Kevin Costner has been around the cinematic block. He has starred in a spate of blockbuster hits. In the late eighties and other '90s it seemed he was all over: "No Way Out" and "The Untouchables," both in 1987; "Field of Dreams" in 1989; "JFK" in 1991; "Tin Cup" in 1996.
(Touchstone Pictures)
His acclaimed "Dances With Wolves", which he directed, produced and starred in, won heptad Academy Awards in 1991, including deuce statues for Costner for best managing director and charles Herbert Best picture.
The actor recently took time to chat with Rolling Stone movie critic Peter Travers about his new election comedy "Swing Vote," which opens nationwide on Aug. 1, and his experiences from more than 2 decades on the silver screen on "Popcorn With Peter Travers" on ABC News Now.
"Swing Vote" tells the narration of Bud Johnson, a slacker world Health Organization is unknowingly thrust into the national spotlight when it turns out that his balloting -- chuck by his 12-year-old daughter -- will determine the outcome of an close at hand presidential election.
"The good thing about Bud is that he's non living in the past, he's living in the future," Costner said. "But he'd rather that future be on the bank of a river sportfishing. He doesn't have all the ambitiousness in the world. He's not what I would call a PTA dad."
The fact that the photographic film will be released exactly months before the 2008 presidential raceway is a mere co-occurrence, Costner aforesaid. "I wasn't trying to anticipate an election year, I but simply saw it as a film that makes that travel and does that special thing that I think movies hind end do in one case in for a while: You begin to feel something that you didn't think was possible when you went in."
But Costner certainly isn't unaware of the opportuneness of the movie.
"You cogitate at a certain point that 'my single vote doesn't matter,'" he said. "But I think that's when people ar thinking egotistically. When you think in terms of that you're a fabric of a whole, when our whole democracy depends on this one case, voting. To exercise this one privilege that was clearly fought for, designed for, and one of the outstanding things America stands for that your voice can count."
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