Natural.

Robert Duvall even made sports movies look normal

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About 20 years ago, Robert Duvall was asked by a reporter from the Los Angeles Times about his acting technique. Maybe it was the word “technique” that prompted Duvall’s un-bedazzled response, which was this:

“It’s just talking and listening. Nothing’s precious. Just let it sit there and find its own way.”

Nothing’s precious: sounds about right. Duvall, who died Sunday at 95, was certainly one of America’s finest actors, in part because his versatility would never be confused with preciousness. It appeared that he took roles that he liked and didn’t worry too much about history or legacy. His quirks were well known, and it’s pretty obvious that he hated studio-driven necessities such as publicity tours, but to paraphrase his character Mac Sledge in “Tender Mercies,” Duvall generally played it the way he felt it.

Perhaps because of that, he wound up mattering in a surprising number of movies with sports-related themes — not necessarily sports movies, but films that incorporated sports as metaphors for something or other. It was a slice of American life to which Duvall gravitated.

Among those roles, I liked Duvall best as a hopelessly corrupt sportswriter operating during the wanton gambling phase of pro baseball’s history depicted in “The Natural.” Duvall infused Max Mercy’s character with this quiet quality of practiced self-deception; even in a moment in which his unworthiness was called out by Robert Redford’s Roy Hobbs, Mercy remained defiantly self-interested.

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One of Duvall’s own favorite career decisions also involved a sports-themed flick, the Tom Cruise vehicle “Days of Thunder,” which I always thought of as a lightweight. But Duvall was so interested in playing Cruise’s NASCAR crew chief Harry Hogge that he turned down “The Silence of the Lambs” in order to do it — and said he never regretted the move.

The way Duvall told the story, the producers of “The Silence of the Lambs” first offered him the role of Hannibal Lecter, then switched up and talked to him about playing an FBI agent. “They offered me one part, and then the other, and I said, ‘I’d rather work with Tom Cruise than wait around for these people to make up their minds,’” Duvall said. He later described the Jodie Foster/Anthony Hopkins Oscar-winning “Lambs” as a well-made formula movie — “It’s very effective. Very talented cliches” — which was a typically blunt sort of thing for Duvall to say.

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Duvall played an overbearing basketball parent in “The Great Santini,” which is 100 percent not about sports, and a Scottish soccer coach in a 2000 movie that some Duvall fanatics believe is one of his more underrated, “A Shot at Glory.” He was a retired golfer mentoring a broken but promising young player in “Seven Days in Utopia.” (That’s Utopia, Texas, for those keeping score.) And in the Adam Sandler basketball vehicle “Hustle,” Duvall was the owner of the Philadelphia 76ers.

There were others — a few minor sports movies and a few cameo-type characters — but you get the idea. Robert Duvall could play the controlled fury of Tom Hagen on the biggest stage, making a “Godfather” role indelible. But he could also choose to play the whacked-out kiddie soccer coach who trades his own grandson in “Kicking and Screaming,” a movie that I don’t believe is likely to be confused with “Apocalypse Now” anytime soon.

Or maybe I’m wrong:

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Nah. I’m not wrong. Safe travels, Robert Duvall.