Question: What are you playing these days? I know in high school you were drumming. So what are you doing now?

Costner: I trained on a piano classically. I grew up in the church, so my grandma played the piano, my mom and her sister were in the choir, I was a 9-year-old wise man at Christmas. But I continued on, I took up the guitar so I play guitar and we write music. The band plays original tunes. That’s what makes it fun for me.

Question: Could you talk a little bit about using Modern West in the film?

Costner: That was a no-brainer for me because those guys would all work for scale, cheap. No one would ever give you any lip, how big their trailer was. I suddenly had the band right where I wanted ‘em, doing whatever I wanted. But they’re my friends, so, finding myself on three months of location, it’s nice to have friends around. They were only around for a week or so. They all wanted love scenes, they all wanted to be, you know… I just told them no! But it was originally written into the script, so it’s not really a vanity piece. I guess the only vanity was [director] Josh [Michael Stern] knew I had a band, and he was the one that actually wanted us to play a song in the movie. That was not originally scripted. We were always the Half Nelsons, some of us were always incarcerated, but the actual playing the song, we wrote that song for the movie.

Question: Madeline, what was the audition process like for you? Once you get to set was it more overwhelming or were you pretty comfortable once you got there?

Carroll: When I first got the lines for Swing Vote, I loved the script. I loved everything about it, I loved the character. I had just gotten back from New York, I was testing for another film and I didn’t get it. So I was just devastated and I was really upset. I went to the audition to Swing Vote and I was so happy I got even the chance to be there. They liked me a lot and they just had me come back. So I came back a couple of times and Josh had me improv a little bit and I did different things.

My mom and my dad and my brothers and I, we just kept praying and asking God to bless us with something good. Then we got a call. We were originally going to have to wait over the weekend because Kevin was going to look at my tape and everything, but he just signed off on me and he hadn’t even seen me. We just started thanking God and screaming and we were just so happy and grateful. So thank you, Kevin.

Question: And your first week on set?

Carroll: It was really fun because I didn’t know what everybody was going to be like. And when I met them, everybody was really nice. I was really happy. When I went on there, I just loved watching them all do their own thing. Each person in the film has a different appearance and they have different ways that they go about acting and about their job and everything. So it was cool seeing all the different ways and watching them. They’ve been around for a very long time, so it was nice to see them play something different.

Costner: Sometimes you think, ‘How can Madeline and I relate to each other?’ You know, age and everything else. We have one thing in common. I remember when my first break happened for me on The Big Chill. It’s this kind of thing where you feel like the wheels are in motion. And it’s a gigantic secret because there’s nobody like this around, that movie’s going to take a year to come out. In the instance of The Big Chill for me, I actually never appeared, obviously being cut out. But I knew at that moment it had happened for me.

I think Madeline had been doing some small parts, and doing commercials or doing whatever she’s doing. But this role was a really significant role, and I think Madeline, one reason why she’s as good as she is, is because she has an awareness of what’s in front of her. And she knew she had an opportunity to score in this movie. And you did, sweetheart.

Carroll: Thank you.

Question: Kevin, do you think your character Bud will inspire the American public to get out and vote?

Costner: Clearly Swing Vote’s not a public service announcement, but I think it might be better than that because it doesn’t preach, it doesn’t hit you over the head. Everyone one of who you sit in the dark and get to the end, and you can ask yourself a fundamental question. Because you’ve had this comedic ride, you’ve even maybe had a tear well up—because you know at it’s essence it’s about a man and his fifth grader set against the backdrop of politics. But interestingly enough when you get to that last speech that somebody brought up, and we were talking about why we worked so hard on it, you can ask yourself that fundamental question, ‘Am I Bud? Or am I a participant? And who am I going to be going forward?’ And it’s not going to change the world, but I feel good about what we tried to do.

Question: You and Kelsey [Grammer] are pretty much on opposite sides of the political spectrum. When you do this film, do you just agree to disagree?

Costner: I don’t know what side you think I’m on, and I’m not even sure what side Kelsey’s on. Is Kelsey a Republican? We never talked about that. You know, because I think there’s something really graceful about when Bud closes the curtain. Those hot button issues, we have the ability to vote in private and whoever thought of that was a genius. Because you’re exercising your duty, but you can also do that in private. But we did not engage in that process, and probably if we had, I might have learned something from Kelsey that I didn’t know. It was interesting, it didn’t get brought up.

Question: Madeline, do you have any new projects coming up?

Carroll: Yes, I do. I have something in September coming up and there’s a couple things that we’re trying to see if we’re going to do, so hopefully everything will work out.

Costner: (laughs)

Question: Kevin, The New Daughter, is that the next one for you?

Costner: Yeah, I finished The New Daughter. It’s a horror movie, you know one of those movies like ‘Why don’t you get out of the house if it’s so scary?’

Question: Are you the bad guy or the good guy?

Costner: I’m the good guy. But then again, I thought I was a good guy in Mr. Brooks, too. I’ll say this and it will sound odd: It’s very much like Field of Dreams—in the sense that we didn’t know if we could pull off Field of Dreams. We didn’t know if people were going to ultimately at the end of the day buy people coming out of the corn, have Burt Lancaster step over that line and not be able to go back, and be moved by that. Ask your father to play catch. We didn’t know. We thought that that was possible, we saw it in the writing.

In this particular movie, it is ‘Why don’t you get out of the house?’ There’s a reason why we don’t. Hopefully we show that, there’s a certain intellect to that. And then at the end, a very big thing happens. And I don’t know if we’re going to pull it off. I hope we do. But that’s what I like about movies, when they’re not a sure thing. Because if I were in the sure thing business, I sure would have done Dances III and Bodyguard III.

So I hope that we pull it off. It’s not my favorite genre because I don’t actually enjoy being scared in movies. I don’t like that feeling. There’s nothing, no rush at all, just the rush to get out. When I was six years old, I was at the theater and I saw Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and I had to have a nightlight on in my room for like 15 years. I was terrified. So I don’t like it, but we made one and hopefully we’ve made a little classic in that genre. I don’t know if we did, but that’s what we were trying to do.