Bill Paxton on Working with Disney: "You wanna hear something crazy? Walt Disney Studios takes more chances on new filmmakers than any of the other four majors. That’s a fact. They gave me carte blanche and once I had Shia, they were comfortable. He’d been in ‘Holes,’ he’d done ‘Even Stevens.’ They let me go out and cast this movie. And I was able to get really good actors. The other thing is I couldn’t have made this movie with movie stars. I had to shoot this movie in 48 days on a schedule originally scheduled for 60 at the minimum. I had a budget that wasn’t going to allow it, either, if I would have had some star on this movie that I couldn’t get out of a trailer or something like that.”
Bill Paxton on the Use of CGI: “My effects coordinator was a guy named Dennis Berardi. He has a company called Mr. X from here. I brought him in very early on, but that was also why I did the storyboards. I thought, ‘I’m gonna light this thing up.’ I’ve played enough golf to know when you hit a good shot, there is kind of a sense that you are astral projecting. So I thought, ‘Well, let’s see a camera do that.’ So we had this helicopter. Oh, it was crazy. Helicopter about as big as this table that could be remotely operated, could hold 200 feet of magazine film. We had this technocrane too that was amazing to do all those [scenes], like that putting sequence and some of the other things.”
Bill Paxton Explains Why Most Golf Movies are Comedies: “Because I think they just have been, number one. And I think again, people get caught up in the pastoral nature of the sport. It’s played on a golf course, it’s beautiful, and I think that’s a real trap you can fall into. But championship golf, you're standing as close - the basic thing about this sport is I can be standing this close to Tiger Woods while he’s making a shot that might make or break him in a tournament. And like Harry Vardon, he has to just make those people just kind of go away. It just becomes about the hole. I just thought this is inherently cinematic. This is inherently dramatic.
The fuse on this thing burns a little slow at the beginning to get everybody invested emotionally in the players. It’s kinda like a fireworks show. So we get into that final round and it’s the ‘House of Flying Golf Balls’ and everything else. But what’s cool about the movie is in most sports films, the opponent or the opposing team are vilified to make the underdog a bigger hero, just like in a movie where a guy’s got to catch a killer or in a gunfight where the guy is going to have to take him on. But in this you have great empathy for Harry Vardon. You realize he came from abject poverty.”
