true detectives
In The Highwaymen, Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson are the Texas Rangers charged with hunting down Bonnie and Clyde. Total Film talks to the leads and director John Lee Hancock to find out why the star-crossed outlaws still hold such an enduring and relevant fascination for moviegoers.
The more honest the stories are, the better they become,” ponders Kevin Costner in that unmistakeable Californian drawl. “Sometimes the truth is more entertaining than the sensational lie.” It’s December 2018, and Costner is talking to TF about his latest film,
The Highwaymen, which offers a fresh perspective on the Bonnie and Clyde story. Produced by Netflix, the film will get its world premiere at Austin’s South by Southwest festival in March.
The outlaw lovers – gunned down more than 80 years ago – continue to exert a powerful hold on the public imagination. “Just naturally, it does tend to happen that people get interested in the story, just like they did all those years ago,” considers Woody Harrelson, Costner’s co-star and bearer of a similarly unmistakeable, albeit Texan, drawl. “But I don’t know… I didn’t know this perspective on it.”
This, it soon becomes obvious, is an untold angle on an iconic piece of American history. While The Highwaymen always has Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in the crosshairs, it focuses on the stateline crossing manhunt from the perspective of the lawmen hired to bring them to justice: former Texas Rangers Frank Hamer (Costner) and Maney Gault (Harrelson). Hamer is offered the retirement interrupting gig after the FBI’s efforts to apprehend the couple come to naught; all the while the crime spree is attracting newspaper inches and a burgeoning fandom.
As a project, The Highwaymen has its own history of being elusive. The script first started circulating 15 years ago, and while it always attracted attention and was developed at Universal Studios, it never made it into production until Netflix came on board. “People really enjoyed the script,” recalls director John Lee Hancock
(The Blind Side, The Founder), who also added to John Fusco’s screenplay. “But it was one of those things where it might be an actor who wanted to do it and then his schedule didn’t work out, and then something came up. Or somebody wanted to make it, but they’d only give us X number of dollars, and it wasn’t going to be enough to do it the right way. And then I kept leaving to go off and direct movies. When I’d come back, I’d get right back on it again, in the hopes of getting it made.”
Despite this stop-start nature, Hancock’s interest never waned.
“A lot of films, when you’re involved with scripts, as time passes you can lose your fervour for them, or it can be something that you feel like: ‘I’ve already, in my mind, told this story 10 times. Do I really want to spend a year-and-a-half or two years on telling it again?’” he says. “Every time I went back to re-read [The Highwaymen],
I was more excited than I’d been before.”
In the early days of the film’s gestation, another iconic duo were linked to the project: Robert Redford and Paul Newman were once loosely attached as the lawmen. As Hancock recounts, “One of the best days of my professional life was spent at Paul Newman’s house back in Connecticut for one day, just talking about the script,
talking about process, all those kinds of things. It was everything that you wanted Paul Newman to be. He was articulate, smart, funny, self-effacing.” While Newman’s illness wasn’t public at the time, it soon became clear that the role would have been a bit too much for him to take on at that stage in his life.
Costner first became aware of the project a decade ago. “Actually, to be honest, it was offered to me about 10 years ago, and I didn’t really feel like I was the right age for it, in a way,” he says. “I thought that I could age and play it at this [later] point in my career.” It’s not the first time Costner has worked on a project that sat on the shelf for years. “The Bodyguard [screenplay] was 16 years old,” he recalls. “It was the first screenplay that Lawrence Kasdan had sold, and it just languished for 16 years, and I spotted it, and liked it, and decided to make it.” And it’s not like Costner was daunted by the prospect of following in the footsteps of Newman and Redford. “I didn’t feel that, no,” he says, nonchalantly. “I thought that Woody and I would be a really good team… I knew we were trying to play it close to the bone, if you will.” Harrelson admits to putting that Redford/Newman thought out of his mind: “I think it would have been too daunting because, you know, those are two just phenomenal actors.
But yeah, I heard that.”
From the first costume test, Hancock was confident he’d found the right crimefighting duo. “Just the two of them, standing there together, it looked so fantastic that I knew that they were going to gel,” he says. (Coincidentally, John Lee Hancock previously wrote the screenplay for
A Perfect World, which Costner starred in.) Despite seemingly being a perfectly matched double-act, Costner and Harrelson had never worked together before. Of the experience of partnering up with Costner, Harrelson says, “Sometimes, you might feel that someone has just lost their passion for what they’re doing, but his was as strong as ever. He told me, ‘I think about this 15 hours a day.’” Harrelson breaks into a chuckle. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s an exaggeration.’ But as I was with him, I realised: no, he does think about it literally all day long. That’s what he thinks about. It’s kind of cool.”
BEFORE THE LAW
While the 1967 Arthur Penn film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway remains the definitive cinematic take on Bonnie and Clyde, this offers an alternative viewpoint. “I think this is kind of a companion piece,” considers Hancock. “Because what you’re doing is you’re just putting the lens in a different place. That [film] was focused solely on Bonnie and Clyde, and we’re focusing on the other side of the manhunt.” There’s something distinctly cinematic about the Texas Rangers, something Hancock knew a lot about having grown up in the Lone Star State. It’s hard to escape the trappings of a western, especially given the sheriff-like Rangers, their widebrimmed hats, and their general law-unto-themselves demeanour. Costner’s presence only ramps up the western mythology. Historically, there’s only a fine line between the Rangers and what we’d know as cowboys.
“It does feel like a western,” says Harrelson. “It’s not quite the Old West, but it is that vibe, for sure.”
Frank Hamer was very much in the mould of a western figure, according to Costner. “He started off on horseback as a Texas Ranger, killing Comanche and killing Mexicans on the Mexican
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border. If you believe in numbers, it was well over 50 in shootouts.” It was the advent of the car that changed things for the Rangers. “The reality is, as America’s forming, there weren’t any roads, because there weren’t any cars,” continues Costner. Cars would soon require new laws to be enacted, and a highway patrol to be created to enforce them. “We think it was always there. It just wasn’t. These same men that were hunting men on horses were suddenly learning how to shift a car, and they could get to where they were going faster. So [Frank] was a man that was operating in the 1800s… it was only in 1933 [when he was tasked with the Bonnie and Clyde manhunt]… he came out of retirement because he knew how to hunt men. He didn’t have a radio.” The thought causes Costner to reflect on a far older, but no less cinematic, tradition. “I mean, the Texas Rangers, back at the turn of the century, were very much like Spartans. And if you know anything about Sparta, they would often just send one man to a town where there was a problem. One man!”
More is known about Hamer than his partner Gault, but even so, he was a publicity-shy semi-recluse. “He was offered money, and Frank didn’t make a lot of money… He refused to do interviews,” explains Costner. “For Frank, it was just a job.” Hancock relied on Costner for what he could do without dialogue (“He can tell you so much with that face and those eyes”), given that Hamer is tough and taciturn in his resolve. “I’m OK with Frank being hard,” acknowledges Costner. On the film, as on the mission, it was necessary for the two men to spend a lot of time on the road together. “You have two people in a car together, and one of them talks too much, and the other talks too little,” explains Hancock. “One pushes everything down and pretends like nothing bothers him, and the other wears it all on his sleeve, and has sleepless nights over his past.”
Hamer’s the more stoic of the two central Rangers, with Harrelson’s Gault wearing his emotions on his rolled-up sleeves. “You could say that he was really daunted about the notion of killing this young girl,” muses Harrelson. “She’s only 23, and so, yeah, that definitely weighed on him.”
YOUTH IN REVOLT
In contrast to the seasoned lawmen, Bonnie and Clyde’s youth is thrown into sharp relief, even though they remain peripheral figures throughout The Highwaymen, always slightly out of Hamer and Gault’s grasp. Hancock wanted to ensure that it felt like they were a very different side of the coin. “I said, ‘I want to build up the power and the popularity of Bonnie and Clyde in the few shots that we have with them,’” explains Hancock. “You never really, really see their faces, but I wanted to make them very stylish. And so I talked to John Schwartzman, our DoP, and I said, ‘I want every time we shoot Bonnie and Clyde for it to feel almost like a graphic novel. I want the colours to pop. I want the frames to be really stylised and beautiful.’ And on the other side, you’ve got the reality of Frank and Maney, which is a more normal look, if you will. They’re doing the hard job of tracking, and all those things. So there’s a reality to their side of the story.” Keeping the lovers on the lam just out of frame not only heightens the electricity of their celebrity (Hamer and Gault occasionally find themselves having to navigate hordes of fans when they get close to their targets), but also dramatically emphasises their youthfulness when you do get a good look at them. “You realise that they’re early twenty-something kids who are tiny,” offers Hancock. “It’s not Warren and Faye.”
Their age is one of the many romanticised layers that The Highwaymen looks to strip back, to present an altogether grubbier reality. “The way that Bonnie and Clyde had to live in that car was terrible,” grimaces Costner. “They were suffering. They had wounds. It was not glamorous. They were eating baloney sandwiches. They were on the run. It was unsanitary. It was ugly. But it was celebrated in a very romantic way. It was an ugly, ugly life.” Their exploits kept them in the public eye though, and their popularity only swelled. “They had fans everywhere,” adds Harrelson. “[The press] used to just
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write about them all the time. So they became popular, even though they were doing some unethical things. I’m not sure why they became so popular.”
Part of their popularity was a product of the times they were living in: this was Depression Era America. “The banks are foreclosing on farms and taking people’s houses, and everyone’s in a desperate place,” points out Hancock. “Bonnie and Clyde come up, and they’re robbing banks. So I think in some ways, they’ve got a pass from the general public. There were a lot of [fascinating] gangsters during that era – Dillinger, Capone, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd
– but the thing that was different with Bonnie and Clyde was Bonnie. So I think the idea of these star-crossed lovers, if you will, made them more popular, and it pushed them up the headlines. They were these two young people who were in love and out breaking the law. So it was exciting for people to read about.”
But what’s caused the fascination with Bonnie and Clyde to continue to the present day, and enable a story like The Highwaymen to finally get made? One reason is that there are several modern-day parallels that bubble to the surface, including gun culture, celebrity, fandom and the media’s involvement. “[This film] had something to say in a contemporary sense, I always felt,” says Hancock. “I didn’t feel like it was just a history lesson. Because of the cult of the popularity and all these things, which have only become more and more strong in the 13 years since [the script was first written] – there was no Twitter or Instagram or self-branding or reality television where people were famous for stuff they should be embarrassed about. Every year, it became more of a contemporary story with modern lessons, I felt.”
Those modern parallels weren’t lost on Costner. “Like I keep saying, there’s not a lot of difference between the centuries,” he adds. “But fame was always something that can’t be explained. When it’s seen at its most grotesque, you’re kind of repulsed by it.” For all the parallels with the Old West, it seems like there are as many with the Instagram generation. “They were very aware of their image,” asserts Hancock. “And in some ways, they were aware of branding before there was such a thing as branding. They had their public, in a way, and they knew that. So they would have done very well today with Instagram and Twitter and selfies.”