Why does Kevin Costner keep turning down Quentin Tarantino?
Kevin Costner and Quentin Tarantino might not seem like the most natural collaborators. Costner is the all-American sometimes-auteur who luxuriates in the myths of the frontiersmen. Tarantino is an overgrown wunderkind, an iconoclast steeped in cinema history who loves turning low-brow genres into splashy, dialogue-heavy Oscar winners. He’s one of the most distinctive filmmakers in US history, and while he loves to lean into clichés of the Old West, Old Hollywood, and spaghetti westerns, it’s more about aesthetics than themes.
You might think, based on Tarantino’s wild success as a director and the fact that everyone from Robert De Niro to Margot Robbie has been more than happy to work with him, that Costner would be the one doing the pursuing. As it turns out, however, Tarantino is the one who keeps initiating a collaboration, only to be turned down at every turn
The first overture came in the early 2000s when the director approached the Field of Dreams star about playing Bill in the Kill Bill movies. At the time, Tarantino was in the most fruitful period of his career, having made Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown in the span of five years. It’s difficult to comprehend how anyone could turn down the most celebrated man in Hollywood, but Costner did.
Five years after the colossal disappointment of his second directorial feature, The Postman, he was ready to step back into the director’s chair for Open Range, and he wasn’t about to let an acting opportunity (no matter how tantalising) stand in his way. He rejected the offer, and David Carradine took the part. Ultimately, everyone had a reason to be pleased with their decisions. Open Range fared much better with critics and audiences than The Postman, and when Kill Bill was a box office smash.
Still, Tarantino wasn’t giving up on his dream of casting Costner in one of his films. Less than a decade later, he approached the star about playing a character in Django Unchained. This time, the actor was interested. Deadline reported in 2011 that Costner was on board to play the righthand man of Leonardo DiCaprio’s sadistic Calvin Candie, but somewhere along the line, he dropped out, leaving Tarantino scrambling for his replacement. Eventually, he scrapped the character altogether.
Costner’s reason for turning Tarantino down a second time was that he had a different western he wanted to star in, the television series Hatfields & McCoys. Yet again, everyone went home happy. Django grossed $426million at the box office and took home two Oscars, and Hatfields & McCoys won five Emmys and paved the way for Costner’s involvement in another TV western, Yellowstone.
In this context, the most interesting question isn’t why Costner keeps turning down Tarantino but why Tarantino keeps making offers to Costner. The director could work with just about anyone he wants. Movie stars are the ones calling him, not the other way around. But anyone who knows about the Pulp Fiction director knows that nostalgia is one of his greatest inspirations.
Having grown up as a movie-obsessive, he still revels in the opportunity to work with actors he revered as a kid. Casting Pam Grier in Jackie Brown and Kurt Russell in Death Proof was a dream come true, and Costner, believe it or not, fell into the same category. In a 1994 interview with Vanity Fair, Tarantino revealed that he had been obsessed with the little-known 1985 road movie Fandango, starring Costner. It was only in theatres for a week, but he still managed to see it five times.
It wasn’t just the filmmaking either. The budding director couldn’t get enough of the movie’s star. He even wanted to be him. “I wanted to dress like Kevin Costner. I started talking like Kevin Costner. I wanted to wear a filthy tuxedo and sleep and piss and barf and drink and sweat in a car going over the desert,” Tarantino said. “He made a filthy tuxedo look like the coolest thing to wear.” All those years later, he still hadn’t forgotten it.
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