In 1992, millions of viewers sat in a movie theater to discover the story of Frank Farmer, a former American secret service agent who is tasked with protecting Rachel Marron, a self-centered and complicated superstar who is receiving death threats. . The film, titled The bodyguard, had been written since the seventies, and was going to star Steve McQueen and Diana Ross. However, it took more than 20 years for Kevin Costner, who had just starred, directed and produced the enormous success that was Dancing with Wolves, decided to rescue it from a drawer, accelerating interest in the film, and looked for Whitney Houston, a successful singer but with no experience in the world of acting, to star in it alongside him. It was one of the highest-grossing films of that year, with a gross of $411,006,740 million, and only surpassed by the now Disney classic Aladdin. Costner, who was also the producer of the film, only has one thorn left: “I should have directed it.”
This is what he confessed in a recent interview. in it Armchair Expert podcast, where Costner has come to talk about his current projects (he has just premiered in Cannes the western Horizon: An American Saga, the first of the four parts of a huge film project for which he has mortgaged his four houses), but also of his past projects, specifically, The bodyguard and, above all, Whitney Houston. The actor has confessed that Houston, who died in 2012, at the age of 48, due to an overdose, was the first and only option since he considered producing that film, since when he saw it it reminded him of the woman with whom Costner met. obsessed as a child, Diana Ross. However, as Houston herself related in an interview in Rolling StoneAlthough she was looking for film projects, she wanted to start with small roles, since starring in a film made her very dizzy: “I was afraid that people would criticize me before I even had the opportunity to play the role,” she confessed. So at first she refused, until the actor himself called her personally to convince her: “She told me: ‘I promise I won’t let you fall.’ I will help you in everything,’ and she did,” the singer confessed.
According to the actor now, although for him—the person who, in short, had gotten the project afloat—Houston was the only possible option, the director, Mick Jackson, had his reluctance. “So I started guiding her,” he explains in the podcast Costner, “and it’s not that I was trying to usurp my director… but I had made a promise to her, not to him.” “There was a moment when Whitney arrived and I told her, ‘Look, you can’t bring your entire entourage, at most one of your trusted people, and I’ll take care of you’; It turned out that person was Robyn Crawford (her best friend at the time). I told him, ‘We’ll have Robyn with you… But I don’t have an entourage, so neither do you,’ Costner recalls. “And that’s how we started.” Houston, the interpreter now says, trusted him and he took care of her, in a relationship that ended up resembling the one the public ended up seeing in the film: “I was a little bit of her bodyguard.”
Houston was insecure, and needed Costner’s presence to calm her down. The interpreter has also revealed that, in the first audience screenings, the film did not have the expected response from the public: “I had promised Whitney that it would work,” so the actor was determined to re-edit the film if necessary. . “The song she sang said it: ‘I will always love you,’” Costner mentioned in reference to the popular song that Houston performed. I Will Always Love You, composed in 1973 by Dolly Parton, “and I was always going to keep the promise I made to her.”
The friendship that was formed in that set The filming between the two lasted for years. So much so that Costner was one of eight people who gave a speech during Houston’s funeral: “Possibly the biggest pop star in the world never believed he was good enough,” he said during that almost 20-minute speech after the sudden death. Of the singer; “Whitney, if you could hear me now, she would tell you that not only were you good enough, you were the best. You sang the whole damn song without a band. “You turned that movie into what it was,” added the actor, visibly moved and on the verge of tears. “A lot of actors could have played my role… but you, Whitney, I really think you were the only one who could have played Rachel Marron. The public not only liked you, the public loved you.”
In it podcast The interpreter has also acknowledged that the television network CNN, which in the United States broadcast the artist’s funeral, in which Stevie Wonder and Alicia Keys performed, asked Costner to shorten his speech to be able to insert the publicity more comfortably: “There was I’ve been working on this speech… trying to put together everything I wanted to say. And someone said: ‘CNN is here, they would like your speech to be shorter because they are going to have to put in commercials.’ And I said, ‘Let them figure it out.’ For me, they could run ads while I was talking, I didn’t care.” Costner’s eulogy finally lasted 17 minutes, although initially he did not plan to speak, the singer Dionne Warwick, the artist’s cousin, asked him to, and he could not refuse: “I could feel the enormous weight on her, which was now on me. At first I thought: ‘What do I have to say about this poor girl?’ In the end, arriving at that church in Newark (in New Jersey, the Baptist church where Houston began her career, and also where her funeral was held) I saw it full. It was something electric. The music was playing and the church was alive. It was like…boom!” Until the end, he kept his promise.
