Entertainment

08:31 AM CDT on Thursday, September 29, 2005

By NANCY CHURNIN / The Dallas Morning News

When Bill Paxton decided to direct The Greatest Game Ever Played, the Fort Worth native realized he had more in common with the film's hero than their work as caddies when they were teens.

DARNELL RENEE/Special Contributor

Director-actor Bill Paxton says he feels a kinship with golfer Francis Ouimet, hero of The Greatest Game Ever Played.

Both he and golfer Francis Ouimet went after the most unlikely of dreams at absurdly young ages. Mr. Ouimet was all of 20 when he challenged two of the greatest golf pros of his time in a 1913 David vs. Goliath match that shocked the country and the world.

Mr. Paxton left home at 18, bypassing college, to try to make it as an actor. Looking back, he says it was his youthful feeling of invincibility that gave him the guts to shrug off rejection before he started getting his breaks.

"If I weren't so young when I came out to Hollywood, I would never have survived, and I think the same holds true for Francis Ouimet," says Mr. Paxton in a recent visit at the Adolphus hotel.

Mr. Paxton, now 50 and living in Los Angeles, started out as a set dresser for Roger Corman. A small role in James Cameron's The Terminator in 1984 led to roles in the director's True Lies in 1994 and ultimately the part of the modern-day treasure hunter in Titanic in 1997. That film's undercurrent of class warfare helped him refine and shape the subtext for The Greatest Game Ever Played .

Mr. Ouimet's father actively discouraged his son's love of golf. At the time Francis wanted to play, golf was a gentleman's sport, exclusive to country-club members at the turn of the century. The Ouimets were working-class people, unwelcome in the Country Club, the imposing Brookline, Mass., institution just across the street from their modest home. For Francis, carrying clubs for the upper crust was the only way in the door.

In contrast, Mr. Paxton's father encouraged his son's love of film by taking him to the movies when he was young and quizzing him afterward about the technical details – the sets, the lights, the special effects. However, John Lane Paxton also told his son he would have preferred that he go into the family lumber trade rather than pursue acting.

"'Son, I love you and I support you, but you picked a really screwed-up business,' " is how Mr. Paxton remembers his father's advice.

But again like Mr. Ouimet, Mr. Paxton followed his instincts, and his instincts have led him well, both in Hollywood and in his personal life.

He jumped at the chance to direct The Greatest Game Ever Played because he loved the underdog story adapted by Mark Frost from his best-selling book of the same name. He cast it without the insurance of big stars – Shia LaBeouf as Francis is one of the biggest names – because he liked the way his actors fit their parts.

And, most important, he credits instinct for the day he was in London filming The Lords of Discipline and spotted a 17-year-old girl about to board a double-decker bus. He followed Louise Newbury, not knowing where the bus was going. He talked to her and, eventually, married her.

They're still married, with two kids, James and Lydia. James plays the young Harry Vardon, the six-time British Open and American Open champion whom Francis challenges as an amateur in his first American Open competition, as recalled in flashbacks.

Mr. Paxton says he picked his son for the part because of his "open face." The camera, he notes, is "telepathic. It's a mind-reading machine."

His son has had some experience on the screen, too, as Little Dinks to his dad's Dinky Winks in Spy Kids 2.

Of course, it also helped that, with his mother and maternal grandparents hailing from England, he had the accent of the British golfer-to-be down pat.

"He was a little nervous," his proud papa says. "But he gets it."

E-mail nchurnin@dallasnews.com