Robert Duvall Reflects on His Life-Changing Film The Apostle: A Labor of Love Decades in the Making

When Hollywood star Robert Duvall made “The Apostle,” it changed his life forever.

“For years I wanted to make this film,” says Robert, who wrote and directed the movie himself. “It’s been a labor of love, and it began in 1962 when I prepared to play a character from the rural South in an offBroadway play.”

For his research, he traveled to Hughes, Ark., where he slipped into a local Pentecostal church one Sunday. Growing up in a churchgoing U.S. Navy family during World War II, Robert says, “I knew about the inner life of the Spirit, but I had never seen church like that. People could barely contain the joy of their faith. Their faces were alive with it, imbued. Folks were on their feet, singing praise and clapping, shouting to God! The air crackled with the Spirit.”

The actor thought to himself, “I knew the people in that church had a gift, a story to share. Somehow, someday, I would tell that story.”

Eventually, he began penning the drama he “had wanted to write for many years — a story of a preacher. A good man but a flawed one — flawed as we all are. Called by God at the age of 12, he becomes a respected minister with a rousing gift for charismatic preaching. But his family is torn apart by marital infidelity.”

Robert also knew he would have to make the movie himself.

“Hollywood usually shows preachers as hucksters and hypocrites, and I was sick and tired of that,” he says. “I wanted to show the joy and vitality I had seen with my own eyes and felt in my heart and in my life, the sheer, extraordinary excitement of faith.”

Soon, Duvall remembers, “The story seemed to flow from me. I wrote everywhere, in airports and hotels, on set between scenes, even in meetings.”

But when he took his script to Hollywood producers, he was rebuffed with the same response: “Bob, religion is not a subject our audiences want to watch.”

So the “Tender Mercies” Oscar winner footed the bill for the flick himself!

“I’m proud of the film,” declares Robert, who hopes people who see his labor of love “will be moved the way I was when I happened upon that small church in Hughes, Arkansas. It was the greatest discovery I ever made.”