Kevin Reynolds: Reynolds Rap

Had Costner become a much different animal since their comparatively carefree Fandango days? Reynolds waves away this line of discussion. "Oh, I don't want to get into all that," he says. "We were great friends once. It's over. I don't want to keep conjuring it up because it's like ripping off a scab over and over again. There's almost a scar there. I'd rather it just heal." He stares off a few seconds, then says, quietly: "After that movie, I was very run-down, physically. I lost 17 pounds. It took a while to recover from the experience."

Wasn't part of the recovery process complicated by his having been, during Robin Hood, in the throes of a love affair headed south? "You've been doing some research, haven't you?" he says. "My personal life had been in turmoil. Life doesn't stop because you're making a movie. In the end, the way things turned out with [the relationship] was the way it should have. I had an idea for a film sort of based on the situation, a picture with a woman's point of view, like Darling, and I wrote about half a script I haven't touched for five years. At the time, it struck me as just emotional spew. I'm revisiting it again. I want to finish it. The distance may help."

Has distance helped him look at Robin Hood? "I haven't looked at it again. Too painful. When it became a big hit, it really made me feel like I didn't know what I was doing. The most joyous, selfish part of making pictures is that you're making a movie for yourself. Hopefully, other people will want to go see it, too. The most tragic thing is when you make something you're happy with that people don't go to see or don't respond to. You take it very personally. It is sort of a personal rejection. [But being lionized for a so-so movie] makes you think you don't know what you're doing, and it makes you take on the attitude that it doesn't matter. Just get it on film somehow, it will work somehow and they are going to like it. You distance yourself from the material. You don't have the same passion for it. I don't know how other directors are, but that's what it does to me."

Rapa Nui, a South Seas historical adventure among the tribes of Easter Island, is Reynolds's lovably demented attempt to make a picture for himself. Costner produced the film, which prompts me to ask why, if things got so painful between them on Robin Hood, they worked together again. "I think both Rapa Nui and Waterworld had to do with the fact that we had been very good friends. I think we both wanted to think there was a way to make amends and put it back the way it was." Whatever his intentions, I tell Reynolds, Rapa Nui made me laugh harder and longer than any other movie that year. I recite for him such killer lines as this one uttered by the big Kahuna of the tribe: "I don't need this, Priest. I have chicken entrails to read."

"It's supposed to make you laugh--hopefully in the right places," Reynolds claims. I tell him I couldn't guarantee I laughed in the right places. Not without good humor, Reynolds finally shrugs and concedes, "We probably went too far with the humor, to the point where it became campy, or whatever you want to call it. I actually liked the script much better than the final movie. I got about 35 percent of what my intention was on-screen. I bit off too much. I always loved the story of Easter Island, and, to me, it was like a Herzog film. I filmed on the most remote inhabited island on the face of the earth. It was an impossible situation, weather-wise, supply-wise. We had sailboats chartered from the coast of Chile to bring us food because we had eaten everything on the island. At one point, our caterer was picking corn in a farmer's field by the light of car headlights so we'd have something to eat the next day."

And what about Reynolds's notorious debacle, Waterworld? "Do you think the movie got a bad rap?" I ask the director.

"Even before the picture came out, it was buried in the media," Reynolds asserts. "People so wanted it to be a bomb that they created this whole feeling out there. There's a perverse fascination with what movies cost. I'll never forget that when it was screened in New York, they told me the reaction of a critic who left the screening room, going, 'Well, it didn't suck.' Almost like he was disappointed. I didn't do the final cut, as most people know. It could and should have been a much better film than what you saw up there, given what we had shot."

Does Reynolds think Costner had become vulnerable from too much success? "He was definitely at a point where people wanted to blast him off his pedestal. It all created a whole atmosphere within the production, a scrutiny that just exacerbated what was, in the first place, a difficult situation. People like to denigrate any kind of excess. Rumors of what was supposedly going on were just rampant. Like most things, there was a grain of truth to those rumors, but it was all so blown out of proportion compared to what really occurred. People wanted to believe what they read because it was more interesting that way. All that aside, I think you and I have both seen pictures that were no better or worse but were considered hits."

Would Reynolds ever do another big-scale movie? "I don't want to say I'll never do one again, but right now I wouldn't unless the subject matter and story were fantastic--like The Bridge on the River Kwai or something. Anyway, no one's going to offer me another $100 million action picture right away."

Reynolds has to run. He's got a meeting with Los Angeles radio deejay and Dream Works A&R man Chris Douridas, who wove, for 187 a hypnotic aural background from music by Massive Attack, Everything But the Girl and Miles Davis. Later he's got a meeting at Warner Bros. As for what he'll do when he's put the finishing touches on 187 he's not certain. He tells me how he lights out on diving adventures in such far-flung places as Guadalcanal and Tahiti in between movies. "It helps to make you realize how ultimately unimportant all this is," he says, meaning a world of development deals, on-set screaming matches and intimate communications by cell phone and fax. "It's just not a healthy thing to think this is it. You come here bursting with ideas, with things you want to say, but after you've been here for a certain period of time, all you end up talking about is the business. People here get stale because they don't live, they just make movies. It's important to try and get out there and do something so that hopefully you'll discover something new or have something to say."

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Nastassja Kinski for the April '97 issue of Movieline.

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