EMPIRE MAGAZINE

"As associate producer and star, we didn't have much effect on the movie," says Wilson of Revenge. "Kevin and I both wanted more control over the projects we were involved in.” And that they got, with the partnership taking total control over Dances With Wolves, and with their roles becoming more and more defined within Tig - Costner the creative driving force Wilson the voice of sweet reason.

"I fought to keep the budget down,” recalls Wilson of the 130-day shoot in the wilderness of North Dakota. "Kevin wanted a lot, and him being a perfectionist slowed things down. We went 23 days over schedule. Around the seventh week I told him that if he was going to keep that schedule, we would go over by almost four weeks of shooting. He agreed to defer a portion of his salary and put it towards the completion of the picture.'

A decision which, of course, proved canny in the extreme, with Costner's final income from the movie being estimated at almost $90 million. More to the point, however, Costner finally proved to himself - and, while he was about it, to everyone else - that he was more than just a movie star; he was a filmmaker.

"Everything about filming - the camera, the angles, the pace, the motion, the characters has always come naturally to me,' he considers. Indeed, to prove his point, he locked swords in catastrophic fashion with his friend and colleague Kevin Reynolds, “director" of Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, with the latter being physically locked out of the editing suite as Costner and the Morgan Creek executives tampered and tinkered with the film. Needless to say, the result was a monster hit, with Reynolds retreating to London to write “small movies" and refusing to enter a cinema to see the final version of Robin Hood, insisting to the end that his version would have been even more successful than Costner's.

Now it's happening all over again. After British director Mick Jackson Chattahoochee, L. A. Story) had shepherded The Bodyguard through production and 12 laborious weeks of editing, the three terrifyingly heavyweight producers - Costner, Wilson and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan - re-edited film after Jackson’s director's cut had been, submitted to the studio and been found wanting. The embittered Jackson, naturally enough, "did a Reynolds” , went to ground, and has refused to promote or even discuss the film with members of the world's press.

"The only major problem was the length," insists Jim Wilson of the trio's interference in what, one supposes, should have been Jackson’s film. "We just shortened it considerably, by around 15 or 20 minutes. The director's cut was just too long. Kevin, Larry and I have all directed movies, and I was involved in the exact same way on Dances. This is a common thing.”

Kevin Costner says that in effect The Bodyguard was directed by committee - a state of affairs that Mick Jackson could presumably have seen coming, and can scarcely have relished, given the vastness of the egos on display, and the combined experience of the other players.

“All four of us worked on this film together,' he says sweetly, damning Jackson with virtually invisible praise. "Sometimes Mick's suggestions were listened to and sometimes they were not. But no one put a gun to another persons, head and said, ‘Do this.' "

Indeed, it seems that Tig is among the few Hollywood production companies that is prepared to actually come out and admit that, the luxury of a director's cut is reserved only for the cream of the A-list, with your average jobbing megaphone persons all too often having their wings clipped by producers and besuited executives.

"I'm so tired of hearing about the auteur vision of film, " moans Wilson, "where the director absolutely has to have the final cut with no input from other people involved in the production. Editing is a collaborative process, and that's what happened on this movie."

Except, of course, that nothing is ever that simple, with veteran composer John Barry dropping out of a deal to score the movie, muttering that there was "so much re-editing" involved that he simply couldn't get his work done.

“There were,” he says baldly, "too many directors . . .”

Even by Hollywood standards, The Bodyguard has taken an unusually long time to get to the screen - 15 years to be precise. Written in 1977 by Lawrence Kasdan, MY Bodyguard, as it was then called, was the first film script the writer-director of The Big Chill, The Accidental Tourist and Grand Canyon ever sold.

"After five unsold scripts and five years as an advertising copywriter, My Bodyguard got me an agent who then submitted it 67 times over a two year period," recalls Kasdan. "We'd wait for a studio administration to change, then submit it again."

The script - the tale of a female comedian and her minder who hate each other's guts - was finally optioned in the mid-70s by Warner Brothers for $20,000, on condition that Kasdan rewrote it as a vehicle for Diana Ross, who'd made something of a splash with Lady Sings The Blues. After the comedian had turned into Ross, Steve McQueen and Ryan O'Neal were considered for the role of the bodyguard, but the movie ran into one production difficulty after another.

"I was eager to direct the movie," recalls Kasdan. "But nobody would let me until I'd made my name with The Big Chill. By then, I'd lost interest in making it."

The biggest problem in getting the film to the screen, however, was, according to Ryan O'Neal at the time, that Diana Ross, didn't want to do the sex scenes, didn't want to swear and didn't want to be seen as being too black." The endless rewrites failed to satisfy the legendary crooner, and My Bodyguard was booted into touch.

Fifteen years on, and diva Whitney Houston steps into Ross' shoes as Rachel Marron, a glamorous pop star who hires Costner as a bodyguard to protect her from fruitcake fans. Like Diana, Whitney refused to get her kit off ("I'm not hired to show my ass"), cut the profanity down to the bone ("It's not very ladylike, is it?'), and insisted on the love scenes being toned down to virtual non-existence.

"Not true," counters Kevin Costner gallantly. "Steamier footage was shot, but it was really out of keeping with the tone of the film, which is much sweeter than that."

As Costner sits here in the plush opulence of West Hollywood's Bel Age hotel, clad in blue jeans, plaid shirt and cowboy boots, and listening intently to your correspondent's every query, there is no doubt that here is a man who means business, and who knows exactly why he chooses the jobs he does.

“After JFK I wanted to make a movie," he reasons. "This is a popcorn movie, and I don't call it that in order to diminish it. It was written by one of the best screenwriters that Hollywood had ever produced, and we have taken a personality I think you really want to see Whitney - and created an expectation.”

Indeed, there are fewer more successful pop singers Costner could have chosen for the role. At 29, Whitney Houston (whose aunt is Dionne Warwick) has produced three albums, which sold -more than 40 million copies between them, and she is the only artist in history to have had seven consecutive number ones in the US. She may have bugger all acting experience, but the woman is a star.

“I chose Whitney because she's a beautiful woman and a superstar singer," beams Costner happily. "And she's playing something she's very familiar with. I think she's done a marvelous job."

A success which, naturally enough, can be laid at the door of not so much the director of The Bodyguard, but the movie’s leading man.

"Kevin gave me more that the director did," enthuses Houston, whose first single from the movie, Dolly Parton's I Will Always Love on, is already, if you must, Top Ten Stateside. He spent a lot of time with me, advising me on how to handle the next sequence, how to deliver lines, the sort of reaction I should show. He really took me by the hand, and I think I did pretty damn good."

So are we witnessing the birth of Houston as an actress, Cher-style? "I'm basically a singer and performer," says Houston, five months pregnant and recently hitched to Bobby Brown. That's how I want to continue, with the occasional movie thrown in..."

“I’m surprised that people didn't recognise that Lawrence had written a good script," says Kevin Costner of the many years The Bodyguard languished in development hell until Costner happened across it and persuaded Kasdan to update it to the 90s. "Then again, I'm always surprised by what people think are good scripts. I get a lot of them sent to me and mostly I don't find them well written at all."

One dashed useful thing about The Bodyguard is that once again Kevin gets to play a morally unimpeachable fellow overflowing with honesty and integrity, not unlike nearly every role he's ever played, the most recent, of course, being Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone's JFK.

"I don't think that movie was unfairly criticized," says Costner of the furor surrounding Stone's masterpiece. "I looked at the story in terms of what it was saying and ultimately I was able to make the movie. But as always, I chose to make the movie as a movie, not as a statement. That a film creates a debate is satisfying to anyone who spends a year making a movie, or four months working on it as an actor. It's nice when our movie isn't going quietly into the night."

For the past four years the $12.5 million-a picture star has been developing yet another tale that is unlikely to do such a thing, an almost certainly-controversial-and-successful-and probably-Oscar-winning film version of the life of Michael Collins, the Irish patriot who was branded a traitor and murdered by a faction of he IRA for accepting a treaty with London that sanctioned the partition of Ireland. Costner plans to direct and star in the film next summer.

"Directing is like a great love of your life and I'd only direct a movie that I fell totally in love with," he considers. "Directing is time-consuming and exhausting, but what really scares me is when I watch a good film and I play leap-frog with the director trying to guess where he'll put the camera next. I'm never right.”

Such a statement could not, though, be applied to Costner's recent movie choices, which have, with the exception of Revenge, been either critical or commercial triumphs, and usually both.

"I've been very lucky with stuff," he says, grey-blue eyes hidden behind horn-rimmed specs. "A lot of the movies I've ended up doing, no one wanted to make. Nobody wanted to make No Way Out, nobody wanted to make Bull Durham, or Field Of Dreams, and for the longest time nobody wanted to make Dances. And, of course, The Bodyguard took 15 years to make it to the screen."

So just what criteria does Mr. Midas Touch use to choose his projects?

"I've always been listening to my inner voice, he says, "I was a loner as a kid, I still am. I've always been on the outside, and I went into movies because I wanted to give people enjoyment so that I could win their approval."

Since The Untouchables in 1987, Costner has been a very large star indeed, winning approval wherever he goes - a state of affairs, he readily admits, that has utterly affected his life.

"Sometimes it scares me because my life is certainly full of stuff that I never, ever bargained for," he sighs. "You go from being a supporting actor to being a leading man, to being a star, to being a megastar. But the baggage comes with it, and let's just say this, I'm a happy man, but I wouldn't wish this life on anybody…"

And of all the horrific nightmares of being fantastically successful and wealthy - and a looker to boot - perhaps the most distressing is the desire of all and sundry to knock you down a peg or two, a situation that could conceivably occur if The Bodyguard falls to cut the box office or critical mustard, bringing to an end Kevin Costner's incredible run of successes.

"Why is it that people expect you to pay for your luck?” he asks. "They put you up there and then wait for you fall. They want to see your marriage collapse and drugs destroy, you, and then they'll be able to say, 'Kevin had too much success too fast, now he's paying for it.' ”

And is that ever likely to happen to Costner? Will he, in fact, be toppled from his pedestal? "I can be pushed about a hundred yards, but there's one inch that's really mine, and it's not a great idea for anybody to get in there," he says. "I have a real-ugly streak, and I'm kind of afraid of it myself. . .”