Robert Duvall & Billy Bob Thornton

Robert Duvall and Billy Bob Thornton slip into each other's thoughts with such ease that anyone with them can't help but feel like an interloper. The two friends have worked together three times since they first costarred in The Stars Fell on Henrietta (1995). It was an auspicious beginning: The film was shot in Texas, and of their many shared passions, none stands out more than a love for the South.

Duvall has consistently visited this part of the country in his films, from his debut in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) to his Oscar-winning turn in Tender Mercies (1983) to his recent, heralded portrayal of an itinerant evangelist in The Apostle (in which Thornton cameos as the spiritually needy troublemaker). Like Duvall's triple-play work on The Apostle, Thornton wrote, directed, and starred in 1996's sleeper extraordinaire, Sling Blade (in which Duvall cameos as his father) - in its way, an ode to his beloved Arkansas. This month Thornton will be seen as a much slicker Southerner - a version of campaign fixer James Carville - in Mike Nichols's Primary Colors. Then the two will race to protect us all in competing save-the-Earth extravaganzas: Duvall in Deep Impact and Thornton in Armageddon.

ROBERT DUVALL: Hey Billy Bob, how you doin'?

BILLY BOB THORNTON: Whaddaya say, Bobby?

ELIZABETH WEITZMAN: How did you two first meet?

BBT: I told my agent that I only wanted two things out of him, and then he could retire. I said, "I wanna work with Robert Duvall and Jim Jarmusch, and that's all I need."

RD: We worked together first on The Stars Fell on Henrietta, and then Billy Bob and his partner [Tom Epperson] wrote that beautiful script, A Family Thing [1996].

BBT: Bobby came to us and said, "I'd like to play a man who finds out he's black." And we said, "Well, that's a tall order."

RD: [laughs] Yeah, I guess it was.

EW: You're from such different parts of the country yet all four of the movies you've done together are Southern. Why is that?

RD: Well, we traveled around when I was growing up, but my father's people were from Virginia. They were Southerners but pro-Union. My grandfather was named Abraham Lincoln Duvall. And actually, a lot of my mother's relatives were from Texas, and I'm related to Robert E. Lee, way back. So I have some roots, and a kind of feel for the South because of my background.

BBT: Before I met Bobby, I just assumed he was from Texas. There's very few actors who can play Southerners who aren't. I think because of his people being from there, he's got it in him. You just couldn't do it otherwise.

EW: Your roles in The Apostle and Sling Blade could so easily have been patronizing in less careful hands. Do you feel - and I'm really referring to all the Southern characters you've created, from Tomorrow [1972, starring Duvall] to Primary Colors - any responsibility to correct the stereotyped images of the rural South that are still so pervasive in the rest of the country?

BBT: I do, for sure. That's a terrible thing, to go to a movie and see a caricature. I think a lot of it is because there weren't many filmmakers from the South early on. And so you got guys from the Bronx and California makin' movies about Mississippi, butchering Southern dialect.

RD: We've always made better city movies in this country. You know, we don't glorify the Ku Klux Klan - because they shouldn't be glorified - but I don't know how much worse they are than the Mob. And we certainly take great pains to glorify them, so my point of view is, if you can make a hundred gangster movies in New York, why can't you try to make one authentic preacher film?

BBT: And I'm certainly not claiming the South's any better than anywhere else, or a better place to make a movie about, but it does have a real knack for scandal, and I think that's a wonderful thing to explore. So movies about the South shouldn't just be about how great it is. Part of the interesting thing is how screwed up it is, too.

RD: Billy Bob has said he wants to write the definitive American tragedy - the Hatfields and the McCoys - and no New York actors will be allowed in it.

BBT: That's right. Matter of fact, we're gonna have armed guards.

EW: To keep the New Yorkers out?

RD: Yeah!

EW: Do you share an interest in Southern writers?

BBT: Well, I don't know as much about the contemporary ones. I mean, I'm not a real well read guy, but the people I do read, I kind of read all their stuff. Faulkner had a brother named John that not a lot of people know about. Matter of fact, Bobby, I've got to get you a couple of his books, 'cause I think you'll love them.

RD: He was a good writer too?

BBT: He was terrific. And a lot funnier than William.

RD: William you kinds gotta decode when you read, don't you?

BBT: [laughs] Yeah, it's kinda like reading physics - Southern physics.

EW: Billy Bob, it seems there's a pretty strong connection between Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird and Karl in Sling Blade. Did you have that in mind when you wrote the script?

BBT: Not consciously, but a lot of times you do something and don't realize your influences until somebody points it out to you or you sit back and look at it. And not only Boo Radley, but Bobby's character in Tomorrow.