Edward Douglas von comingsoon.net hatte die Chance sich mit Niki Caro über ihren neuen Film McFarland, USA zu unterhalten, in dem Kevin Costner einen Trainer spielt, der in dem ruhigen Örtchen McFarland ein aus mexikanischen Teenagern bestehendes Team von Läufern zusammenstellt, weil er sieht dass das örtliche High School Football Team nicht unbedingt erfolgsversprechend daherkommt. Niki Caro ist vor allem für ihren 2002er Erfolg Whale Rider bekannt. Mit McFarland, USA hat sie die Regie in einer Disney-Studio-Produktion übernommen. Hier einige Ausschnitte aus dem Interview.
Caro über die Ähnlichkeiten zu ihrem Erstlingswerk Whale Rider:
It's a culture not my own. It's a real place and a real story, and that's where I think I work best, and it's certainly where I'm most inspired as a filmmaker when I can go into a real community and collaborate with them in the telling of one of their stories. This was a very, very good experience for me. I would say Whale Rider is always going to be my baby and incredibly special, because I'm a New Zealander, but this comes very, very close as an experience.
Über die Dreharbeiten, die wirklich in McFarland stattgefunden haben, wo Caro auch auf den wirklichen Mann namens Jim White getroffen ist, der im Film von Kevin Costner verkörpert wird:
The way that I work is just to kind of go there and Jim was so great. He and wife Cheryl hosted me, and I stayed with them and they took me all around, and I met a lot of people and I put out to them any questions I liked about their experience and about running and competing, about their relationship with Jim. But then there's the whole other layer about being in McFarland and looking and listening and eating-because the food there is really good!-and just absorbing all the texture of that life and observing the light and the color. I can bring all of my skill as a filmmaker and all of the resources that the studio offers, but the aim was to go there and make something really authentic and really specific. And that's exactly what we did. If you go to McFarland, it's going to look like that with a lot of the same people on the street that you will see in the movie.
Über die Probleme beim Casting und das erst recht späte Hinzukommen von Kevin Costner:
It was a really big process to cast the seven runners. It's way harder than you might think. Even in a big city like Los Angeles, to find seven teenage boys who were all Mexican who are bilingual who can act and also run really fast. Believe me, that's a shallow pool. So we had to go out and do open calls in places like, obviously Bakersfield, Los Angeles, San Diego, Texas and that started more than a year before Kevin came on. By the time we got Kevin to commit, we were pretty far down that road. The interesting thing was that of all the places we went to, and all of the thousands of kids we saw, we ended up casting three from McFarland. There they were, right under our noses.
Und natürlich noch über die Zusammenarbeit mit besagten Kevin Costner:
[...] when you get the opportunity and the privilege to work with somebody like Costner, you don't really know how it's going to go, because for sure, he is one of the great movie stars. Unquestionably the king of the sports movie genre, but a testament to what a good man he is, that he showed up for us absolutely not as a movie star. It would have been enough that he showed up as an actor, but that he showed up as himself, as the man he is, was so moving to me. It was so special watching the tender way he took those boys under his wing, and he became their coach off-screen in a way, because he's such a seasoned actor and because they really looked up to him and because he could give them something that nobody else could. They were taught impeccably well, and they were really, really well looked after by him.
Checkt das gesamte Interview auf comingsoon.net aus. Die Regisseurin spricht hier einen sehr guten Punkt an: Kevin Costner ist so etwas wie der König der Sportfilme. Von Feld der Träume bis Draft Day. Was ist euer Favorite Film mit Kevin Costner, vielleicht ist es ja auch gar kein Sportfilm?! Hinterlasst eure Meinung in den Kommentaren und auf geht's zur heiteren Diskussion. Natürlich könnt ihr mir auch gerne auf @Facebook oder @Twitter schreiben.
