Kevin Costner is name that’s sure to go down in Hollywood legend.
The actor, director and musician has had a sparkling career that’s been given a new lease of life once again by his Emmy winning turn in historical drama Hatfields & McCoys.
The two times Oscar winner took some time out of his busy schedule to talk about his part in the epic drama and give us his opinion on whether this is truly a new golden era for TV drama.
Did you know a lot about this story before? We know that it was a famous feud. But, how much did you actually know about it and how much did you have to investigate?
I probably knew more than the average person simply because I do kind of look at history a lot and I have a tendency to look at American history a lot and that particular era is something I’m familiar with and the participants - but certainly as I went into it, I learned more. And I liked the script so much but I basically started to involve myself in the socio-economic questions of the day, which really inform you why things were happening.
How close is the screenplay to the actual events?
I think it’s pretty good. We’ve made some jumps. We’ve had to compress history. I know there’s some discrepancy but a lot of the discrepancies exist between somebody saying that’s what they thought happened and somebody else saying this is what I thought happened and somebody saying well this is how I’m writing it.
You know, you guys have to do that all the time, try to sort through the idea. But I found the human nature to be very close to how I feel. You know, why people would’ve made the decisions they made. We did our best to be faithful to both stories, both families and try to go down the rabbit holes of other subplots.
The dialogue was great and with that dialect, it was almost like Shakespeare. How hard was it to get into that rhythm?
Well, that is our Shakespeare and sometimes the simplicity in saying “yep”, “nope” is as clear as anything that Shakespeare could have said. It may seem like a simple person but, I think the language had a certain economy and I think that sometimes when you watch Shakespeare performed and it’s hard to pick it up the first 10, 15 minutes.
But if it’s being performed really well, the next thing you know, you understand all the inside jokes, you start to really sense it. And there’s a bit of Victorian language that exists there because of where people came from. But, I appreciated the language a lot which is the thing that drew me in to actually doing it.
The script drew me in more than the story itself. It would not have drawn me, even though I find it interesting. It took a great script for me to become involved.
We’ve obviously seen you in westerns. What it is specifically about period dramas that appeal to you so much and why did you think this was a better fit for television?
Well the last part of the question is that, when you have a story that’s going to span six, seven hours, this is really your kind of only outlet unless you say well, I’m going to do a version of the Hatfields and I’m going to do a sequel and that’s really not that practical. So, to really be able to tell the story, the format fit and the ability the History Channel gave us.
I have an affinity for a lot of things. I love doing the JFKs and the Thirteen Days, I kind of in a sense visited the Kennedy legacy twice. I’ve done a series of baseball movies. I think everyone knows what they are. I don’t mind dabbling in American history.
I don’t feel bound by any genre. I feel an affinity for my own country, for the history and I like to tell it in a robust way. And so, if I see it told that way, I’m certainly not afraid to go after it. It doesn’t necessarily mean the subject is en vogue, but my great joy has been to be a storyteller.
This is your fourth collaboration with director Kevin Reynolds. How is your partnership or relationship grown over the years?
Well I consider him a real artist and this could’ve taken on a lot of looks. And given the tough conditions that we were going to work under, somebody maybe would’ve settled for well, I just got to do it like this, a master two shot or close up, close up, close up.
I don’t work that way and (Kevin) didn’t either and I knew that for as little time as we had for as much room as we had that we would both fight to bring as much cinema as we could to the story. Not let the style get in the way but also, not let the conventional wisdom of, look, you just cram as much as you can. And he tried to bring a cinematic poetry to it and I knew that he could do that. And I felt like he could do that and I basically had to tell everybody that’s what I thought.
A lot of people talk about this time right now as sort of a golden age for television and that in some ways television is kind of trumping film. Where do you stand on that kind of debate and what do you think you can do in the television medium that you can’t do in a feature?
Well, the long format you can’t do. But, otherwise you can do the exact same thing. The problem is that on a theatrical experience, moving a movie from R to PG-13 has been such a giant consideration that movies that really should be R, in order to become more acceptable, get watered down. So the story you’re trying to tell when you try to move into whatever you call a bigger - let’s say an economic piece of the piece.
We’ll we’re not able to get this group into the theaters and so we have to take out the things that maybe an adult audience would really enjoy and really like. Sometimes you have to dumb it down in order to swim in a bigger pool and I hate that.
I did a couple movies that tested like at 65, which is a movie that you would not want to release, right. You think you’d have an abject failure on your hands. And I’m talking Bull Durham and I think Tin Cup too. And yet, those movies played to a specific audience and because they’re a classic, they play forever.
So, you know, that’s an economic engine. But on the surface, it was like well, no, we would never make this movie because it doesn’t appeal. And the truth was if we would’ve softened Tin Cup or Bull Durham in order to reach a bigger audience, I doubt that it would’ve had its enduring quality.
So, why I think the golden age is that you can see these people are saying look, I can put in all the adult situations and language that I want and I’m not being interfered with at all. Everybody understands that that freedom is really a valuable thing.
Like I said, you can do it in film but you will find yourself suddenly at odds with the executives going that damn guy just wants it to be this way because he thinks it’s this way and we’re missing this big thing. And if he just took a few of those things out, we’d certainly be in the PG range and look at what our economic upside is.
And that’s just not a conversation that I like to find myself in. And unfortunately, I found myself in it too many times for my own satisfaction. I think it robs the experience of the viewer.
Is there another era of American history you’d want to explore in the vein of the Hatfield mini-series?
The talk about the Revolutionary War was a really good question, when you think about what was at stake then, and the heroism and the politics of the time. France and England and everybody else in Europe who’d come over as a second and third class citizen, and then the indigenous people that were here and the absolute atrocities that occurred to them that we’ll never read about, never know about.
Those are big stories and so I love the Revolutionary War, and as embarrassed as I am about the Mexican-American War, we started that we just wanted to expand our borders. We have our fingerprints over so much, and there’s no reason to be embarrassed about it or hide it. It’s just a part of a national appetite that we had.
There’s not a border in the world that hasn’t been formed in blood, and we’re no different, we don’t have that clean of hands. But there’s no reason to not talk about it, there’s no reason to not investigate it. And you can do that theatrically, and you can do it as simply as just reading a book.
Hatfields & McCoys starts this Thursday, October 25th on Channel 5 at 9:00pm
Tagged in Emmy Awards Kevin Costner