Last weekend B-D stringer Heather Huntington caught up with actor Kevin Costner, who chatted a bit about his forthcoming horror film, The New Daughter. In the film, Costner stars as John James, a single father who moves to a house in the country with his two children following a painful divorce. Soon, however, his adolescent daughter (Ivana Baquero) begins acting strangely, and the household is plagued by disturbing events. John begins to suspect that the mysterious mound at the edge of the forest may have something to do with her ominous behavior. Read on for the interview.
At a recent press conference for his upcoming movie, SWING VOTE, Kevin Costner confirmed that he has wrapped on the horror flick, THE NEW DAUGHTER. Based on a short story by John Connolly and adapted for the screen by John Travis (The Haunting of Molly Hartley), THE NEW DAUGHTER is about a single father (Costner) who moves his two children to a South Carolina farm after his divorce, only to realize his daughter’s increasingly odd behavior might be the result of a nearby burial mound. Spanish writer/director Luis Berdejo is at the helm and Pan’s Labyrinth’s Ivana Baquero plays Costner’s possibly possessed daughter.

Aside from the obvious question – i.e., how do you explain why Kevin Costner has a Spanish daughter – readers might be wondering what Costner is doing in a horror movie. Indeed, it might be a question Costner would put to himself, as he professes to hate them. “It’s not my favorite genre,” he says, when asked about his new movie. “I don’t actually enjoy being scared in movies. I don’t like that feeling. There’s nothing, no rush at all, just the rush to get out.”

In fact, his aversion to the genre dates all the way back to his early childhood. “When I was six years old, I was at the theater and I saw Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte,” he explains. “I had to have a nightlight on in my room for like 15 years. I was terrified.”

But yet when asked to describe THE NEW DAUGHTER, Costner says, “It’s a horror movie. You know, one of those movies like `Why don’t you get out of the house if it’s so scary?’”

And why don’t they get out of the house? “There’s a reason why we don’t,” he assures us. “Hopefully we show that, there’s a certain intellect to that. And then at the end, a very big thing happens. And I don’t know if we’re going to pull it off. I hope we do. But that’s what I like about movies, when they’re not a sure thing. Because if I were in the sure thing business, I sure would have done Dances III and Bodyguard III.”

As for other details, Costner will only say that he plays the good guy. “But then again, I thought I was a good guy in Mr. Brooks, too,” he laughs. And then he compares THE NEW DAUGHTER to the unlikeliest of movies. “I’ll say this and it will sound odd: It’s very much like FIELD OF DREAMS — in the sense that we didn’t know if we could pull off FIELD OF DREAMS. We didn’t know if people were going to ultimately at the end of the day buy people coming out of the corn, have Burt Lancaster step over that line and not be able to go back, and be moved by that. Ask your father to play catch. We didn’t know. We thought that that was possible, we saw it in the writing.”

“Hopefully we’ve made a little classic,” he finishes. “I don’t know if we did, but that’s what we were trying to do.”

We hope so, too.