In America, there used to be junkets and at the junkets there was Silvia Bizio. And she was there at set visits, at the Golden Globes and the Oscars, watching them from the inside, chatting with the stars. Now the stars go to her house for dinner, and if you’re in Los Angeles and you’re Italian, Casa Bizio is the place to go to meet someone. You find Oliver Stone there or Clint Eastwood’s daughter or Matteo Garrone or Paolo Sorrentino. So it is no coincidence that Silvia, for 40 years Hollywood correspondent for Repubblica, finally decided to talk about one of her long-time friendships, the one with Kevin Costner. She has done so with a very simple but at the same time rich book of 40 years of interviews, conversations during and after films, that the Hollywood star did with her. Kevin on Costner, published by Gremese and co-authored by Pietro Ricci, founder of Costner’s Fan Club in Italy, is a film-by-film account of the actor and the person.
“I first met him for Fandango,” Silvia tells me on the phone from Los Angeles, “but we started being friends back in the days of The Untouchables. At that time I was friends with Brian De Palma and used to visit him on the set of the film. Kevin got to know me that way, in a totally informal way, and he began to trust me; I, on the other hand, began to discover the good American boy behind the star.”
Costner was famous then, when his scenes were edited out of The Big Chill– he was the suicidal friend around whom they all rally–he had made up for it by starring in Silverado, Fandango and American Flyers, as well as Spielberg’s Amazing Stories. But it was Brian De Palma’s masterpiece that launched him into the starry skies of Hollywood. The relationship with Silvia after that was solidified through 1988’s Bull Durham, Field of Dreams—who doesn’t remember the phrase, “If you build it, they will come?”—and the award-winning Dances with Wolves which he directed and starred in (7 Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director). Then there was Robin Hood, Oliver Stone’s JFK until 1992’s The Bodyguard, which established him permanently as an American sex symbol. As Whitney Houston’s bodyguard Costner made millions of women dream, but he didn’t want to make that film. “He told me that the subject did not excite him at all,” Silvia Bizio recalls, “that he was interested in films with historical, or social, indirectly political subjects, but he went to a Whitney Houston concert and was thunderstruck. It seemed to him that there from the stage she was singing just for him, so he decided that the film made sense, and he made it.”
At the time Costner was happily married—”he used to repeat that he was very much in love with his Cindy, whom he met while he was in college, and she was playing Snow White and he was the jungle boat helmsman at Disneyland to support himself”—then there were other loves. But Silvia Bizio says he has always been a great “family man,” who now has 7 children, and moreover, a supporter of friends’ children as well. For example, he bought two hand-carved lamps made of reclaimed wood by Silvia’s son Matteo Borgardt and promoted them on social media to advertise for him. A staunch Democrat, having been friends with Ronald Reagan in his youth, he also frequently gives to charity. He recently made a record, Find Your Way, with his band Modern West, to donate proceeds to victims of hurricanes Helen and Milton.
“Kevin is deeply American,” Bizio explains, “you see it even in the little things, in the fact that he eats hamburgers or steak and fries with gusto. But you see it most of all in the films he’s made, the epic of the west is present in so many of his films, it’s in is DNA. It’s no accident that to make Horizon his two-part series, which was shown in Cannes and now in Venice, he mortgaged his four houses and invested $40 million of his own money in it. Because he believes in it, it was a project he had been planning to do for 40 years, he couldn’t find the backers and finally did it anyway, on his own.”
He’s American also in believing that dreams can come true in this country, like Coppola who sold his vineyards to make Megalopolis. These are rare characters in a film world where fees are often discussed before anything else.
Silvia went on the set of Horizon several times, and it was there that she met Pietro Ricci, who had collected all her interviews because he was a die-hard Costner fan and proposed that she put them together in a book. Thus was born Kevin on Costner. “When I went to dig up all the original recordings of the interviews, I was amazed at how many conversations we had had over time!”
The same thing happened with the video recordings of chats with Charles Bukowski that Silvia found in the back of the garage at her house and that her son put together in the beautiful documentary An Evening with Bukowski presented in Venice a few years ago. “I could do a series of books,” Silvia laughingly concludes, “Andy Garcia, Oliver Stone, who knows how much material I have in my closets.” So much Hollywood history for fans to dust off.
