‘Swing Vote’: Talking Movies, Politics with Kevin Costner
By Emily Christianson, Hollywood.com Staff
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Monday, August 04, 2008
HW: Bud is kind of a grump when it comes to his daughter. Is it easy to switch that off when you’re not filming?
KC: Yeah, I absolutely switched off because we wanted to get it right and if we didn't go rough enough we talked about that…We took two weeks to kind of come to that place where we could be really natural with each other, where I could, so to speak, touch her bottom as her dad might or touch the top of her head, kiss the top of her head, pull her hair and for her to be able to slug me or wake up or raise her voice to me. At first, we had to find our own trust between each other because we're strangers at first, but we bring our technique. Madeline brought a wonderful amount of technique to her acting.
HW: How much input did you have when it came to Bud’s speech at the end of the film?
KC: The whole movie was just a good collaboration…When we got to that last speech I thought that a lot was riding on it. I felt that it was a little bit too rah rah. But it was talking about we all can be this and we can all be that, and I thought, 'No. Bud has to look deeper into his life and realize that maybe he's the enemy, that he's the enemy of democracy, complacency. So we started to take away the words 'we' and Bud started to look inward at himself. We wanted to make sure that he never kind of out stepped his own IQ, his own vocabulary.