| Kevin Costner's View |
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Page 1 of 2 Shaped by a life in the outdoors, Kevin Costner is committed to preserving the wilds for future generations—starting with his one-year-old son 
Kevin Costner doesn’t do the meet-me-in-my-hotel-suite thing. The 53-year-old filmmaker, who lives about two hours north of Los Angeles, prefers his stylish, nautically decorated beachfront home to the concrete canyons of the city. Walking through his front door, it’s easy to see why. A vast picture window overlooks blue Santa Barbara skies and the breaking waves of the Pacific. As the architect of his life and career, the star of Waterworld is nothing if not oceanic in his vision.Parked on a huge sectional, in jeans, deck shoes, and a sweater, and surrounded by toys belonging to his one-year-old son, Cayden Wyatt, Costner fixes his eyes outside. “I can sit and stare at bodies of water,” he says, scanning the horizon. “If you look out there, you can see the dolphins coming up. They put on a show most every day.” Over the past 25 years, the Oscar-winning director of Dances with Wolves has not only made big splashes in westerns and sports sagas, but he’s also misstepped with postapocalyptic adventures such as Waterworld and The Postman. Through it all, Costner has emerged as an actor-auteur, quietly making a virtue of his regular-guy reliability. This summer, he surfaces again in Swing Vote, a Capra-esque comedy about a good ol’ boy named Bud Johnson, whose one vote will decide the country’s next president. And while Costner keeps his politics to himself, the scene in which one of the candidates tries to win over Johnson by saving his favorite fishing hole obviously resonates with the actor. “I would fish in a mud puddle if somebody told me there was something in it,” he declares. “I am not a purist. I’ll fish with a bobber. I don’t think there’s any greater thrill than seeing that red-and-white bobber go shwwwwwomp. Down.” Costner has been fishing since he was “in diapers,” he says. Born in Compton, California, the youngest son of a blue-collar couple grew up in a one-road town in the Upper Ojai Valley. “I had a Huckleberry Finn childhood,” he recalls. “I wanted to build a birchbark canoe and sell animal skins. I wanted adventure. Period.” He vividly remembers the mornings his father would take them camping in the Sierra. “Our family vacations were rubber tires and canvas tents,” he says fondly. “We’d sleep on air mattresses, and then I would get on my dad’s back and float downstream and fish. Those sensations—the wind and the way pine needles smell when it’s hot—are still in my senses. I have never found a place that has the same feeling.”  1. What’s your favorite back nine in the country? Pebble Beach. 2. What do you prefer, sailboat or motorcycle? Motorcycle. If your hands get cold, you can put them on the engine. When you’re cold on a sailboat, you’re just cold.... At age seven, he crawled across a stream on a log to catch a trout. “I had to reach for him, and I miscalculated. Suddenly, I was hanging like a sloth,” he recalls. “I remember thinking, I am not going to die here; all I’m going to do is get wet.” Later, emboldened, he defanged a rattlesnake because he’d seen on TV that the venom was worth money. “I was up in a treehouse with long-nose pliers,” he says, grinning. In school, Costner defined himself through sports: “I watched the great teams of my day, and when they would lose, I would be sick for days.” He tagged along when his father and older brother hit the diamond, and Kevin became an accomplished pitcher and shortstop. “My dad would say, ‘Be home before the streetlights come on,’ and sure as shit I’d end up seeing my dad walking up the street in a pool of light.” Costner started high school at five foot two; nonetheless, he played quarterback and was a guard in basketball (on the C team). His dream of becoming a professional athlete was crushed, however, when his family moved and he attended a different high school every year, always the newest and smallest kid. So when he “stumbled,” as he puts it, on acting, he used his experience in sports as a touchstone. “I thought, I am not going to say I could’ve done that,” Costner affirms. “I am going to do that. That was a pivotal moment for me.” It is unsurprising that Costner has starred in three seminal baseball films—Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, and For Love of the Game—experiences that gave him a new appreciation for athletics. “In sports, when you do something right, they give it up to you. And when you miss, they boo,” he says. “It’s honest, very unlike the movies.” During the making of For Love of the Game, he threw 300 pitches a day in front of Yankee Stadium bleacher seats packed with extras. On the twentieth night, a ball got by him, and someone in the crowd dogged him out. He charged the fence, demanding the loudmouth repeat himself, only to be met with silence. |
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