WAMG At The DRAFT DAY Press Conference With Kevin Costner

In Draft Day, on the day of the NFL Draft, general manager Sonny Weaver Jr. (Kevin Costner) has the opportunity to rebuild his team when he trades for the number one pick. He must quickly decide what he’s willing to sacrifice in pursuit of perfection as the lines between his personal and professional life become blurred on a life-changing day for a few hundred young men with dreams of playing in the NFL. Recently, WAMG sat down with Kevin Costner in a press conference where he spoke to members of the media about his new role in DRAFT DAY, FIELD OF DREAMS, and how affected he was by Rock Hudson in GIANT. Check it out below!

There’s a line in the movie where you say, “What do you want?!” Is this a direct reference to FIELD OF DREAMS where you at one point said, “What do you want?” – the same inflection.

KEVIN COSTNER: (Laughs) I tell ya, it’s a thing you have to say to women once in a while. It’s really a line that – I think I’m probably speaking for every guy in the world, and maybe that’s why these movies have worked – sometimes it’s like, ‘What…just tell me. Jesus Christ. What is it you want?’ And maybe somebody should ask [men] that, too –
‘What is it you want?’ It’s such a cool thing in life to get what it is you want. Most of the time we don’t, but occasionally we do. Sometimes it takes a partner to say, ‘What is it you want?’ I think we operate in life [and] sometimes we don’t know. We’re all in some kind of maze going after the cheese at the end and [ask], ‘What is it we want?’ I think I just wanted to work when I finally came to Hollywood. I wanted to get a job, and then I wanted to get the second one. What was it I wanted? Maybe I didn’t want to have to go to work on Monday, or the repetition of the same type of job – not that there’s anything wrong with that. But what is it that I wanted? I knew I didn’t want that. I didn’t mind working 100 Mondays in a row, but I wanted to be done at some point, and I wanted to move on to something fresh. I wanted to move on to something different. It’s never bothered me to work hard. I’ve probably worked on some of the longest schedules in movie history – DANCES WITH WOLVES was 108 days, I think THE POSTMAN was 113, WYATT EARP was 120, and WATERWORLD was 157 days. Six day weeks. And I was directing a couple of those movies. Working hard has never been the problem. What is it you want? That’s a question we all get posed sometimes internally, and sometimes externally, somebody just asks us. Do you have the answer? It’s been a pleasure to say those lines in movies.

The movie is as much about instinct and passion as it is about brawn and money? Have you trusted your instinct from the beginning? Have they shifted? Has your perspective on who you are and what you bring to this game been based in any part on your instincts?

KEVIN COSTNER: Yeah. My whole life has been instinctual for me. I wouldn’t do well in the computer world. My children look at me for a question, then they quickly look away because they know that I’m not going to know how to make Super Mario do anything. I wanted what everybody wants, which was a sense of direction. Right about the time you’re 18, 19, 20 years old in college, everybody that you run into that knows your parents [asks], ‘Well what’s he going to do?’ I finally want to say, ‘Who gives a fuck? It’s not up to you what I do!’ And I don’t know what I’m going to be and I don’t know that I’m going to be a doctor and I don’t know that I’m going to be a lawyer – the convention of knowing that you want to do. I have instinctually thought I could do things in my life, and I’ve followed that up by sometimes putting everything I have at risk – my money, my house – to make a movie. I just did it again with Black and White, a little film that I made about the notion of racism in this country and how we have such a difficult time talking about it. The movie reminds me a lot of FIELD OF DREAMS in that there’s a speech in the end that gives us a window to all finally step through. We’re not going anywhere in this world; we’re all in this together. We have to learn how to talk with each other. So my instincts were wildly at play, late in my career, a rock I have to push uphill just to make it – nobody really wanted to make it. It’s my hope that you’ll all see it. It’s my hope that it becomes as important as FIELD OF DREAMS or DANCES WITH WOLVES. I think it will be. It’s about people, it’s funny, it’s poignant, it’s sad. And in the end, it gives you hope. So I do live off my intuition. I do live off my passion. I realize that I’m not in battle; I’m not in combat. [Some might say,] ‘Ooh, that’s very brave to do.’ Well, I’m not exactly in Vietnam. I’m not in Iraq. And if I want to make a little movie about racism, I should do it. And maybe the studios should, too. ‘Ooh, it’s dangerous to make a movie about that now. I’m not sure about that.’ Even this little movie didn’t have a lot of homes. Lionsgate was the one that say the potential and protected it. ‘Mmmm, I don’t know. It’s just about that one day at a draft?’ But it’s not. It’s really about the human element; it’s about boy and girl. It’s about, ‘Could we not talk about this on my most important day of the year?’ She says, ‘No. We’re going to talk about it now.’ That is such a woman. Jesus Christ. It’s like, ‘Wow, could we pick a better day?’ ‘No. We’re talking about it now.’ And then what does she do? She drives off in a huff. I still have my day to go through. I see her in the hall; she acts like everything is all right. And we laugh. And that’s what the movies, when they’re working at their very best, are about – moments like that where we see ourselves and we chuckle. When we’re in the middle of our own life, it’s not very funny and we’re confused. This movie, it’s not about football. It is about that age-old thing of people who love each other who just can’t seem to get it together for a while, and then finally do. And we adore that; we want that. And we make amends with my mom, and we want that, too. And I tell that guy, ‘You pancake-eating motherfucker,’ who’s been mean to me. And you know what, we kind of wish we were (Costner’s character) Sonny [Weaver, Jr.] right then, and we are kind of glad what he says to that guy, vulgarity aside. It almost needed the vulgarity because the guy was such a bad winner. Don’t you hate bad winners? That guy was a bad winner all day, and I had to nail him right there at the end. And I’m glad that single line didn’t spin this movie into an R [rating] because we see what Rs really are out there. But this was a moment that needed all the salt and pepper, needed everything to let this guy know that – I basically said it for everybody in the audience – that’s what needed to be said to this prick at that moment. Movies can do that, and the difference between movies and our own life is that sometimes in these heated moments we don’t know what to say, and we wish somebody wrote our own script for us. It doesn’t always work that way. We fumble.

Having played so many iconic roles who has been defined by his sense of integrity, heroism, calm under pressure – how did your roots and growing up in Lynwood, California define you as an actor and person?

KEVIN COSTNER: I thought I had the greatest upbringing. I thought I had the biggest yard; I didn’t realize we didn’t have any money hardly, until I went and saw a kid’s backyard and it had a pool in it. And I began to understand there were things…but the way I was treated, my parents came to every one of my games because it was important to them, and every time I sang, they came. I built the church in Paramount, [California], and the guy snapped the little red line down, he said, ‘You nail all day long,’ and so that’s what I did. So as four-year-old, I thought I had helped build the church. I don’t know how that defines you, but it was part of my upbringing, which was family. Also, the movies helped define how I should be as a person. That may sound funny, but there’s a lot for us to learn at the movies. I remember watching GIANT as a boy, and I saw Rock Hudson and James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor. Rock Hudson starts out a bit of a bigot, a bit of a racist. His boy is going to marry ‘that little Chicano girl,’ and in Texas, that just ain’t going to happen because of the Alamo, because of everything. It just ain’t going to happen. So he starts off as a racist. And I also like the movie because it’s over three hours long – duh! So you have this big three-hour movie, and I saw this man was very disappointed in his son’s choice; somehow his son let him down. And the movie has this arc…well in the end, a lot of time has passed, and this family – this wealthy, wealthy family that had nothing that’s now unbelievably wealthy – is dysfunctional, rags; it’s a wreck. This man, this giant of a Texas man, finds himself in this diner with Elizabeth Taylor and his daughter-in-law and this little Chicano baby. They’re going to have a hamburger because they’re on a road trip or something, and it’s dusty West Texas, and the man won’t serve them. Rock Hudson doesn’t get it at first – ‘Won’t serve me? What do you mean, won’t serve me?’ Rock Hudson’s a pillar of Texas. And [the server] kind of nods at the little Chicano baby and this Mexican woman. And Rock Hudson is suddenly affronted and says, ‘You will serve [us],’ and he gets into a fist fight, an old-fashioned fist fight. “The Yellow Rose of Texas” is playing – you don’t think I watch these things carefully, you’re missing [out] (sings a few notes of the song). It’s a knock-down-drag-out, and the guy defeats Rock Hudson, which, number one, doesn’t happen in the movies all the time – the leading man doesn’t lose; the leading man wins. But not in this fight. He takes a terrible beating by a Korean vet, a guy who is a tough guy. Classic movie is tough, too – two tough guys; not a tough guy and a weak guy. Two tough guys fighting. And Rock Hudson loses. Elizabeth Taylor is in tears, his daughter-in-law is in tears, the baby is crying, glass is breaking. And at the end, Rock Hudson is laying in a pile over there, and the guy just looks at him realizes, I don’t want to fight Rock Hudson anymore, and he just puts a sign on him, a sign that said people can still eat there. Rock Hudson loses, but Elizabeth Taylor goes over to him and says, ‘You’ve never stood taller.’ And I thought to myself, that’s who I want to be…the guy on the floor, and he lost. So, a long story to say, I’ve never been afraid of things not working. I think it’s an underrated experience in life. I’ve had some wild, wild successes, I try to clean up the oceans and I try to do things – I am not afraid to be on the floor. As long as I got my girl to come say, I saw what you were trying to do. We can learn a lot from the movies.

What do you find creatively exciting and satisfying about story-telling within the sports framework?

KEVIN COSTNER: I think if you want to make a good sports movie, you have to cut down on the sports. You have to make it about people. You can’t try to impress people with your knowledge and the x-and-o’s and all the details and all the technicalities. See, we know about the sport. You’ve got to know that people are going to sit down, they’re going to have gotten babysitters and in certain instances they’re going, ‘Why are you dragging me to this movie?’ And then, what happens is, you have to conduct scenes that can speak to that person who said, ‘Why did you drag me to this movie? It’s draft day. It’s about one silly day. Don’t we watch football enough all year ‘round? We have to go see it now on the big screen?’ ‘Just come with me to the movie…please, Kevin, make this movie fucking good. Please, please, please.’ So the lights go out and the movie starts, and women start to see themselves, and men start to see themselves. Yes, there’s this backdrop of the NFL, but he wants to tell his mom they’re going to have a baby, there’s a lot going on in the movie, and that’s when movies are always going to be at their best, when they are about moments – I’ve said before, the smallest gesture that maybe you never, ever forget. There’s too many movies that we see that you can never remember one thing from them, and there are sometimes that then you remember the wink. If you can orchestrate a movie that we remember wanting to have a catch – FIELD OF DREAMS, the big moment was, ‘Dad, do you want to have a catch?’ – it’s not even close to a car wreck or a fist fight or a gigantic battle – ‘Do you want to have a catch?’ – and at that moment, we all broke over a single line, not because we all wanted to play baseball, but we’ve all had a life where things have gone unsaid to somebody we actually really love. That moment just opened the ball on that. So movies can do that, and I felt that DRAFT DAY had a chance to be an American classic if we stuck with it. Period. I don’t know if it’ll be a box office hit, but I think it can be a classic movie, which by definition means it’ll be shared from generation to generation. To me, that’s the mark of a great movie.

Your character faces too much pressure. How do you, personally, deal with pressure?

(He couldn’t hear…explained to him)

KEVIN COSTNER: It’s not your fault. It’s me and rock-n-roll. You were perfect. In the old days, they’d say, ‘You’re not listening, Kevin. Go to the back of the class.’ Oh, that really helps. Wow, I can’t hear and now I’m in the back. A really sensitive teacher [laughs].

I deal with pressure. I have a tendency to probably be at my best under pressure. I have said before – somebody asked me this – and I said I actually play sports better when I’m mad. Some players don’t play better when they’re mad. They lose their sense of where they’re at. I have a tendency to do better when I’m under pressure. I’ve had moments in my life where it was all out on the table, everything I had, because I had a strong believe that what I was doing, other people could believe in it, too, if I can get it just right. So, I have a tremendous belief in people – not that people don’t let me down, and not that I haven’t maybe let people down – but I have a tremendous belief in people and in the common experience. I feel like I’ve have been able to live a dream life, but my view of things is absolutely inside behavior, about how I behave and how I count on other people behaving.

Ivan Reitman said he could hear a voice when he was reading the script, and a few days later could place your face with it and the character. So when a director comes to you…

KEVIN COSTNER: He didn’t tell you about the bong, did he? The bong hit he had. See, it wasn’t coming to him, and then he bonged up.

He was also mentioning your characters in various sports movies, that you bring a certain amount of baggage with you and in this case it’s important. When someone wants you to be in a movie because of who you are and what people will see you on-screen as, does that present an extra challenge?

KEVIN COSTNER: Well, some people come to you because if you’re in their movie it’ll help them raise money. And some people come to you because they think you’re the person to play the part. I’ve always been distracted when somebody is coming after me and saying, ‘You’re the only person that can play this part. You’re the only person that can play this part.’ And then if you say you can’t play the part and then he casts Jeff Goldblum in the part. And Jeff Goldblum is a very, very good actor, but we’re different; we’re really different. So if I’m the only person who can play this part, you would think that maybe…and I’ve been in a place if I couldn’t get somebody to play a part, I wasn’t going to make the movie, so I mean what I’m saying. I like being around people who mean what they say. For Ivan, I think it was about the part, and if there was baggage, he cast it aside. For him, I think it was, Kevin should play the part. Let’s be honest, it’s nice to be wanted, in almost any capacity. I’ve come to this restaurant, the girl walks by me for 30 minutes – I wish she’d want to serve me. It’s nice to be wanted. That’s a good feeling. I’m not immune to it.

Do you see your own “draft day” in your career?

KEVIN COSTNER: I think getting in THE BIG CHILL. I think that was the moment.

Even though you weren’t in it much?

KEVIN COSTNER: Yeah, but that’s instinctual, too, because somebody wants to say, ‘Well, it’s not good if it wasn’t fulfilled and it wasn’t a hit.’ But there are athletes you pick sometimes not based on their statistics, but what you actually intuitively know they can actually do. So for me, the box office, I didn’t need to appear in a movie to know that that was a pivotal moment for me. Other people maybe [say,] ‘Oh, man…’ but for me, I knew that it was happening, so I looked at it differently.

Did you have any input in Sonny after you got this script?

KEVIN COSTNER: Yeah! But it was a really good document. “Pancake-eating motherfucker” was my contribution.

Did you pass on projects in Mexico?

KEVIN COSTNER: I’m confident of working in New Mexico; I’m a little less confident working in Mexico right now just because of everything we hear. I’m just trying to be honest with you. I’ve worked in Mexico many times and now I’m not certain about how I could do it or if I would do it.

Why?

KEVIN COSTNER: Because of the obvious problems that are going on. I like my family to be with me, and I don’t anyone to be at risk. Not that they would be, but I’m like anybody else, I just have a feeling. I wouldn’t want them at risk.

Favorite sports movie?

KEVIN COSTNER: I always liked The Pride of the Yankees. I just did. I’m a Walter Brennan, Gary Cooper fan.

Draft Day stars Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, Denis Leary and Ellen Burstyn; is directed and produced by Ivan Reitman, from a script by Rajiv Joseph & Scott Rothman.  The film also features Frank Langella, Sean Combs, Terry Crews, Chadwick Boseman, Rosanna Arquette, W. Earl Brown, Kevin Dunn, Arian Foster, Brad William Henke, Chi McBride, Griffin Newman, Josh Pence, David Ramsey, Patrick St. Esprit, Timothy Simons, Tom Welling, and Wade Williams.

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DRAFT DAY hits theaters TODAY