After lunch, he’ll strap on his Robin Hood leathers and scarves to resume shooting the Morgan Creek/Warner Bros. movie in a damp forest outside London. But for the moment, he’s still in jeans and two-tone cowboy boots, sipping a glass of milk and reveling in the strangeness of life. “People were really poised to kill me on this movie,” says Costner of his directorial debut. But while nobody has elevated him to the status of living hero, his engrossing epic has proven him to be a serious–and seriously entertaining–filmmaker.
Costner’s success is made all the more delicious by the fact that “Dances With Wolves” is his baby. Rather than work through a major studio, Costner decided his production company would go it alone–not because the studios might have rejected him, but because he didn’t want to give them the chance.
He worried, too, that he wouldn’t make a great movie. “I wasn’t looking for “attaboys,’ I wasn’t looking for “very good first effort’ or “shows promise,’ I wanted to go for a home run.” He wanted to make a movie “that can make your face tingle. Movies should be about things that you’ll never ever forget in your lifetime,” he said. “That doesn’t happen by mistake.”
Part of warming up for the job involved watching and studying a lot of movies. “I’d get so paranoid when I’d see a lousy movie,” he says. “Most people would get encouraged when they saw a really lousy one, but I’d get paranoid thinking, “Jeez, what if mine looks like that?”’ But in the end, Costner says, “You just make offerings in the work that you do and in my heart I knew that mine was an honorable offering.”
