Once the toast of Hollywood, Kevin Costner has been beset by a succession of commercial and critical flops. And now he is looking to an unlikey genre to put his career back on track.

He talks to Steve Pratt about failure, westerns and Princess Diana.

KEVIN Costner is a perfect example of how Hollywood can fall out of love with its stars. Once he was an Oscar-winner who could do no wrong with critics or picturegoers. Now his career has gone straight to video, just like his most recent films. Both 3000 Miles To Graceland and Dragonfly barely registered at cinemas before being consigned to the small screen.

These days the name is instantly recognised by people, but they're not as eager to go to see his movies as they were in the days of Dancing With Wolves and Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves.

Quite what Costner did wrong is difficult to pinpoint. There were stories of his need to control, to the extent of falling out with friend and director Kevin Reynolds on both Robin Hood and Waterworld.

The final straw was The Postman, a post-apocalyptic drama which Costner produced, directed and starred in. The big budget picture flopped at the box office and was ridiculed by critics. He lost his crown of king of Hollywood. Like Burt Reynolds before him, a number one box-office star found himself out in the cold.

He hopes - though would never admit to it - that Open Range will reverse his run of poorly-received movies. Costner has certainly been pulling out all the stops to promote this western, which did respectable if not mega business in the US.

Perhaps Hollywood didn't like being proved wrong. His epic, three-hour western Dances With Wolves in 1990 was reckoned by the industry to be a bad idea. Costner could afford to say, "I told you so" after the film won seven Oscars, including best film and best director for Costner, and became a commercial success.

He may have thought he could do no wrong, but events showed otherwise.

If his career is in crisis - and it looks that way to an outsider - he's not about to admit it. He casts himself as a maverick rather than a loser.

He admits to being aware of how The Postman was received, but says: "I like The Postman, and I'm a realist and know that there were some that didn't. There's a lot of people that did, but it wasn't and won't ever be considered a commercial success. But there might be a revisionist view of it some day with people who look at it for what it is and how it was done.

"I've not been really very in step with trying to anticipate what's the smartest move to make, what's in vogue in terms of commercial, what would be the easiest, the simplest, step."

So he goes off and directs a traditional western, Open Range, in which he and Robert Duvall play cowboys at odds with an evil rancher (British knight Michael Gambon) over land rights. For a film-maker out of favour, working in a currently-unpopular genre such as the western looks like career suicide.

"In my own country, the genre is just not well thought of - and here I go and make it," admits Costner. "If someone sees that my career is up against the wall - the proverbial back against the wall, which I don't believe it is - I can see why they might go, 'why, Kevin, why would you make a western?'.

"I just believe in the genre and I'm also a realist. I don't feel like I need to find a mass audience, although I believe it could find one. I believe it has entertainment value, and I made it for that reason. I didn't make it as a Valentine to myself or to the west, but as a really solid piece of entertainment."

Costner doesn't want to be associated solely with westerns. The evidence shows that from Silverado in 1985 through Dances With Wolves and Wyatt Earp to the current Open Range, he's returned to the genre time and time again. Yet he declares firmly: "I am not in love with westerns". He reckons that most western films aren't very good. Only a handful meet his requirements to merit that description, among them The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Red River.

"So I love the west but I'm not a fan of the majority of westerns. Westerns can be relevant to our lives and that's what I hope Open Range could be," he says.

"Westerns can be very thrilling, but they're hard to make. There is a whole generation of young people that don't like westerns. They're not necessarily in vogue but will probably never fall out of style, at least for me."

He does have definite views on directing such films, and was able to bring lessons learnt on making Dances With Wolves to bear on shooting Open Range. Most directing is common sense, he says, combined with your idiosyncrasies as an artist. Westerns come with added difficulties such as animals, children and wagons - the sort of things that aren't used to co-operating and hitting their marks the way actors can.

He realises that some of the animal handlers, for instance, don't really care about the artistic side, and doesn't agree with directors who "give over" to such people. He likes to be in charge.

"They create a kind of voodoo how things are supposed to work, 'Mr director listen to me'. I get that and quickly try to say to the experts once in a while, 'well, if you're quiet long enough, you might learn something from me too'.

"It's really important for those people who handle that thing to understand they're trying to facilitate the movie and not carve out their own little rice bowl. And because I have a lot of experience I can break that wall down quickly, and everybody can start to try to service the movie."

Costner once said he was born maybe 30 years too late for the type of movies he wanted to make. "I was probably born 30 years too late for the industry too," he jokes.

"I mean, I'm not a sequel guy and I'm not doing it exactly right. This trying to stay on top thing - no, I don't feel any special pressure to revive the western or to set it straight."

The closest he came to making a sequel was to The Bodyguard, in which his security man was called on to protect singer Whitney Houston. The follow-up, for which a script was written, would have teamed Costner with Princess Diana, although her name doesn't pass his lips.

"Someone came to us with an idea, a very good idea, and I recognised it as such and began to develop it," he recalls.

"Of course, we weren't able to ultimately make it because it was written for one person - I think you know the person it was written for - and history is what it is, and I'm the type of person that I don't just slam another person into something that was written specifically for someone else.

"That's what made Whitney kind of unique in the movie.This other one would have been unique and very satisfying for a commercial movie."

If it had been made, the combination of Costner and the princess would also have ensured that Hollywood would have been his friend once again.

* Open Range opens in cinemas on Friday.