May 3, 1989 | Kevin Costner was all set to make Revenge, a violent melodrama about illicit love and bloody retribution, when he was asked to read a script for a kinder, gentler film.
“I told them I wasn’t available,” Costner said recently in his posh Manhattan hotel suite during a promotional press gathering. “But they told me just to take a look at this, that they knew I really liked great writing, that maybe I might appreciate it, that maybe I might want to work with the writer sometime.’
Costner grinned at the memory.
“Yeah,” he said, “they really did a number on me.”
Still, Costner isn’t complaining: The script has reached the screen as the very best movie of his career to date, Field of Dreams, a beautifully written, flawlessly played fairy tale of love, hope and redemption.
Costner already was a star before Field of Dreams, thanks to The Untouchables, No Way Out and, most important, last summer’s sexy sleeper hit, Bull Durham. With Field of Dreams, however, the 34-year-old actor takes a giant step onto higher ground. As Ray Kinsella, an Iowa farmer who heeds a supernatural summons to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield, Costner joins the ranks of such homespun, all-American leading men as Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper — two actors who, not coincidentally, are among Costner’s idols.
The comparisons are flattering, Costner conceded, but he is reluctant to make much of them. Pressed on the subject, he allowed that, “Yes, I think Jimmy Stewart could have played this character.” So Ray Kinsella is a Jimmy Stewart role? “Well, no,” Costner replied, grinning once again. “That’s misleading. I thought of it as mine.”
Even so, it was a role some well-meaning advisers suggested he avoid. Afterall, they counseled, Costner had just finished a movie about baseball, Bull Durham. And Field of Dreams, with its earnest celebration of family ties, and its delicate interweaving of the matter-of-fact and the magical, hardly seemed like a sure-fire commercial project.
Worse, they warned, there were other, image-conscious considerations. After the steamy sensuality of Bull Durham and No Way Out, Costner’s female fans expected something a bit more, ahem, revealing from Costner. But Field of Dreams would have Costner cast as a happily married family man, deeply concerned about his relationship with the father he lost years ago. On paper, if not on the screen, Field of Dreams appeared skewed more toward male moviegoers, not the millions of female ticket buyers who proclaimed Costner the thinking woman’s sex symbol.
Costner listened politely, nodded sympathetically, then followed his own instincts.
“You can’t walk around being timid,” he said, settling deeper into the plush couch while resting his boots on a glass coffee table. “You can’t walk around trying to please, looking for endorsement. And you can’t be, like, making movies that have double endings all the time, to try to find which one will please people in previews.
“Look, if a movie’s not everything that I want it to be, I don’t want to go slit my wrists. But I do work real hard for them to be good. Movies have to be about something. If they’re about dreams, or they’re about violence, or if they’re about love, or if they’re about an era — then they have to attack those areas.”
In Revenge, which he filmed after wrapping up Field of Dreams, Costner plays a retired Air Force pilot who has a torrid affair with the beautiful wife (Madeline Stowe) of his best friend, a powerful Mexican business (Anthony Quinn). The title should give you some idea of what happens next.
The movie, set for a September release, is said to be extremely violent, for which Costner makes no apologies. Indeed, he is concerned only that timid studio executives may trim the bloodshed.
“I think we have to attack what revenge is all about. That it’s vulgar, that it’s mean. That, ultimately, people’s lives are wrecked because of it. And it’s only a temporary relief. I mean, revenge is satisfying on a certain level, to a certain point, in your life. But then there’s repercussions that come after it. And the movie, I think, explores that.
“Now, whether it’s commercial or not, that’s where you really get into trouble — trying to pander. I happen to think you’ll like this movie. Maybe you won’t think of it as one of the best, but you’ll definitely think something was going on. At least you’ll honor the try.”
In the case of Field of Dreams, Costner honored the richly developed screenplay director Phil Alden Robinson adapted from W.P. Kinsella’s 1982 novel, Shoeless Joe. It’s an incredible story, with the extraordinary presented in the context of the ordinary: The voice Ray hears in the cornfield belongs to Shoeless Joe Jackson, the baseball great who was banned from the sport he loved after the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal. Shoeless Joe sends Ray on a quest, a cross-country journey that leads to second chances and, more important, restored dreams.
“The movie is very life-affirming, I think,” Costner said. “See, I think people throw away their dreams too early. Especially in this country. You know, you have to have a car, you have to get a house, and you have to get a lot of things. I’ve made the analogy of a plane going down, and people are jettisoning all the weight, to keep the plane up. And I think, in America, dreams are the first things to go for people. They get out of college, their life starts, and they throw their dreams away.
“And I think dreams should be the last things to go in our lives. Dreams are the things you go down with, I think. Somebody said they would clutch a piece of wood in the middle of the ocean. Well, I would write ‘dreams’ on that piece of wood.”
To his credit, Costner has lived by his words. While working toward a business degree at California State University at Fullerton, he appeared in several community theater productions, and thoroughly enjoyed himself. After graduation, he landed a job with a marketing firm — and quit in less than six weeks, to dedicate himself to acting.
Costner married his college sweetheart — Cindy Silva, who once played Snow White for Disneyland tourists — and moved to Los Angeles, to seek work. He made his movie debut in a low-budget feature, Stacy’s Knights, then hit the big time when he joined the ensemble cast of Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill. Costner’s role was trimmed from the completed film, but not before Costner made a lasting impression on his director. Two years later, Kasdan hired the handsome young actor to play a boisterous gunslinger in Silverado. Audiences and critics took notice, and Costner’s career took off.
Stardom has brought Costner considerable power, which he uses judiciously. “When we were preparing this film,” says Field of Dreams writer-director Phil Alden Robinson, “Kevin told me, ‘You may feel a lot of pressure from the studio to change things in the script. But I will be your rock. I’ll be behind you, saying, ‘Don’t change it!’”
On the set, said co-star James Earl Jones, “Kevin fought only for a better scene. He’s so entered in his talent, as well as in his person, his own psyche, that he can see in all directions around himself, around his reality. He could not let a scene go by if it wasn’t accurate. Not just his work, but the whole scene. That’s what he fought for — not for his own star turns. He’ll make a good director because of that, too.”
At the Pasadena home he shares with his wife and their three children — Annie, 4; Lily, 2; and Joe, 1 — Costner is working on a screenplay for his first directorial effort, a not-yet-titled drama about a U.S. Cavalry officer who has a cultural clash with Plains Indians in the 1860s. Like Field of Dreams, it is not considered a high-concept, highly commercial project. Costner doesn’t care: He obtained his financial backing from foreign investors, and is determined to make exactly the movie he wants to make. He knows it won’t be easy. But, then again, he figures, why should it be?
“I think the good things in your life always seem to be a struggle,” Costner said. “It’s always the things that you want that seem to be a bit more of a struggle than the things you can naturally do. It’s not any different in movies than it is in your personal life.
“But I think everyone’s looking for fresh air. Everybody’s looking for something to spark them.”
And in Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner found just what he was looking for.
