been paying attention to him. Robert Duvall was such a serious actor but whenever I think about him he’s laughing.
Years go by before I see Robert again, but over the next few years I become friendly with his publicist. Because the photos were published in the LA Weekly they seemed to get a lot of attention out there and suddenly a lot more people were getting back to my emails requesting access to their stars. I started working with the same publicists year after year and I would shoot their smaller films as favors and they would make sure I got time with their biggest stars. I told you I would use this as an excuse to tell some stories so let’s do a speed round of name dropping celebrity stories from the six years I did that gallery…
Adrien Brody was really psyched to shoot with me because his mom is the photographer Sylvia Plachy and she was a staff photographer for the Village Voice for decades. Paul Walker was another person who was really excited to talk to me about photography. He didn’t seem to know anything about cameras but he really wanted to talk to me about them. I wish I had that kind of personality. I got to shoot the cast of Silicon Valley which was cool because I had been friends with Kumail Nanjiani at some point but I hadn’t seen him in years. It was great talking to him and TJ Miller about mutuals in the incredible mid 2000s NYC comedy scene. Speaking of which, I shot Reggie Watts with Sarah Silverman, Tim & Eric and Michael Cera. I knew Reggie back in the day but he didn’t seem to recognize me so I didn’t say anything and suddenly in the middle of our shoot it clicked and he was like “Wait you are Driven By Boredom!” and he pulled out his phone and he had a bunch of my photos saved in it. Pretty surreal moment. I had an insane moment with Aubrey Plaza and Mark Duplass (the second time I photographed him) but it’s way too long to tell here. I was once shooting Johnny Knoxville on the street when a bunch of skateboarding teenagers saw us and lost their minds. I ended up incorporating them into the photos. I got to shoot Conan once because I was photographing someone else in his hotel and we rode the elevator down together and briefly made small talk so when we got outside he posed for a few photos. I got to talk to Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper about Bill Mosley’s character in the sequel who is probably my favorite horror character of all time. I got to photograph Brie Larson and Lena Dunham before they were famous (Okay Lena was already a friend of mine, but still counts). I should end this paragraph now before it gets even more namedroppy and self congratulatory but I have so many more stories from those years covering the film festival. But let’s get back to Robert Duvall…
The second time I photographed Robert Duvall was in 2014 for a movie he did called A Night In Old Mexico. We took some photos on the balcony of the Driskill Hotel. Many of the film junkets happened there and so many of my photos were out on that balcony or near by. I tried not to recycle the same location in the same year, but after six years I used that balcony a lot. I didn’t love my Duvall photos that year but the balcony had a Texas flag on it so we did some shots next to that and one of those photos ended up on the cover of Texas Lifestyle Magazine which celebrated Duvall’s work playing a Texan, most famously in Lonesome Dove.
In 2015 Duvall was back with a film called Wild Horses, another Texas tale, and I photographed him and his wife for my last ever Voice Media gallery before the company was sold. But the Voice was not my only client that year, I was actually hired by Duvall to photograph the after party for Wild Horses which was such an honor. I took a ton of photos of him and Josh Hartnett who also starred in the movie, but I also got to hang out with some proper Texas good old boys including Matthew McConaughey who is a wild dude. Honestly he was the life of the party. He and his oil pipe business partner Wayne ‘Butch’ Gilliam must have been at SXSW for a Texas Shark Tank style show called West Texas Investors Club because it came out a few months later and they were the “sharks”.
I should also note that in my original write up of the party I said “Guy Myhill asked me to take a photo of him with his Leica M6 and believe it or not it was the first time I had ever shot with one and ever since then I can’t stop thinking about getting one.” A few months later I did in fact buy an M6 and I have shot with it constantly ever since. So that party had another weird little impact on my life.
That party was the last time I ran into Robert Duvall, but it really reinforced how funny and warm he was and what a commanding presence he had. For such a serious actor, he was such a good time. I can’t say I ever really got to know him, we did quick photo shoots and during the party I mostly observed, but just being around him was enough to get a great impression and I have such good memories of those times in my life and they wouldn’t be the same without Robert Duvall. Thank you for all your incredible movies and the brief moments I got to spend around you.