‘Broken Trail’ gives the classic Western a twist

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With the 12-plus hour days, Duvall tried to lighten things up during the down time, usually inviting cast members to dine together in the evenings.

However, Haden Church, who coincidentally is a rancher in his native Texas, felt it was important to the story to maintain his distance — both physically and emotionally — from the women during production.

“I wasn’t rude,” insists Haden Church, now in production on “Spider-Man 3,” “but I definitely kept my distance because I felt like when they first meet the girls, and for a good way on the trail, he’s kind of wary of them. You want there to be some mystery with who these men are because the girls are incapable of understanding who they are — they couldn’t be more diametrically opposed — and I really wanted to maintain that dynamic.”

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This is also why Gwendoline Yeo refrained from hanging around with castmates during the three-months shoot. The Singapore-born actress allowed herself, instead, to draw on the loneliness she remembers of the time she immigrated with her family to San Francisco.

“Being able to channel that understanding of going to a foreign land, of feeling invisible again, and being able to access the invisibility, I think that’s what these women felt,” she says during a lunchtime interview in West Los Angeles. She gets teary-eyed. “To think a hundred years earlier, if I immigrated then, I wouldn’t be here, I’d be on a ranch or in the mines.”

“I always thought this could be iconic for the nation,” says Duvall of the film. “In these times when people malign us a lot (on immigration issues), this country was built on people that were complex, that had good qualities and bad qualities. And this is good for the country to see, the world maybe, that there were good positive things that went on with these people in those days.”

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