GQ Magazine 1991

INTO THE WOODS

GQ July 1991

The morning Kevin Costner walked into his first fitting in London for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, his costume had been carefully laid out on the arm of a chair by the film's British wardrobe designer: bright forest-green tights and a jaunty little felt cap with a large feather. Costner looked down. Then he looked up, in a classic double take. "Just kidding, " the wardrobe man said quickly. Too quickly to savor the comic moment, but the first wardrobe designer had just left- and it might not pay to piss off, the star quite so soon. "His courage," Costner says, "didn't last too long."

The designer, John Bloomfield, is now adjusting a studded leather tunic on the leading man's six-foot-one frame and fussing with a long scarf. In chocolate-brown moleskin breeches, rakish suede boots and a partial wig of unkempt brown hair, Costner looks every bit the scruffy twelfth-century outlaw and not at all like the pageboyed, Errol Flynn, whose image he is desperate to dispel.

"There's too much junk," Costner says, mildly grumpy, putting at the scarf. "I'll just tie it, and we'll pin this here. We can fix all this bullshit later."

As usual, Costner is doing everyone's job. That's why he is being paid $8 million for the film and why he spent the previous day down at the chalk cliffs of Beachy Head directing the second unit and reshooting a scene that didn't please him. In fact, he's not truly happy with much of what has been going on with the star-studded swashbuckling epic, which Warner Bros. hopes will rival its $254 million blockbuster Batman in box office receipts, videocassette sales, foreign rights and merchandising tie-ins-you know, Robin Hood dolls, crossbows, swords, theme parks, Maid Marian chastity belts and Sheriff of Nottingham codpieces.

Just kidding. Plans for the codpieces were scratched.

Actually, the film will be marketed by Warner Bros. more as a product than as a cinematic endeavor, and that has the Oscar-winning director-producer worried. But the fact is, he's just an employee here, hired by Morgan Creek Productions, and for a man with a healthy, well-documented need to control his destiny, he seems resigned to the outcome of this particular project, which he calls his "least satisfying, artistically," if potentially his most lucrative

He admits that the reason he took the film, and the reason he just spent four days in bone-chilling water at Aysgarth falls and the reason he's not making a stink about the problems he sees, is that the director, Kevin Reynolds, is a friend.

"It's a hard line, girl. It's a hard line," Costner says, sitting in his dressing room at Shepperton Studios, waiting to film a crucial scene, the final duel with his nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham (Alan Rickman). He's annoyed that there was no time to rehearse the sequence. Now, they will have to wing it. "I've probably, in a way, grown up more on this film than on any film," Costner says, stretching his Ion legs out from the sofa. "There are things I could not control on this movie [that] I think needed to be controlled. Two years ago, three years ago, in the privacy of my room, I'd go crazy, and I still go a little crazy, but I found that I'm able to show up every day and try. just try." Of course, $8 million is one incentive to show up.

A year ago, Costner would have been regarded as just another matinee idol with a multiplex ego. But after the enormous success of his first directorial effort, Dances With Wolves, and after he made history as the first actor in sixty two years to produce and star in a Best Picture, he is regarded as someone who knows whereof he speaks. "A director can't look at me anymore and say, 'You don't know what problems are.'”

So has the all-American boy with the Jimmy Stewart demeanor turned, overnight, into Orson Welles?

"This is not a perfect situation for me," he says, referring to his unofficial directing stint the day before. "If has any trouble later on, what a nice angle: 'Kev took the reins and started directing himself.' There are those who suspect Costner was a self directed monster: the obsessive nit-picking, nit writing, taking control. Still, says Bull Durham director, Shelton, a Costner friend and fan, "I'd rather have on the side of passion and attention to detail than out of his trailer.

When Costner does stride onto the set, it crackles with his energy. "He's like a 15-year-old: all hormones, says one observer. He knows every scene; every line of dialog line is changed after Costner points out that Schwarzenegger used the same phrase in Total Recall. The taciturn, Texas, born Reynolds seems unperturbed at the star's insistence on trying out a million possibilities ("When I first started," Reynolds says later, I used lot more than I do now.")

The scene takes place in the chapel of the dank medieval castle that has been painstakingly re-created in Shepperton's cavernous Studio C. Costner's double has already been filmed crashing through a window, a fairly, routine stunt. Now Costner will pick up the action, rescuing Maid Marian (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and dispatching the villainous sheriff.

"It's probably the least thought-out part I've ever done”, says Costner, who has studied the role of Robin Hood, enough to know that "this is not a spoiled boy who his back on authority and is growing old in the forest and now starts to kick ass. He makes a lot of mistakes!” Still, the legendary avenger is the perfect folk hero for the Nineties: What could be more fitting in this pos Reagan, anti-greed, fallen-Wall Street era than the truimphed underprivileged over the evil oppressor? And who better to play this man than the little guy who, against all took on the Hollywood Establishment and won big?

Ironically, Errol Flynn's benchmark The Adventures of Robin Hood was filmed during the Depression. The production was the most elaborate and expensive that, Warner Bros. had ever undertaken. Problems developed quickly during the filming. The set was not a happy one and producer Hal Wallis fired off a flurry of telegrams to director William Keighley. To break the tension, Flynn spent the evenings drinking and wenching and playing poker,according to his biographer Charles Higham. The star rewrote dialogue and complained about his wig, beard and makeup. He was so insubordinate that he was brought before the Screen Actors Guild for holding up the production: Two weeks behind schedule and vastly over budget, the movie was spiraling out of control. Keighley was, fired, and Michael Curtiz was hired to deal with the difficult actor. The film, though, was an enormous hit, endearing Flynn to legions of moviegoers. Higham wrote, "He was sinewy, lithe, muscular, and arrogantly sexual. He laughed: his eyes sparkled: his cheeks flushed. He seemed more alive than anyone else.”

This time around, the 36-year old Costner plays it tougher. His Robin Hood is less arrogantly sexual and more brooding, like Indiana Jones. He also has Morgan Freeman playing his Moorish sidekick. For the Clearasil set, Christian Slater appears as Will Scarlet, and in a stroke of luck, the producers were able to secure the services of Sean Connery in a cameo as King Richard the Lion-Hearted.

Costner has been sparring with various companies that want to use his Robin Hood likeness. He endorsed the action figures but “stopped about 300 things”, including beach towels, sheets and a Taco Bell tie-in. “I don’t want everyone eating tacos on a paper place mat of me”.

To avoid Errol Flynn’s wig problems, Costner has brought his own hairdresser to England. He worked with a dialect coach for several weeks at the start of production but decided not to go with a British accent. He also offered numerous suggestions to Bloomfield, whose rough-hewn, historically correct costumes are a far cry from the elf hat and tights.

Still, there are echoes of 1938, at least in the difficulty surrounding this new production. Reynolds had had ten weeks of prep time when he took the job last year. A Spielberg protégé, he had directed only two other films: 1985's Fandango, which starred Costner, and The Beast in 1988. Two other competing Robin Hoods were in the works but Costner-as the producers had hoped chose to work with Reynolds. Costner also preferred the Morgan C Production's script, written b John Watson and Pen Densham, to the competitions.

The original Maid Marian, Robin Wright, dropped out of the production when she became pregnant and the insurance company refused to bond her. Then the filmmakers had to race against time, trying to shoot the crucial Sherwood Forest scenes before the leaves dropped. What’s more, Costner’s Dances with Wolves opened while he was filming in England, so the star regularly commuted by Concord back to America to launch the movie, which he promoted heavily.

So the production is weeks behind schedule and nerves frayed. “There’s not a lot of patience on this set.” Costner says. There are signs that his friendship with Reynolds is becoming strained under the enormous pressure. The wardrobe people have been sleeping in their offices and the eighteen-hour days and the constant English drizzle have left everyone nursing a cold. “You never get a stunt guy to do the fucking water,” laughs Costner, who spent inordinate amount of time freezing in those North Country falls. He’d probably have pneumonia if John Bloomfield hadn’t scoured every sex shop in London to find him a thin rubber suit to wear under his costume.

Now, filming the pivotal fight scene, Costner’s cheeks are flushed, as Errol Flynn’s were: he does seem more alive than anybody else.

All right, people,” yells Reynolds. “Take one.”

The director, in faded jeans and a white shirt, watches the monitor while the cameras roll. Costner leaps up from the floor and pulls out his sword. Rickman releases Mastrantonio and faces him. "Recognize this, Locksley?" he sneers as he unsheathes his sword, which had once belonged to dead father. "I shall never fear my father's sword!" Costner answers. Rickman charges, swinging the blade against a column. Suddenly, he stops, startled that he is holding a nub of steel. The sword has broken -off at the handle. “Cut!" yells Reynolds. A new sword is brought in. Costner leaps up; Rickman lunges. "Recognize this, Locksley?" He swings the weapon savagely. It hits the column. CLANG. The blade goes flying. "I don't believe this," Reynolds groans. A third sword is found. Costner leaps, Rickman swings again. CLANG. "Shit," Costner says, shaking his head. The sword has broken.

The prop people mill about. That was the last blade. Will a $60 million epic be brought to its knees for want of a sword? Finally, another one is located. It looks like the others but weighs slightly more than a major appliance. Rickman struggles with it. The cameras roll, Costner leaps up. Rickman heaves the sword against the pillar. CLANG. It remains intact. Costner fights back, falling over a wooden pew and rolling to the floor with an awkward thud. "Cut! "

"You know," says Costner, "in Hollywood, I'm known as an agile guy."

If luck is the residue of design, Costner's success is no fluke. Focused and tenacious, he is' by all accounts, extremely ambitious. He has formed his own production company, Tig Productions, which is currently wrapping the Ed Harris-Madeleine Stowe vehicle China Moon and will develop more projects in the future. Observers say the seemingly guileless Costner is actually a shrewd businessman who knows exactly how to market himself. He is also self-absorbed and vain, and enjoys being the center of attention. He recalls his mother chiding him as a child, saying, "Kevin, what's all this 'I' business?"

Clearly, Costner has found his calling: In what other industry (except perhaps major-league baseball) can a man earn millions for behaving like a kid?

He has a weakness for frozen Hostess Twinkies and claims not to know the meaning of big words, although he was bright enough to figure out that his price went up every time he turned down a project. He wears a uniform of faded Levi's 501 jeans, white T-shirt and cowboy boots. When he must wear a suit, he looks as uncomfortable as a recalcitrant kid off to Sunday school. He likes to ride horses. He likes to shoot guns and bows and arrows and leap from second-story windows, although he doesn't particularly like heights. And, of course, he gets to kiss the girl. What more could a boy want?

"I trust the 10-year,old in him," says Ron Shelton, who thinks that Kevin is at his best when he's sitting around giggling , drinking beer, swapping stories. But Shelton also says Costner, as an actor can be lazy, relying too often on that "comfortable place." We know his bag of tricks. The killer grin. The eyes lowered modestly. The self-deprecating humor. The inarticulate, aw shucks retro dialogue that has become his own form of eloquence. During Bull Durham, Shelton kept telling Costner to quit trying to be Gary Cooper and to be Steve McQueen.

Still, his looks and his man of few words persona do conjure up the ghost of Cooper. It is this mythical cinematic virtue that Costner reflects, and it is just as much an illusion now as it was then. As Henry Fonda said, "I ain't really Henry Fonda. Nobody could have that much integrity."

Dances With Wolves may have been childishly naive, as critic Pauline Kael complained, but it was Costner's own ambitious, broad vision of himself. "Kevin wanted to take everyone on an adventure with him, and he did," says Dances production designer Jeff Beecroft. "When he says he wants to see the West before it's gone, I think he really does. You see a lot of Kevin on the screen."

What also comes through is Costner's deep-seated sense of being an outsider. Moving from town to town as a boy as his father, Bill, won successive promotions in the electric company, Kevin learned early on that pleasing people was one way to fit in. Subverting his personality was another. "I was an air-force brat," says Kevin Reynolds. "We have similar backgrounds. You tend to live inside yourself. You create your own fantasy world. You develop an active imagination. Maybe that's why he does what he does and I do what I do. What you learn," Reynolds adds, "is not to get close to people."

Costner's older brother, Dan, says the nomadic life-style toughened both boys. He sees the experience as "the ability to develop an inner confidence. You develop an ability to compete early."

Sports became a passion. So did the movies. "They fill that empty place inside that you're constantly trying to fill," says Reynolds.

It was the language of the early films that gave Costner a code of behavior, rooted in his Baptist upbringing and small-town sense of decency. "He's a great chess player of life," Dances costume designer Elsa Zamparelli says. Costner always talks about Doing the Right Thing. Moral dilemmas fascinate him.

"I know everything I know," he says, now sitting in the Shepperton cafeteria, wolfing down a plate of short ribs. "And I'm not trying to seem like a good fucking guy. Maybe I am a good guy," he says at one point, challenging and a little defensive. "Huh? Ever think about that?"

As a sort of professional good guy, he refuses to play unappealing characters, which brings up the question, Why is Costner so afraid of not being liked?

"I think everybody likes me," he says. "Which is one of the sad things in life, when you realize not everybody does like you. It sounds like a really naive thing, 'Not everybody likes me,' but you find that people take incredible shots at you."

Like Dan Quayle, the boyish mogul has been thrust into the limelight, and he's not sure his character will withstand the heightened scrutiny. While he has never held himself up as a paragon of virtue, the myth-and the constant need to debunk it-persists. "He's not a god, he's not a deity, he's just a guy," says Reynolds.

Unwilling to live by anyone else's rules, Costner needs a certain amount of freedom. He doesn't quite buy into the notion of celebrityhood, and he says he would "die on the vine if, I couldn't have a private life." As far as his thirteen-year marriage to his wife, Cindy, goes, "We never presented ourselves to be America's perfect couple." In fact, he's been pretty adamant that they're not.

He has a self destructive streak and says his biggest vice is "strangers." Although his fans would like to believe that he is immune to scandal, he is not. The British tabloids, in the past few months, have run stories on the actor's alleged extramarital affairs. Even Kevin Costner ain't Kevin Costner. But the American media, who genuinely like Costner, have protected him. Now that CAA’s Mike Ovitz is Costner’s agent, that protection will increase. Costner is exceedingly loyal and discreet. Divulging confidence is a common occurrence in Hollywood, so his reticence sets him apart. Still, it is becoming harder for the man who has such good instincts about people to know whom to trust. “I’ve tried in my life to tone down that survival instinct of thinking I know people. Because I’m pretty good at it. And the better you are, you suddenly start thinking you can read everybody, and just about that time you get it fucking wrong.”

Sadder but wiser, Costner has been forced to be more suspicious, although he is gamely trying to hold on to the basic accessibility that made him so attractive in the first place. Another aspect of Costner's appeal is his passion. As Francis Ford Coppola once remarked, there is a fine line between megalomania and enthusiasm, -and although Pauline Kael finds Costner a "bland megalomaniac," friends such as Andy Garcia see it differently: "Any director is an enthusiastic boy with a camera."

And Costner embarks on every film with the zeal of a true believer. "I thought they'd all be great," he says, taking a swig of milk. "I really did. And they should have been great. Every one of them. And they weren't all great."

Making Dances With Wolves cost Costner more than the fifteen pounds he lost in preproduction angst. There are crow's feet around his eyes, and a certain weariness in his demeanor that comes from parting with a little piece of your soul. In cynical circles, the project was dubbed "Kevin's Gate." "Somebody put in the paper that I was going to be screening it in Phoenix at a 'numbing three hours. Orion officials secretly worried,' " he says. "It's almost as if I knew what they were gonna say before they said it: 'First-time director doesn't know how to cut his film.' Had I had complete brass fucking balls and not given a shit what anybody thought, it would have been about three hours fifteen." (It finally clocked in at three hours and nine minutes.)

The film's success was not a lucky accident. "It was a well planned attack," laughs Dan Costner, who is Kevin's investment manager. Costner himself has an uncanny sense of how audiences perceive him, and Lieutenant John Dunbar fit that formula: brave, trustworthy, and vulnerable.

"People aren't aware of what makes me do what I do. I don't have a lot of motives, " Costner says. "I have a lot of ambition. I don't know where the ambition comes from, but it's not motive-driven. "

From being a younger brother? "Maybe," he says, looking up. "Maybe. It's the ability to be inspired, and knowing what that feeling is."

The gritty blue-collar working town of Compton, California, offered little inspiration. Neither did the other towns, concluding with Ventura. Costner, like his brother, changed schools every other year. He was not a good student but was street smart and, although short for his age, played basketball and baseball. He also took piano lessons and sang in the First Baptist Church choir. His mother instilled pride in her sons. "I remember our mother always saying to us, 'There's nothing you two boys can't do,' "says Dan.

Kevin was the third child. Dan had been born in 1950. A second son, Mark, died at birth, in 1953. Kevin was born two years later. He learned to hunt at an early age. "I remember private time as a kid, just sitting down with my gun. It's a wonder I'm still alive. I used to get into tunnels, in irrigation ditches. I had no idea where I was gonna end up. I was real adventurous that way. My mother wouldn't see me until I came back and it was dark. The only requirement was 'Don't go in your school clothes.' "

After graduating from Villa Park High School, in 1973, Kevin strapped a canoe onto his car and took off with a friend, headed for the Dakotas, to retrace the original steps of Lewis and Clark.

Though Costner was unfocused academically, he took refuge in the antics of fraternity life at California State University, Fullerton, from which he graduated in 1978 with a degree in business. After graduation, he married his girlfriend, Cindy Silva, the girl with the "interesting aura" he had met at a party and who worked at Disneyland as Snow White. (They now have three children, Annie, 7; Lily, 5; and Joe, 3.)

Cindy Costner came home one day and found her new husband at a table, typing away. He announced he had quit his job with a construction company and had found his true calling: He wanted to be an actor and a writer. Cindy told him he couldn't even spell. But the couple decided to give Hollywood a try. Dan recalls his brother telling him he would give it five years, though the actor now says he never gave himself a time limit: "I was on fire."

He read an ad in the trades for an acting job in a low budget movie and wrote a letter. "It was the most sincere, genuine letter," recalls Leslie Brander, whose husband, Richard-an acting teacher-was putting together the film, Malibu Summer. "He told me about his background, that he felt he was right for the role. It wasn't pushy, it was just so sincere."

Costner was hired to play Leslie's love interest, and the film was shot on week ends in Santa Barbara. The Branders ran out of money before its completion, and outside producers agreed to invest the necessary funds on the condition that the film include more nudity. Costner, who was never paid, asked that his name be taken off the credits. The film was renamed Sizzle Beach, U.S.A. and is now available at video stores.

In exchange for acting lessons at Richard Brander's Studio City workshop, Costner did construction work. Brander says Costner's desire to succeed "was obsessive. His dedication was far superior to anyone I've ever had in class. There was a compulsion to learn and an acute self-awareness."

By now, Costner's story is familiar: He worked at Raleigh Studios as a stage manager and joined a group of actors. He was registered at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios as an extra. To pay the bills, he worked as a print fashion model. "The little rat from Compton," as he once described himself, was developing into a hunk, and he caught the eye of influential casting directors. Although Costner was eventually cut from his first big-time outing, The Big Chill, its writer-director, Lawrence Kasdan, turned around and wrote the part of Jake in Silverado especially for him.

No overnight success, Costner learned to deal with rejection. He remembers an encounter with a potential agent. "He was such a dick. He said to me, 'Look, Donald Pleasence will make more money for me this year than you will ever make in the business.' I was looking around, wondering if I should just crush his larynx right then and there. " "If you look at his eyes," says Brander, "the door is shut. I'm sure there's some scar tissue. There's gotta be."

The lights of London loom ahead as Costner sits in the back of his chauffeur driven car, his assistant in the front seat. There will be mail to open, calls to return, lobby posters to review. "Ultimately," says Reynolds, "everybody gets worn down. You either become boring or you have no more to give. He's not there yet."

Still, Costner looks spent. It took five hours to get approximately fifteen seconds of film. It has not been a satisfying experience. But the box-office receipts for Dances With Wolves are coming in, and the numbers are astounding. Dances, which was made for a modest $18.5 million, may, along with The Silence of the Lambs, help the cash-starved Orion Pictures remain solvent. The same pecker heads who wouldn't give Costner the money he needed are waltzing to the bank with the millions the film has made so far, the most successful venture in Orion's thirteen-year history.

And now, Warner Bros. is banking on Costner's star power to rocket Robin Hood to box-office records. Reports had the director and the producers in turmoil, scurrying to make a Memorial Day deadline. It is now scheduled for a mid-June opening. But as screenwriter William Goldman once said, the single most important fact about the movie industry is that Nobody Knows Anything. Not Costner. Not Warner Bros. Not the guy who was gonna make more money from Donald Pleasence.

Meanwhile, Costner's thinking about doing a musical. Currently, he's taken the role of D.A. Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone's JFK, and plans to start filming The Bodyguard this fall, with Whitney Houston.

He pays lip service to the idea of slowing down. He's got a beach house in Santa Barbara and a condo in the mountains. He's thinking about buying a farm.

Reynolds finds that amusing. "He'd go nuts. He'd be climbing the walls in about a week. He's too wired right now."

The director calls his friend "a driven guy. When you reach the top, there's nowhere else to go. I mean, how do you top yourself! You drive and drive and drive for success and then suddenly you stop and ask yourself, what am I driving toward?"

Costner may never fill that empty space inside. Twelve Oscar nominations for his first directing effort? Most people would consider that a career high. Not Costner. He wants to go still higher. He doesn't want to be Orson Wells, they say. He wants to be Louis B. Mayer.

But the price for that kind of passion is not always negotiable. Costner has said he does not want to see his family fall through the cracks. As the car speeds down the MI,, thousands of miles from home, he talks about his children.

"I can't justify my time away from them," he says. "Maybe at some point in their life, they'll look at the work their father was doing and say, 'That's still not a good enough reason, but we understood what your passion was.'

Stephanie Mansfield profiled Kurt Russell in the June GQ.