He may not have bagged an Academy award for The Judge but Robert Duvall is feeling jovial. He shows Alex Needham his Eddie Redmayne impersonation, shares his love of Kes – and explains why Leonard Rossiter was one of the greats

Robert Duvall is a cinematic legend. The man who proclaimed “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!” in Apocalypse Now this year became the oldest person to be nominated for a supporting actor Oscar for his role in the film The Judge, though he lost out to JK Simmons for his turn as a sadistic music teacher in Whiplash. It was Duvall’s seventh Academy award nomination – he won best actor for Tender Mercies in 1983.

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Duvall is a jovial presence, reclining on a sofa in the Driskill hotel in Austin, Texas, where he is debuting Wild Horses, a film he wrote, directs and stars in. “I didn’t mind losing to him,” he says of Simmons. “I lost to others where I thought it was a joke, but he was very good, and I liked the movie a lot.” Whiplash wasn’t his favourite film last year though – he loved Ida, which won best foreign language film. “I saw it twice! And I loved Wild Tales, from Argentina. It’s the wacko-est movie you’ll ever see.” Its director, Damián Szifron, he adds, is “coming to America, he’s making a western – he wants me to read it. Very interesting guy.”

Duvall is 84. His first film role was as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962. Since then, he’s chalked up an astonishing list of classic character roles, including Tom Hagen, the Corleone family’s lawyer in The Godfather. The New York Times once called Duvall the American Olivier, but today he modestly waves that away with a “whatever”.

In conversation, though, it’s immediately evident that Duvall has a forensic feel for acting. He believes we’re in a golden age. “To me, the young actors are better than ever,” he says. “McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club – Brando would have taken his hat off if he was alive.” Brando, he adds, used to watch Candid Camera to study people’s reactions to bizarre scenarios.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest James Franco, Robert Duvall and Josh Hartnett in Wild Horses

Wild Horses is a western about an elderly ranchman, played by Duvall, whose son comes home years after an incident in which a local boy he was in love with disappeared, chased away by the disgusted patriarch. It combines non-actors like Duvall’s wife, Luciana Duvall, who plays a Texas ranger, with stars such as James Franco and Josh Hartnett. Duvall was inspired to mix non-actors – including some real-life Texas rangers – with actors by the example of his cinematic hero Ken Loach. “I came out of Kes years ago and said, ‘I know it’s not a documentary, I know it’s fiction, but how do you get that fine line?’ A first-time actor might have a purity, no bad habits, and he might put the professional actor on notice. What impressed me more than any other director of the time was what he did in that movie.”

Hearing Duvall, who has worked with so many of the greats, big up Loach is a salutary reminder of the director’s brilliance. But he doesn’t stop there. Saying that he could have fitted in in the UK, as he’s a character actor who got his start in the theatre, Duvall then pays homage to Leonard Rossiter, remembered in the UK as the star of sitcoms Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. “One of the greatest things I’ve ever seen on stage was Leonard Rossiter doing [Bertolt Brecht’s] Arturo Ui in England years ago,” he says. Given that Rossiter took the role in 1969, this is praise indeed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Robert Duvall, with Tess Harper, in his Oscar-winning role as a country singer in Tender Mercies. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex

That said, Duvall doesn’t splash around his admiration lightly. Though he is thrilled that black actors are now getting their due, he gives short shrift to the idea that the Academy showed its prejudice when only nominating white actors this year.

“So what?” he shouts. “They weren’t up for Oscars because maybe it wasn’t as good. Maybe the guy who did this was better than they were!” He puts his hands around his throat in a strangulated – and funny – impression of Eddie Redmayne doing Stephen Hawking. “You know what I’m saying? I mean, the guy who they brought over from England to play Martin Luther King was good,” Duvall says, meaning David Oyelowo. “He didn’t have the musicality that King had when he preached as a southern black man from America. But it was a well-made movie.”

As Hollywood royalty in his ninth decade, Duvall is well past feeling that he needs to self-censor. Like Kate Winslet in Extras, he suspects the Academy particularly admires actors who play disabled people. Going back to Redmayne, he says: “I thought whatshisname should have won, Michael Keaton, but the kid was good. It’s funny, I was down in Palm Springs and I’m watching this kid get his picture taken, and I’m saying, ‘All you’ve got to do is go [does Hawking impression] and you win an Oscar for it.’” Behind him, someone laughed. It turned out to be James Marsh, director of The Theory of Everything, the film in question. “He laughed and laughed. But it’s true in a way – look at Daniel Day-Lewis” – who won an Oscar for My Left Foot.

It’s exhilarating to spend a few minutes in Duvall’s company. He’s still working; he has complete confidence in his abilities as an actor, and he calls it like he sees it.