USE THE COURSE, LUKE
Bill Paxton’s new golf movie evokes Star Wars
Bill Paxton is either imparting moviemaking wisdom or he’s about to kiss me. The director of The Greatest Game Ever Played, which opens this Friday, is explaining how close he wants the audience to be to the characters in his movie.
Pretty close, it turns out. “I want to be so close that I want the audience to go like this.” He then warns, “I’m gonna get in your space.” Placing his head about an inch away from mine, he starts peering closely at my features as though expecting to find Waldo hidden in my eyebrow, or up one nostril. It seems rude to close my eyes, so I stare back. I’ve seen Paxton twice on Imax screens, in Apollo 13 and Ghosts of the Abyss, and never has he loomed so large.
But with the camera thus scrutinizing their mugs, the performers are told, “Don’t work, don’t make a choice, don’t do anything. Be enigmatic. It’s a weird dichotomy in our work as film actors.”
Paxton is an actor first and foremost, having appeared in some 60 TV shows and movies, including U- 571, Titanic and Vertical Limit. His first foray into directing was the critically popular, low-budget 2001 thriller Frailty, in which he also starred. Since then, he says, “I’ve been looking to do a major studio film; I wanted to take the next acid test in this business.”
His chance came with Disney — the studio that brought you the football movie Remember the Titans, the hockey movie Miracle and the baseball movie The Rookie was looking for a new field to conquer. Paxton, meanwhile, had seen a script by Mark Frost, based on Frost’s book of the same title about a 20-year-old named Francis Ouimet who played against some of the most famous ( mostly British) golfers in the U.S. Open of 1913. “I got this crazy idea that I could do something with it,” says Paxton.
At their first meeting, Disney executives said they wanted more development. Paxton was happy to oblige, and his description of the film literally contains something for everyone.
“ This is a western, kind of, meets Camelot,” he begins. “ And it’s got some Star Wars in there, too. This is a peasant boy who grows up outside of Camelot, he dreams of the castles [the club house], he dreams of the tournaments, he dreams of the knights and their squires [the players and their caddies], the fair maiden [love interest Peyton List].” Paxton is clearly warming to his theme. “ There’s even a Merlin character in Luke Askew, who’s the old indentured golf professional at the club who gives him his first club, which is Excalibur as far as I’m concerned.
“He grows up to be the knight errant, the knight who’s never been tested in battle, who has to take on the dark knight — but they’re all Jedis if you think about it.” He’s in the home stretch now. “It’s Luke Skywalker meets Darth Vader, and Darth Vader is Stephen Dillane as Harry Vardon. He was a Jedi but now is working for Peter Firth, the Emperor, so he’s dispassionate about his work now, he’s just a hired killer. So it worked on that kind of Joseph Campbell level.”
Paxton is dressed in loose pants and a waffle shirt over a tee. If he hasn’t just come from working out, he’d be well served by the exercise of spinning that plot synopsis.
Dillane’s Vardon is a British pro golfer who has always been made to feel like a second-class citizen alongside the country’s gentlemen amateurs. (Firth plays Lord Northcliffe, his handler.) Nevertheless, he is seen as the man to put these upstart Yanks in their place (the United States in 1913 was the same age as Canada today, and much less self-assured before the First World War). Nineteen-year-old Shia (rhymes with “hiya”) LaBeouf portrays Ouimet, a poor son of immigrants who dared to compete with the best in the game.
And stealing every scene in which he appears is 10-year-old Josh Flitter as Eddie Lowery, Ouimet’s tiny, fast-talking caddie. The character seems like a dollop of Hollywood- manufactured cuteness straight out of Our Gang, but there was in fact a pint-sized Lowery in 1913, who grew up to become an automobile magnate.
Paxton’s reaction when he read the script: “ I thought he had to be an invention. It was too good. It was Burgess Meredith in Rocky at 10 years old.” ( Movie analogies for Lowery abound: LaBeouf compares him to Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy.)
Paxton’s own childhood weirdly parallels the story he’s telling on the screen. As a boy, his family lived next to a golf course in Fort Worth, Tex. Shady Oaks Country Club was the home turf of the legendary Ben Hogan, and young Paxton would sometimes shag balls for Hogan during practice. “ You had to keep your eye on it because he’d hit you if you weren’t careful.”
He’s not an avid golfer. “ I play a couple of rounds a year with my father,” he says. “ But I can relate to this story of a kid who had a hero. I went from there.” And while he admits that the game “can be as exciting as watching grass grow,” he’s also adamant that when the stakes are high, the tension is equally elevated. He found this out watching Tiger Woods play at the L.A. Open, while doing research for The Greatest Game.
Time for another demonstration, less up close than the first. He stands a few metres away. “You’re me, and I’m Tiger Woods. You’re right there and he’s making maybe one of the most important decisions of the tournament. And the concentration: I’m not even there.”
The director knew if he could capture that feeling, he could capture his audience. “ The fuse is a little slow,” he admits. “ You have to set up this odyssey … but I realized that once we got into the second half of the movie I could just cut to a close-up of somebody, and you’d know what their emotional interest is.”
And what close-ups.