Kevin Costner Is Open-Minded About Lots of Things, Except for Tomatoes
In Disney’s upcoming high-school sports drama, McFarland, USA (which opens on Feb. 20), Kevin Costner plays real-life cross-country running coach Jim White, who in 1987 made state champions out of a team of mostly poor Latino students who spent most of their extracurricular hours toiling with their families, picking fruit for a pittance. As a result of the actor’s experience with this inspiring tale, every meal reminds him of the community of migrant workers depicted in the film. When he’s brought a tuna sandwich for lunch while doing this interview, he picks off the tomato (not his taste), and just holding the extricated slice in his hand brings to mind the people paid little to pick this and much of the other food we eat every day. “They don’t do it because it’s fun… they don’t do it because they’re going to get ahead — because they’re not going to get ahead,” Costner said of field workers like the ones in McFarland, USA. “They do it because they want their kids to have it better. There’s something very American about that, something very noble.”
Costner grew up knowing the McFarland community. The 60-year-old actor went to high school in California’s rural Central Valley (which sits inland between L.A. and San Francisco), in a town about 50 miles away from McFarland. He was an active athlete (playing football, basketball and baseball at Mt. Whitney High School in Visalia), and he and his teammates hardly considered McFarland a rival. “I played against McFarland and we thought we were gonna kill those guys,” he remembers. “And we did, but they [eventually] found a sport that they could succeed in wildly.” Since Jim White noticed his students’ speed and harnessed their talents in the late eighties, McFarland High has made it to the state cross-country championship 24 years in a row, winning nine times.
Watch McFarland, USA Trailer:
Childhood connections aside, it’s easy to see what else drew Costner to White. Describing the coach, Costner says, “He has a natural gift of leadership and an ability to infiltrate himself into a culture and a language” — traits reminiscent of Dances with Wolves’ Lieutenant Dunbar. However, in portraying this actual man, Costner was very wary of making him seem too larger-than-life. “When we tried to make Jim a little too exciting or too divisive, I said, ‘A guy couldn’t do this and command that kind of respect and have that kind of love,'” he says. Those scenes were plucked out of the script.
One of White’s main goals in inspiring his athletes was getting them to imagine a world beyond the backbreaking labor in the harvest fields: Triumphing in cross-country would teach them that there were other challenges they could succeed in, and it worked: every member of his inaugural 1987 team ended up going on to college. To illustrate this, Costner says he suggested a scene (which ultimately ended up on the cutting-room floor) in which White taped pictures of foreign landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower, in the runners’ lockers. “[In the scene they would say,] ‘Why would you do that?’ I would go, ‘I just want you to know there’s something more than McFarland, more than [nearby city] Bakersfield.’”
If it were up to Costner, every student, regardless of class, would have “think bigger” as part of their high-school curriculum. What happened to a good-old-fashioned class about opportunities and dreaming?… Our kids are trained to pass tests… They don’t know how to discuss, they don’t know how to look beyond.” Costner said he had a similar challenge growing up: “My dad had one job. He was very nervous about how I conducted my life — which is, I try a lot of different things. [He would say] ‘You do something, settle down.’ And, ‘You gotta pick.’ I do crazy things. I put $20 million into developing equipment to clean up oil spills around the world. And I know I can do that better than anybody. Why the f–k would I do that? I don’t know! But I do… I am who I am and everything to me is possible.”
McFarland, USA enters theaters this weekend.
Watch McFarland, USA Clip - Golf:
