Mr. Costner Takes a Chance

Carla Meyer - Sacramento Bee

SAN FRANCISCO -- Kevin Costner doesn't make sequels. That's why you haven't seen a "Field of Dreams II" or a "Buller Durham."

Costner prefers stand-alone stories with a "beginning, middle and an end," he says. The one time he did attempt a sequel -- or at least a roundabout, quasi-sequel -- it wasn't even to one of his own films. And it didn't work out.

When Costner signed on for "Rumor Has It," a spinoff of the 1967 film "The Graduate," the script was "absolutely acidic," he says. Then the director, who had written the script, was replaced, Costner says, and picture with the potential to be "sharp as a razor" ended up "OK, sort of sweet."

When Costner gets more creative input -- which is often, since he produces many of his films -- he sticks to the script as closely as possible.

"I am a very literate person, and I believe in the document," Costner, 53, says during an interview at a San Francisco hotel. Taller than he appears on screen, Costner exudes warmth, with a crinkly smile that puts people at ease and also testifies to a willingness to grow older naturally, and thus truly gracefully.

When Costner works behind the scenes of a movie as well as in front of the camera, subplots and challenging content aren't likely to get chucked in favor of brevity or focus-group results.

"Those things don't guide my instincts at all," Costner says. His election-theme comedy "Swing Vote," for example, clocks in at two hours -- far from "Dances With Wolves" length but substantial nonetheless.

Costner put his own money into "Swing Vote," which opens Friday, and collaborated closely with director/co-writer Joshua Michael Stern. He also appears in most scenes. Yet you couldn't call it a vanity project.

As Bud, the hard-drinking single father of a preternaturally mature daughter, Costner looks beaten-down and, frankly, not entirely clean. More concerned with reuniting his Willie Nelson cover band than with politics, Bud becomes the ultimate target demographic when a series of circumstances give him the single deciding vote in the presidential election.

As it alludes to the 2000 election and skewers political pandering, "Swing Vote" ultimately celebrates the voting process. Costner says he believes every vote counts -- no matter how removed politicians seem from Americans' daily lives.

"We have to engage in the process no matter how above it we think we are or how jaded we have become," he says.

A self-described independent who won't reveal whom he's voting for in November, Costner says that whatever political commentary "Swing Vote" might contain is a sidelight to its humor, which includes plenty of Costner slapstick.

"I have always known I could do (physical comedy)," he says. "But what I haven't done is insert that always into my movies, just because I know I can do it."

Bud is even scruffier than Costner's former major-leaguer in "The Upside of Anger." These two characters, along with the complex serial killer Costner played in the little-seen 2007 film "Mr. Brooks," suggest a midlife effort to redefine himself away from traditional leading-man roles. But he says there's no master plan.

"I think it is just the nature of (the scripts) I have read. I always have been guided by what moved me." Indeed, Costner's roles always have been diverse, linked primarily by the apparent ease with which he slips into them.

"He has such different taste in different films, and those films are still around," says Madeline Carroll, the self-possessed 12-year-old who plays Costner's daughter in "Swing Vote." "I went to a Blockbuster, and he had five films on every shelf."

When they were filming in New Mexico, the locals were "in awe" of Costner, says Carroll, also in San Francisco to promote the film. She, on the other hand, treats him like an old pal, with Costner teasing the youngster in a paternal manner befitting a man whose own brood runs from kids in their 20s to Cayden, his 1-year-old son with his second wife, Christine Baumgartner.

When Costner mentions "Fandango" and "Silverado" as previous examples of his physical comedy, you realize he has made so many good films that there's a tendency to forget the earlier ones.

Costner enjoyed an exceptional winning streak until the mid-1990s and the dual setbacks of his epics "Waterworld" and "The Postman." "Waterworld" seemed doomed even before it opened by rampant reports of cost overruns.

Costner says the film never was properly budgeted in the first place. But he's sanguine about the bad press he got during this period, which in retrospect seems at least partially attributable to schadenfreude. Costner, after all, wasn't just a great-looking movie star, but one who won an Oscar for his first directorial effort, 1990's "Dances With Wolves."

"I actually have had a career where I just had to sit back and let this criticism go," Costner says, adding that " 'Waterworld' is a very beloved movie, and people talk to me a lot about 'The Postman.' "

Costner can handle the criticism because "it's what comes with trying to make an individual movie," he says. "Because they're isolated. If you want to protect a movie, you can make four of the same."

"Swing Vote," Costner points out, "is out there all by itself. It's not in there with 'Iron Man,' or 'The Mummy.' It's isolated. It can be picked on. But every decision I make for it is for an audience. It's not even for myself. It's for an audience."

More specifically, an American audience. He couldn't find financing at first -- aside from his own wallet -- due to concerns that the film wouldn't play overseas. But "Swing Vote," armed with a populist sentiment Gary Cooper might have embraced had he lived in a time of NASCAR omnipresence and Willie Nelson tribute bands, still needed to be made, Costner says.

"I learned a long time ago that movies have a bigger life than America, and that they travel the world, and I have never forgotten that," he says. "But since I'm quintessentially American, I am not afraid to make a quintessentially American movie, and that is out of vogue, because it doesn't have what you'd call your international upside. But I can't change that, and I don't want to howl in the wind over it either.

"So the only thing I am left to do is ... well, I just need to do it myself."

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