The Oscar-winning director Kevin Costner refused to work with: “I wanted to believe in him”
For all intents and purposes, Kevin Costner’s favourite Academy Award-winning director is almost certainly Kevin Costner, such is the unshakeable confidence the actor and filmmaker has in his own work, regardless of how badly things have gone, or are going tits up.
First time marked the charm, when the debutant ploughed millions of his own dollars into Dances with Wolves, which won him a pair of Oscars for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, but lightning has failed to strike twice since then, despite Costner spending exponentially more money on funding his films than most people will earn in a lifetime.
The ongoing Horizon debacle speaks for itself, with the second instalment still in limbo and the other two trapped in purgatory, but he doesn’t even need to be the director to put his hand into his seemingly endless pockets, after he funnelled his own funds into Black or White, Swing Vote, and the infamous Waterworld.
In the post-apocalyptic blockbuster’s defence, it did eventually turn a profit through home video sales, TV rights syndication, and a long-running theme park attraction, but it wasn’t a hit at the time. Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong on the most expensive production in Hollywood history, so it’s debatable if having a better director at the helm than Kevin Reynolds would have made a difference.
However, it’s worth thinking about, especially when Costner was offered someone who was literally at the pinnacle of their career. “Directing a movie of this size is akin to being a general,” Universal Studios chairman Thomas Pollock told The Wall Street Journal in January 1995. “You want somebody who will be decisive in issuing orders and marshalling the troops on the battlefield.”
Who did he have in mind, then? None other than Romancing the Stone, Back to the Future, and Death Becomes Her‘s Robert Zemeckis, whose most recent outing behind the camera, Forrest Gump, had earned almost $700 million in cinemas, became a cultural phenomenon, and scooped six Oscars, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’.
As a producer and Waterworld‘s leading man, Costner had directorial approval, which he used to reject Zemeckis and insist that either the movie hire his friend, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves‘ Kevin Reynolds, or he’d walk. The studio didn’t really have a choice after being issued an ultimatum, so Reynolds got the gig, which all parties ended up regretting.
By the summer, after the film had gone excessively over-budget, under-performed on the big screen, and caused the star and director to fall out, Costner was at a loss to explain why it was Reynolds or bust. “I can’t even put into words why I wanted to believe in him,” he said in July, after being kicked in the arse by hindsight and realising that maybe he shouldn’t have lobbied so hard for his now former friend.
Would Zemeckis have made a better version of Waterworld? Since this was mid-90s Zemeckis, almost definitely. There probably would have been a lot more CGI, too, which would have saved an awful lot of headaches. Still, since Costner had the final say and didn’t want him, he was taken off the board pretty quick.
