Waterworld: Or In Defense of Rich Actor’s Insane Self-Funded Passion Project

Andrew Merklinghaus is a writer and former monorail conductor from Seattle.  You can listen to his American History podcast Kings of Democracy anywhere podcasts are a thing.  Also follow him on Social media on TikTok and Instagram. 

There’s a rule in Hollywood. If you’re making a movie on the cheap it can’t have any animals, children or water. They’re unpredictable, they require special equipment, and two of the three might poop on George Clooney. You just don’t do it. Unless you are Kevin Costner in 1995 when he decided to break rule two and break the hell out of rule three by making Waterworld.

The story of Waterworld started in 1986 when an aspiring young screenwriter named Peter Rader took a meeting with low budget producer Roger Corman who wanted to ride the Mad Max trend. Rader figured the whole “post Apocalyptic cars” was played out so he came back with “Post Apocalyptic Boats." Corman laughed, saying you’d need $5 million to do something like that. The script was handed around Hollywood for a while until Kevin Costner took an interest.

To say that Kevin Costner was hot in 1992 is a bit of an understatement. Costner was a successful leading man, but he had just pulled of the Leading Man's dream of successfully producing a passion project when he produced this weird little script called Dance With Wolves. He gambled $15 million of his own money, winning Best Director and Picture, and making him rich as god. Costner liked Waterworld and had the clout to get the money it needed. Studios wanted to keep it mid-budget but after Jurassic Park landed they started to see sequel and toy money spin in their heads. Plus you can just CGI everything now right? Right? Costner had little conversation with Steven Spielberg who flat out told him not to do it. Jaws had nearly been a career-ending disaster. Costner ignored him and pushed on with a budget set for $65 million, or two million more than Jurassic Park.

And the problems started to show pretty quick. The largest set, a quarter mile around floating city called the Atoll used up all the steel metal in Hawaii so they started flying it in from California, which was so heavy they had to make a local runway longer. By the time the set was done it was hurricane season and they hadn't spent any money researching the weather. The set sank and had to be raised and repaired, doubling the cost to $22 million. They had to cut about 30 pages from the script because another huge set sunk for good.

The locals gouged them for food and basics. When the location manager tried to get them to stop the reaction was so harsh she had to leave the state. Professional Surfer Laird Hamilton was brought in to do stunts for Costner, then went missing, only to be found 40 miles from the set, sucked out to sea by a riptide. Costner himself almost died when a helicopter got to close to him during a close up sailing shot. That was the least of his problems, he was assuming more and more of the cost of the film. And he kept getting stung by jellyfish.

But on top of that was the simple insanity of filming on water. You’re trying to do sound, lighting, makeup, elaborate camera tracking shots, all while everything is moving. It could take hours to get a simple close up. If anybody had to go to the bathroom, the whole shoot had to stop while the pooper was driven by boat to a barge full of porta potties 3 miles away. The schedule ballooned from 90 days to 200. And a lot of it seemed to come down on Costner. While the rest of the cast and crew stayed at cheap motels or even un-insulated huts Costner rented himself a tropical bungalow. His marriage publicly fell apart, maybe due to an affair with a hula dancer. One of the most famous rumors is that Costner demanded they use CGI to fix his receding hairline.

And this is where things get interesting and I must engage in INTERNET DETECTIVE WORK:

Costner’s hairline is clearly receding in Waterworld and there’s no obvious 90’s CGI on his head. In fact they couldn’t do it if they wanted to. The first movie to attempt CGI hair was 1994’s The Flintstones and it looked terrible. Unless Waterworld figured out how to make photorealistic hair a full decade before Pixar figured it out for Monster's, Inc., then removed it in the internet bootleg I watched, there’s no way this is true. So where did this rumor come from and why has it lived so long? Because the rats were trying to leave a sinking ship. Studio executives wanted to distance themselves from Waterworld’s impending doom, so they tried to put all the blame on Costner’s bloated movie star ego. They openly slagged the project, which was only amplified by the then un-explored powers of early internet niche fandom. Just the year prior Stargate had done good business by marketing online, specifically to sci-fi movie buffs. But the Waterworld people never got the message. They never made an attempt to hype up the movie or quell the rumors. Studio executive water cooler talk spread globally via film nerd forums and the film was a disaster.

Which is to say, it actually made money. Despite tripling it’s budget to $175 million and floundering in the US it turned an $8 million dollar profit via foreign box office and home media sales. And I happen to agree. It’s not great, but it’s got some amazing set pieces and rich, “lived in” world building. The plot gets thin and the acting is over the top, but I can live with that if it means I can watch pirate jet-skis ambushing a cyberpunk racing trimaran. Costner was an ambitious man and like all ambitious men, was dragged and torn by sandbagging bean counters, which is all we remember today. So thanks Kevin Costner, for having the balls to give yourself gills.