Kevin Reynolds: Reynolds Rap

Reynolds grins when I tell him that it seems to me 187 is more a follow-up to The Beast than Waterworld. Made in 1988, The Beast was an intense, no-fat movie about a Soviet tank crew in Afghanistan. If Reynolds didn't mean this film as his calling card, let alone his statement of purpose, it sure seems that way if you look at what led up to the film instead of what happened afterward. The son of a Waco, Texas homemaker and an Air Force experimental psychologist, Reynolds had abandoned, at around age 29, his Baylor law degree plus several years in speech writing and election law to attend USC's film school. Once his student film, Proof, had attracted the attention of Spielberg and led to Fandango, Reynolds hoped he was headed toward making the sort of movies he liked: Doctor Zhivago; 2001: A Space Odyssey; Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; Women in Love; Badlands. He'd written a Lord of the Flies-type script, only to have John Milius turn it into the paranoid Russkies-are-coming howler Red Dawn. But after the relatively lightweight Fandango, Reynolds was ready to come out swinging.

"If I had to pick one film up to 187, I think The Beast is my best," he observes. The Icon executives who sent him the script for 187 were fans of that film, too. "_The Beast _was also probably the most frustrating experience, because it got no exposure. In fact, it got buried. It came at the end of a regime at a studio and the new regime didn't care anything about the old product."

While we're talking about The Beast, what does Reynolds make of the film's star, Jason Patric, who played a conscience-stricken Soviet tankman? "He's a very talented guy, whom I like and with whom I continue to talk," says Reynolds. "We talked about two weeks ago, and you know what I wish he would do and I tell him so? Comedy. He has one of the driest senses of humor in the world, and if he could find a good comedy, he'd show that he's very witty."

Because The Beast pulled some stellar reviews, didn't it lead to a stellar offer or two? "I liked the film and there were people who also liked it, but, as you know, a lot of people who make the decisions and give you the money to do more pictures look at things from one standpoint: did it make any money? The Beast was not a financially, successful movie and I waited probably two years trying to develop and get something of my own off the ground."

The unrealized projects of those years were smaller and edgier than the gargantuan stuff that came instead. "The problem is that movies like that have to rise up through the cracks to get made," he tells me. "The studios could lose their shirts making good pictures, but they can stay alive making mediocre pictures that pull in the cash. I mean, how much has Sling Blade made so far? If the great unwashed out there would show up to see those things the way they show up to see Twister, the studios would make them. Nothing's going to change until the American public's taste changes. The American public's going to have to go through some kind of seminal event that recreates the disillusionment of the '60s, an era which, for me, started when Kennedy got assassinated. The whole mindset of the country changed, and when movie audiences were more open to the antihero, you saw this whole run of incredible films. Now, we're sort of back in the Beach Blanket Bingo, Doris Day phase that preceded all that great stuff."

"Is that why Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was the successor to The Beast?"

"If I'd had my druthers," Reynolds answers, "I'd have done things that were more personal. I had been involved in so many projects that were almost there, didn't happen, nearly happened. When suddenly Robin Hood came together, I said: 'I'm only going to agree to do this if it's pay-or-play and you tell me within 48 hours.' They did."

Given the widely reported miseries of making the movie--the rush to beat other potential Robin Hood movies to the starting gate, which made for inadequate preparation and production time, the punishing weather on British locations, roiling star-and-director tensions--the movie looked disaster-bound. How did Reynolds react when it instead became a smash? "I was puzzled," he says, with an ironic, mirthless laugh. "When you're making giant movies like that, you're making a product. It's all about creating an event. If you get a studio chief to be candid with you, they [admit that] it's mediocre and that, by and large, they're trying to homogenize it for the greatest common denominator out there. I sat there in Robin Hood screenings cringing. Then the reaction cards came back and everybody was checking all the 'Excellent' boxes and writing in stuff like 'Best movie I've ever seen.'"

I tell Reynolds I know he and Costner were once great friends, but that I've never understood the deal about the other Kevin -- he's always reminded me of the understudy shoved in front of the camera when the real star didn't show up.

"A great actor and a star are not necessarily synonymous," Reynolds responds. "The star has a charisma or persona that, for whatever reason, the public really responds to. They like him. The camera likes him." The public and camera may get fooled by actors, but not all of their coworkers are. I mention to Reynolds that an actress he once directed commented off the record to me that Reynolds, not Costner, should have been in front of the camera. Reynolds blushes. "Who was that? You gotta tell me. Who was it?" I demur. "Mary Elizabeth?" he guesses, referring to his Maid Marian in Robin Hood. "Could be," I answer, noncommittally. "I thought it might be her," says Reynolds. "She's great. Such a pro. She and Alan Rickman were just fantastic. Originally in the script, the sheriff was this Darth Vader character and, as I started rewriting, he came out this fiendishly outrageous guy that Alan really latched on to. We felt, let's take a chance, maybe go over the top here and at least not bore people."

"In other words--" I say. Reynolds cuts me off. "See, when Kevin came on the movie, he'd just finished Dances With Wolves and was completely exhausted, pretty spent. The way the picture took shape, Alan came to the forefront and I think that created some friction, not really when we were shooting, but when it was over and we started looking at what we had. That's when things got difficult."

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