Movies

He's the same ordinary guy off screen, except he's mega-ordinary. He's what other ordinary guys dream they'd be if they were movie stars. Like, Costner, you'd leap up and find an umbrella for the journalist if you were earning eight million dollars plus gross profits. Sure you would.

In this version of Robin Hood, Robin is first seen in a Middle Eastern dungeon, a prisoner of war in the Crusades. "This experience throws a different spin on the character," Costner says.

"Five years in prison makes him not the rascal Errol Flynn was. Maybe Robin was a bit of a spoiled kid before he went away. After he escapes and makes his way back to England, he's different from the other 'merrie men.' He's more grown up than Maid Marian [played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) remembers." Robin seeks to avenge his father's murder by the ambitious and brutal Sheriff of Nottingham (Alan Rickman).

Perhaps most important of this version's merrie men is Azeem, a Moorish warrior with whom Robin escapes. Morgan Freeman plays this regal, sophisticated refugee from a more advanced society than that of rustic England.

Of this innovation, Costner says, "It's important for me that Azeem steal the movie. That's the way the script is designed. I like that theory of acting-that the leading actor should be considered the support. You're there to support the rest of the cast. You can come in and squash their ideas-'This movie is called Robin Hood, man’ or you can embrace them. I prefer movies with a lot of characters."

Costner pauses to watch as the production's four cameras are finally ready to film the stunt. It's an eight-foot leap from the treehouse to the rope, and Costner notes the point in the arc of the rope's swing where the stunt man will be most at risk of falling.

The camera rolls. The stuntman leaps. He grasps the rope. The rope swings him into, across and out of camera range. Then, instead of swinging back after the cameras stop rolling, and gently dropping onto his airbag, the stuntman flies off the rope just at the point where Costner had predicted. "See?" he says, leaping up to make sure that the fallen man isn't hurt.

Returning through the sodden underbrush as the director sets up the scene again-such scenes are always "covered" several times-Costner answers the obligatory question about the competing Robin Hood movies. Last year in Hollywood, three Robin Hood scripts were chasing two actors, Costner and Mel Gibson. But Gibson was committed to making Hamlet, leaving Costner to choose one. "They all wanted me because I fit into a certain category, being a run-and-jump kinda guy.

"I picked this one because the director [Kevin Reynolds] is a friend. It's a very good script, but I might not have done it without Kevin." As for the Robin Hood that Fox hastened to make in an attempt to pre-empt Costner's film, Costner says with as much animus as you'll ever hear from him: "The reason that one is being rushed through is worrisome... troublesome. That it's designed to hurt us. It's close to being spiteful."(At press time, Fox' "Robin Hood" project has been scheduled for release as a Fox Broadcasting Co. tv movie-Ed.)

At the time he was making Robin Hood.- Prince of Thieves, his directorial debut Dances With Wolves was about to open. But Costner displayed none of the apprehension that would have been natural. "Whatever happens, it's a good little movie. Whatever, I'll direct again." After the Oscars, that's an understatement.

Costner tries to live a calm, eye-of-the-storm life. He even tries to make his hype sound natural. "A good little movie," indeed! "What I care about," he says, "is what my parents, my wife, my friends think of me. I'm not immune to the perks of celebrity; I just don't have a lot of time for them.

In fact, the more I read about myself, the more bored I get."

Costner's family-wife Cindy and children Annie, six, Lilly, four, and Joe, two-visited him frequently in England, and they were with him throughout the lengthy Dances shoot in South Dakota. The family lives in the same modest home in the Pasadena suburbs they had before he became a multimillionaire.

Why doesn't he move into a gated palace at the top of some hill? "No sidewalks." Seriously, wouldn't he enjoy living in thirty thousand square feet of sybaritic luxury? "There are days I could use it, sure. But I like the way we live.

"Our house is more the local Y than anything else. Our Danish nanny -who's been with us four years- all her friends come and stay with us. Our kids' friends are always around. In any neighborhood when you're a kid, people gravitate to a certain house where there's always something going on, where there's always food. That's the way it is with our house. That's the way I'm comfortable.