Kevin Costner

Spotlight By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

There are few actors like Kevin Costner in Hollywood. Throughout his distinguished career, he has been a man known for bucking the so-called conventional wisdom and monetary concerns of the Hollywood elite when it comes to films.

He instead has chosen the road less taken and has always consistently picked films that he believes will challenge him most as an actor and challenge the often fickle moviegoing public. And he continuously stands by virtually every movie he has taken part in from, from his highest points in films like Bill Durham and Field Of Dreams to disasters like the bad-press-plagued Waterworld and financial failure The Postman.

His latest role in his undeniably idiosyncratic career is in the new psychological thriller Mr. Brooks. In the film, he plays the film's title character, Mr. Earl Brooks, a golden boy of his community who has secretly battles his own murderous demons that compel him to kill people.

Costner explains that despite the role of a crazed serial killer being considerably different from the kind of characters he's known for playing, he says the film itself contains all the hallmarks he embraces most in the movies he leans towards.

'I might be playing against type, but I think the movie is playing absolutely in parallel with everything else I've ever done,' he notes, 'You could equate this movie very easily to Field Of Dreams in that it's American in its sensibility and yet, at both ends of the spectrum, it should be what American cinema should be, an original experience. I have to give the architecture, that success to the writers.'

Despite the potential difficulty of an audience sympathizing with a character like a serial killer, Costner says he embraced the complexity of how Mr. Brooks struggles with such seemingly psychotic urges.

'I think they created a perfect storm when we come into the movie of not only my conscious is beating the shit out of me, 'Let's kill again. Let's kill again. It's been two years. Let's kill again.' If you've got that voice pounding, if you got that sickness pounding,' explains Kevin, 'And then you have this wannabe that is blackmailing me, and if that's not enough for me, my daughter is having some unique problems. And so, the writers got this nice little stew of problems that bring everything to a head for me.'

Kevin also notes that when it comes to a character like Mr. Brooks, he is always mindful of the notion that even the worst of mankind still has a method to their madness.

'I think that while we can't ever forgive Mr. Brooks, while we can't even make an excuse for him, I think that all men, I think that all women can relate to a man who would go kill for his daughter,' he stresses, 'And so, there's moments that we touch on, where we go, 'OK, I get it.''

'We'll never meet the serial killer that we can ever have any empathy for unless you actually knew him or grew up with him and knew he was abused every night,' Costner adds, 'You go, 'I'm not for saying that what he did was right, but that poor little kid never had a chance.' So movies, at their best, are when characters have elements that we understand and I've tried to do that. I believe you can be hideous in a movie. I think what you need to do is create a level of understanding, not forgiveness, understanding.'

Playing his dark alter-ego is veteran actor William Hurt. The two actors have worked together previously in the popular 1983 drama The Big Chill. Costner claimed that their experience from that enabled them to really work well together on screen for Mr. Brooks.

'That movie, we had a whole month of rehearsal,' recalls Costner 'That's about three weeks more than most movies and sometimes a month more than most movies and people just go out. We invested very heavily in the acting and so Bill and I knew each other. And that's also our style of work to rehearse and that was important to me where Mr. Brooks was concerned and let the director know that that was what was going to be required. And out of that came these opportunities.'

'We didn't change any lines, we stuck right to the text,' he adds, 'And that wasn't really important. I think Bill gives a tremendous performance and we need to give a lot of credit to that script. It was just a really original American script.'

Aside from Hurt having played him, Kevin also says that he deeply enjoyed the dark nature that Marshall brought into the film as a character.

'This was presented as a much bigger movie, as a bigger idea,' he explains, 'Marshall was in a book that I would read as a twelve year old and he was a black knight. But the reality was I liked him so much as a character that I was afraid he was going to die. I never finished the book. So he's been an imaginary friend that's been in my life since I was a twelve year old and it was just a really unique approach.'

When he was given the script, Costner notes that he was intrigued by how Earl and his alter-ego's presence are juxtaposed against one another as the story progresses and how it contributed to how he and Hurt worked together with the characters.

'Not to try to make it science, it wasn't, but a lot of times he was in the scene and a lot of times he wasn't,' Kevin explains, 'We knew that the script was so beautifully rendered, but we also knew that the script was going to have to take a jump cinematically, which was what was our vocabulary going to be for an audience. Because we had to establish a vocabulary when he was in a scene, when he wasn't, how I related to him, how Bill related to me.'

'And that vocabulary was really important, how we were going to really pull it off,' he continues, 'We had to begin it in that car sequence and we had to be finished it by the end of that ice cream sequence to go, this is the vocabulary of this character and how we would relay.'

Despite the fact that his other co-star in the film is the equally high profile Demi Moore, who plays Tracy Atwood, a detective investigating the murders, the two actors never meet on screen. Costner discussed how Mr. Brooks was approached as merely one entry in a much longer series.

'That's how it was presented,' he recalls, 'When it was pitched to me, I said, 'You know, Atwood and I never meet in this movie' and they go, 'Well that's because this was written as a thing.' And I thought to myself, 'Now I've heard that before, you know. I've heard they'd always had six in mind or nine in mind.' And I thought to myself, 'Hmmm, Bull shit, I'll bet. Maybe it's true, I don't know.''

'But as soon as they said that to me, I remember saying out loud in my living room, 'OK, big mouth, what is the second one'' Costner adds, 'You telling me there is one. You tell me what it is. I think you can do that.' And he started to tell me and the hair on my arm went up and I went, 'OK, OK, I get it.'

Also co-starring with Costner is Dane Cook, who plays Mr. Smith, Brooks's nosey next door neighbor. He recounts his experience of how the comedian-turned-actor managed to win him over.

'What I was most proud of Dane about is that in this world of rising stardom and rising recognition, he's riding his own little wave and still is,' he says, 'That's the moment when I said, 'Well, you're interested in this role, then you got to read for it.' Because that's my thing, you got to read for it, unless I just know you. And he put himself on tape and he read and I thought, 'I respect that in an actor'.

'So I know that Dane has a bigger idea about his career, that he's willing to go ahead and do that, Kevin adds, "I've only gotten to see his humor now after the fact and he is really sensational in the movie."

When asked how he thinks Mr. Brooks would fare against the already crowded wave of summer movies, Kevin says he does not believe that the film's merit should be determined by mere opening weekend numbers.

'Mr. Brooks was flawed, make no mistake,' Costner explains, 'Half the flaws are because of budget and half the flaws are just because that's what people do, they make mistakes. You know, people go in retrospect, 'I wish we could have done this, but we didn't.' But what I am confident about Mr. Brooks is that it's bloody as it should been, it's as poetic as it should been, it has a sense of humor, and it is what it's supposed to be. I'm very confident in the movie's life now. I'm very confident in this movie's ability to be shared two years from now and five years from now and ten years from now. I'm real confident in that movie because of that.'

As far as the future goes for the intrepid veteran actor, Kevin Costner continues to be sure of one thing, that every new movie he embarks on is embraced with him as a new experience.

'I think probably what I'm looking at is if I want to play out the rest of my artistic life, you'll see just a lot more control,' he notes, 'Not control in a sense of a vanity, it's just that I'm so perplexed. I've never starred in a movie, quite honestly, that I didn't think had a chance to be classic. I really didn't and you can go right down the list. I know those scripts and I bleed for those writers when they actually see their movie finally completed, cut for pace or for rating or whatever and subplots taken out, because the general public won't follow a story that far, that deep.'

He adds that what drives much of his fearlessness is his deep love for what he does and his continued determination to follow his instincts when it comes to what movies he performs in.

'I'm not a wimp hardly in any other aspect of my life, but I'm kind of a wimp about movies,' Costner stresses, 'I still get my feelings hurt that they're convinced that you won't watch six more minutes of stuff that maybe is most uncomfortable. And that culture of moviemaking is such that audiences ask and tell us how we want movies to end and stuff like that and I'm simply not in sync with that.'