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Daydreaming with Robert Duvall -- but not Bill Murray -- at the ‘Get Low’ premiere

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Where was Bill Murray?

“That’s the $64,000 question,” his co-star Sissy Spacek mused at Tuesday’s premiere of their indie film, “Get Low.” “I don’t know where he has been since he fell in that trash bin on the David Letterman show last week.”

So where was Bill Murray?

“Bill left it all up on the screen,” said the film’s producer, Dean Zanuck, of the Hollywood producing dynasty. “He needed to do no more than that.”

Hey, what do you expect of a guy who doesn’t have a manager or a publicist, just an 800 number? And a lawyer, of course. Everyone has a lawyer.

The man of the hour, Robert Duvall -- he plays a crusty old hermit who throws ...

... a “funeral party” for himself while he’s still alive -- arrived at the Motion Picture Academy in Beverly Hills with his wife, Luciana Pedraza, and Spacek came with her daughter, Madison Fisk.
Celebrating with them were director Aaron Schneider; co-stars Lucas Black, Bill Cobbs and Gerald McRaney; and a shimmering group of friends, relatives and admirers, including Dean’s father, Richard D. Zanuck and his producing partner-wife, Lili Fini Zanuck, Mira Sorvino; James Caan; Delta Burke; Christine Lahti; Ivan Reitman; “Mad Men’s” Rich Sommer; and Jon Lovitz.

Lovitz said that while he watched the film, he was studying the performance of master actor Duvall. “As an actor, you watch him like a hawk to see if you can learn anything,” he said. “I know all the things to do, but then there’s doing it.”

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Even Oscar-winner Spacek was hoping to learn from Duvall. “It’s like falling off a log working with him,” she said. “He makes it all so easy because he is the character. And I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to get to see his process.’”

Did you?

“No, you can’t see it. He comes in ready.”

Under the circumstances, the Ministry investigated Duvall’s process for all the struggling actors out there.

“Just daydream and think about it,” Duvall said. “It’s not totally unlike some of my uncles from Virginia. A little bit, not consciously. I didn’t go for any accent, just the flavor of something. And you wake up in the middle of the night, daydreaming at nighttime and daydreaming in the daytime. And when we went to Argentina during Christmas to visit her folks” -- he nodded toward his wife -- “I sat and just looked at those Andes. I guess I worked on a sense of solitude, solitude and whatever, nature.”

Do you meditate?

“Most times I pray. I pray, but I don’t meditate.”

Amen. Hope that helps.

-- Irene Lacher

Top photo: Madison Fisk, left, and mom Sissy Spacek arrive at the premiere of the film in Beverly Hills on Tuesday. Credit: Chris Pizzello / Associated Press

Lower photo: Christopher Backus and Mira Sorvino on the “Get Low” red carpet. Credit: Chris Pizzello / Associated Press

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