Director Bill Paxton Talks About "The Greatest Game Ever Played"

Bill Paxton on What “The Greatest Game Ever Played” Means to Him: “You know, this movie to me represents my incredible, gosh, love affair with motion pictures. Since I was a boy, my father took me and my brother to see movies. We’d come out of a film and my dad would start talking about the art direction or the lighting. From a very early age, I was made aware of the artifice and the illusion of motion pictures and fell in love with that illusion. Still, I would go to movies and be completely subjective as an audience member, but also because of my dad, this awareness he created in me and my brother, I started noticing whether the art direction is good or the acting is particularly good or the lighting or the cutting. The music, the pacing. So I had a great education from my father, even though he was in the lumber business.

…I’ve wanted to make films all my life. My heroes were guys like Buster Keaton and Clint Eastwood. Guys who were performers and empowered themselves and became filmmakers in their own right. Those are my heroes. Those are the people, like Francis Ouimet, Harry Vardon was his hero. I got to meet some of my heroes as a boy. I actually sold golf balls to Ray Bolger. I grew up next door to a famous golf club in Ft. Worth, TX that was Ben Hogan’s home club, Shady Oaks Country Club. And every spring, Hogan would have a private tournament and all these celebrities would come down to play. I remember Jack Benny, Ray Bolger, Hal Wallace, even Eddie Lowery was in this tournament one time with my dad. My dad with lunch with Eddie Lowery, the kid who’s the caddy. So I guess in my mind, this story reminded me of my own childhood.

I thought, ‘You know what? Here was a sport that hadn’t really gotten the royal cinematic treatment.’ They had tried but failed. And I saw it as an opportunity as a filmmaker. Even though it’s a populous film, I thought this thing embodies a lot of my… This kid, Francis Ouimet and who he was to the game and as an American and to life and to the people who knew him and loved him, he was the kind of guy I’d like to be or aspire to be. And everyone who worked on this film was marked by this guy. We’ve all been kind of marked, it’s a weird thing. Starting with [writer] Mark Frost.

This was a story that had been kind of regaled to ancient history, in a way. Much like Titanic was the same way. The Titanic was a huge story but by 1955 when Walter Lord’s book came out, there’d been two World Wars. The Titanic was still lost. But now he made this book, so when this book came out, ‘The Greatest Game Ever Played,’ Disney said, ‘Hey, this could fit into our sports movie kind of genre that we’ve been doing.’

What was great for me was to have this incredible book as a background. The only challenge though was the book is a dual biography. It tells Harry Vardon’s story, which is far more compelling in some ways. But this was a story about how these two men met and you kind of had to follow the young underdog cowboy who ends up in the OK Corral against Doc Holiday and Wyatt Earp. So I wasn’t able to tell as much of Harry Vardon’s story. This is a guy who, at the height of his career, after he won the British Open four times, was struck by tuberculosis. Came back three years later to win again, much like Hogan did after he was shattered by that car accident in West Texas…

There’s great history in this game. But again, and the other thing for me was when I read the story, it was like there was a moral code to these men. The movie had kind of a code of ethics that I really dug about doing the right thing and how we comport ourselves. It had it all, just had it all. So what we did was I started breaking it down and we slowly developed it… I got this amazing cast. Shia LaBeouf, I got Stephen Dillane and Peter Firth. All these great young up and coming actors and none of them had baggage. When you watch this film it’s one of the rare times you’re going to get to see in a contemporary Hollywood movie, a cast that doesn’t have a bunch of baggage. You can kind of believe. People see this movie and they walk out thinking these people were who they played.”

Bill Paxton on Choosing His Cast: "[Shia LaBeouf] was the first person I cast in the film. My heart of hearts, I’d done a movie called ‘Haven’ with Stephen Dillane that’s not even been out yet, and I’d gotten to know him and thought he’d be a natural as Harry Vardon. He’s an uberman actor. Where I was really lucky, because I feel like I just made an art film for this studio, where I was lucky is they’d had this success where they get a star, an actor and then they build this ensemble cast and they have this sports story. They’d been winning it that way. With Kurt Russell, with Denzel Washington. Shia wasn’t quite that across the board, but for Disney, I’ve gotta say this bodes well for them."