Kevin Costner Finally Reveals The Personal Price He Paid For Waterworld

For years the story stayed the same: a $175 million ocean epic that opened to a shrug and turned its star into a punchline. Kevin Costner has finally said what that film actually took from him, and it was never the money. It starts at the top. The Untouchables, Field of Dreams, and a three-hour Dances with Wolves that won seven Oscars and made Costner the surest bet in Hollywood. Then came his own idea, Waterworld, shot for real on the open Pacific. Four hundred workers spent five months bolting together a floating steel atoll over a thousand tons heavy, a mile off Kawaihae Harbor. Kona winds shoved it off its mark, half the crew turned seasick, roughly $40,000 a day went just to staffing, and one morning a storm the coast never forecast tipped the whole thing to the bottom of the sea. What sank with it took years to surface. Director Kevin Reynolds, a friend of more than a decade, walked away before the edit. Costner's 16-year marriage to Cindy Silva ended in 1994 during the shoot, with three kids caught in the distance. He was pinned underwater against a mast during one squall. The film cleared upward of $264 million worldwide and eventually turned a profit, but the correction came too late to save his name, and this is the part he only says out loud now.