His latest film, Mr. Brooks, is both a serial killer tale and an outlandish mash-up of unlikely thriller elements — a movie, in fact, that Kevin Costner admits he would have had quite a different reaction to if he hadn’t sat down to read the entire script through on his own. So what does Costner look for in a screenplay or project?

“Just fresh air, something that seems highly
original,” he says, from a recent press day in advance of his movie’s release. “I would never have done this movie if it was pitched to me. But I would have
never done Field of Dreams
if it was pitched to me [either]. It takes a writer that really has his muse working on
his shoulder, you know? And you just go, ‘Wow.’ It was just an incredible
window that they found into this subject, I thought. And Thirteen Days, for
instance… it was also great. The window into that story was through Kenny O’Donnell — not Jack’s point of view or Bobby’s point of view, you know? It’s hard,
writing. That’s why it’s hard to write. It’s not easy. It’s an art form.”

That’s one of the reasons that Costner doesn’t view himself as a typical writer. “I don’t think I’m a great writer. But I like to think I recognize a good idea,” he says. “But unlike conventional wisdom, I don’t go out and make a
movie when a script is 60 percent [ready], just because I got the actor now and the director,
and I think the job’s done. I’m anal. I don’t even go out to actors till my
script is 100 percent done, because I don’t want anybody changing it. Annette Bening
and Robert Duvall didn’t change a line on Open Range. Why? Because I was sure that it worked. And [in Mr. Brooks] we
didn’t change any lines, William Hurt and Dane Cook and I, in our half of the
movie. Not a line. Because I was positive it worked, you know?”