For Love of the Game
Dances With Wolves
"I have faith in the movies and I have faith in my own choices about what I do. The measure of what I do is maybe not the measure of how you perceive my movies or how other people do. I take a long time in deciding what I'm going to do while I'm making it, and work it to the point where I like it and respect it as a piece of work and then let it go. And the measure of movies is how well they do at the box office or how critics will receive [it] or don't, and I think those are false gods for me." Kevin Costner did not want to play Billy Chapel in For Love of the Game, but producers Armyan Bernstein and Amy Robinson were not about to let him turn down one of the best roles of his career. "Kevin was the right person for the role. There was no one else that could play the part," says Robinson. Bernstein, a longtime friend of Costner's, puts it more succintly: "Kevin is Billy Chapel."
Perhaps it was the emotionally autobiographical vibe of the aging star pitcher reflecting on his personal failures and professional future that initially scared Costner off. The forty-four year old actor somewhat concedes the point, "I've kinda said as much that it was close to me. You know, where he's at in his age. There are certain things that are not true - I've had a relationship, a wife, and this guy never really did. But you deal with fame and you deal with how he's thought of by his colleagues, how he's perceived, where he's headed, how he battles, the kind of toughness that he actually has. I can't get specific but all I can say is that he's probably the closest [to me]. Kind of hardest to act for me, too, in a way."
Resiliency is a must to be in a business that is rife with turnaround and where careers can ascend or descend with equal alacrity. It took more than a decade for Costner to be an overnight sensation. After roles in films like Sizzle Beach, USA and being all but cut out of Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill, he finally broke out with the one-two punch of The Untouchables and No Way Out. He established his sex symbol status with his deliciously sly Crash Davis in Ron Shelton's Bull Durham and combined that with the All-American wholesomeness of Field of Dreams. Comparisons to Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper abounded, but Costner had something else up his sleeve.
The trade papers were calling it "Kevin's Folly." What was Hollywood's reigning heartthrob thinking when he began producing, directing and starring in a three-hour Western that had an hour of subtitles? Dances With Wolves bucked convention and expectations by becoming a critical and commercial success. It won the Best Picture Oscar and Costner nabbed an Academy Award as Best Director.
And then the backlash. Good work in Oliver Stone's JFK, Clint Eastwood's A Perfect World and Jon Avnet's The War was overshadowed by phoned-in performances in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and The Bodyguard. He rebounded from the overlong Wyatt Earp and the disastrous Waterworld with a shining turn in Shelton's modestly successful Tin Cup only to follow that with his universally lambasted second directorial effort The Postman.
Costner remains fond of The Postman and perhaps one day critics and viewers will as well, once they separate the man from the media-created myth. "I have people that sent me letters that feel the way I feel about it. It's kind of a modern fairy tale for me, but I like The Postman. I cannot not like it and I couldn't like it if I didn't, I wouldn't say I did if I didn't. So I think it's a really good movie, but movies have been marked through time as being dismissed and finding their way back into our psyche. Whether that movie does or not is not as important. I'm comfortable with what happened on that movie."
Unlike Waterworld, which was a notoriously problematic shoot. "I didn't know if I was going to make it emotionally, given everything that was going on," he admits. What was going on was a 157 day shoot, a set that had to be completely reconstructed, a ballooning budget, battles with friend Kevin Reynolds who was serving as director, and rumors that Costner's ego and libido were raging out of control. "It was probably the most traumatic time. You can cry all you want and think that people invaded your privacy but you created some situations in your life and you need to deal with them. I got to the end of it and I thought, You know, you're bruised but you ain't a baby," he laughs.
Costner admits there were times during the production when he thought about quitting but "not when I'm in the middle of it, I don't allow myself that." He smiles. "Listen, human nature - maybe I rolled over in bed and went, 'Fuck! I want to be somewhere else.' When you're hurting, you just want to go to your mom or something," he laughs. "You just want someone to be nice to you."
Which returns us to resiliency. And responsibility. Costner may be a natural born Californian, but his charm is that of someone who grew up in the cornfields. He is the epitome of Americana because he combines a bashful boyishness with an unwavering determination to make sure his aim is true. That is true of his film projects - he'll portray JFK's chief of staff Kelly O'Donnell in Roger Donaldson's 13 Days, a drama about the Cuban Missile Crisis; and produce, direct and star in a six-hour adaptation of Robert Schenkkan's Pulitzer-winning play The Kentucky Cycle, for HBO - and for his moral character.
"Army [Bernstein] told me, 'You know, Kev, most people in your position, their fingerprints are on nothing. They have a million people to arbitrate their problems. You arbitrate your own problems so you have face-to-face contact with your enemies.' But I believe in that - people should know that these 'nos' came from you, and if there's hard news that you're the one to give it; and to remind people what the goal was, what the deal was, what was agreed upon morally and ethically. I'm not pretending to be infallible, but I kinda like sticking to my word and I expect people to do the same."
- Kevin Costner
