Kevin Reynolds is an American film director and screenwriter. His best-known movies as a screenwriter include 'Red Dawn', 'Fandango', and 'Rapa Nui', the latter two of which he also directed. Reynolds’ other famous works as a director are 'Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves', 'Waterworld', and 'The Count of Monte Cristo'.
Background
Kevin Reynolds was born on January 17, 1952, in San Antonio, Texas, United States. He was the first-born from four children in the family of Herbert H. Reynolds. Reynolds’ father served as the psychology professor at Baylor University and as its President from the 1980s till the middle of 1990s.
Education
An interest for theater that Kevin Reynolds developed while in a high school pushed him to make the first steps as an author by writing plays. However, according to the will of his family, Reynolds abandoned the artistic path and pursued his studies at Baylor Law School after graduation.
Not satisfied with law practice after receiving a diploma, he finally came back to his artistic intentions and enrolled at an evening introductory filmmaking class at the University of Texas at Austin. An American film director Edward Dmytryk was among his teachers in the institution.
In 1979, Reynolds entered the filmmaking program of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Career
Kevin Reynolds began his career in Austin working as a lawyer in election and political speechwriting. He also served for future Texas governor Mark White.
Fascinated by cinema since his childhood, Reynolds realized that it was his true path of life, so soon he abandoned law and turned to his childish passion. When he began his filmmaking career, his intention was to direct the coming-of-age screenplay that he had written titled ‘Fandango’ which was based on ‘Proof’, a short film he had made as a student in 1980. Being relatively unknown in Hollywood, however, he needed to bolster his resume with some big-screen credits. His opportunity came in 1984 in the form of a co-authorship with filmmaker John Milius. Milius was the author of a handful of successful films that espoused macho ideals and violent solutions to violent problems. Reynolds’ collaboration with Milius brought his name to the attention of numerous film executives as well as millions of filmgoers.
The screenplay that Reynolds and Milius wrote became the movie ‘Red Dawn’, a sort of military, survivalist fantasy involving the invasion of the United States by Communist forces. Expertly timed to coincide with then-President Ronald Reagan’s hyperboles about a Communist threat, the movie became immensely popular with a variety of American movie audiences. Despite this popular support, critics were less enthusiastic about Reynolds and Milius’s work.
In addition to the boost that ‘Red Dawn’ provided, Reynolds’ hopes of making ‘Fandango’ were aided by director and producer Steven Speilberg, who had seen ‘Proof’ and wanted to lend his support. Speilberg’s production company, Amblin Entertainment, became the big studio muscle that Reynolds needed to get his movie made. Released in 1985, ‘Fandango’ was set in May 1971, just a few short weeks after the tragic Vietnam War protest at Kent State University, and followed the exploits of a group of college friends as they faced graduation and the possibility of going off to Vietnam. Kevin Costner starred in the movie became one of Reynolds’s friends and cinema colleagues for the next ten years.
A year after the release of ‘Fandango’, Kevin Reynolds has again collaborated with Speilberg directing the episode ‘You Gotta Believe Me’ of his Amazing Stories. In 1991, Reynolds issued ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’ starring in the main role Kevin Costner who co-produced Reynolds’s Rapa Nui three years later. The conflict on the production of a post-apocalyptic adventure movie ‘Waterworld’ in 1995 ceased the close friendship of Reynolds and Costner.
After the critical and commercial fiasco of ‘One Eight Seven’ movie with Samuel L. Jackson in the lead role, Kevin Reynolds had a five-year pause. He came back to the cinema scene as a director with a couple of literary adaptations, ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, and a 2006 ‘Tristan & Isolde’.
One of Reynolds’s recent works both as a director and screenwriter is a 2016 movie ‘Risen’.
Personality
Kevin Reynolds had quarrels with Kevin Costner on the movie set of ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’. Another co-project of Reynolds and Costner, a 1995 movie ‘Waterworld’, also starring Costner, found its director and its star quarreling again and incurred numerous cost overruns and a near-fatal accident on the set.