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When did this love of Bobby Darin start for you?
My mother was in love with Bobby Darin. She thought he was the greatest thing that ever walked the face of the earth. I grew up in a house where Bobby Darin was playing all the time, as well as Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. My dad had a 78 collection, which I now have, that was pristine. I grew up listening to big bands, that brassy sound, and by the time I was 15 my mother had thoroughly converted me.

Then it was when I was in my early twenties that a couple of books came out about Bobby?s life, and I didn?t know anything about him. I just knew him as a performer and I might have seen a couple of things of him on television. But by that point he?d passed away. But getting a hold of his story, and learning what he had overcome, and learning how much he?d crammed into a 15 year career, in a very short life? Then I heard they were making a movie, or trying to make a movie at Warner Brothers, this is now the late ?80s. I thought, ?This is the part for me. I?m born to play this part. I?ve got to play this part.? Unfortunately, they didn?t think so. In all fairness, I hadn?t done any movies and so I was slugging my way through and trying to get in film and television. I began to work in film and television and every single year, at least three times a year, my manager would call over to Warner Brothers and say, ?Hey, what?s happening with that Bobby Darin movie? You guys ever going to make it?

Kevin really wants to do it.?

Then in ?95 I started to emerge in film, and then fortuitously I did a series of films for Warner Brothers. ?L.A. Confidential,? ?Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil? and ?The Negotiator? were all Warner Brothers Pictures, so I then began my own relationship with the executives there, in particular Alan Horn who runs the studio. I just basically begged him for about four years, because studios don?t like to give up their titles even if they don?t make the movies. He finally cleared all roadblocks, and the end of ?99 I got the rights in 2000. So I?ve really only had something to do with the movie for the last four years, but I started working on the music in ?99, hoping that maybe I?d get the rights.

You have a knack for impersonations, but you didn?t do that with Bobby. How did you manage not to make it a caricature?
I?ve watched a lot of films that are biopics and sometimes I feel like it?s watching a wax museum performance. You can saddle yourself as a performer with having to be so much like somebody that it actually doesn?t make you explode out, it hampers you. Although I have a good ear, and I love doing impressions and that?s all fun for comedy and stuff, but I always felt that if I was going to do the singing, if I was going to do this performance, it had to come from me. If I could find Bobby?s essence, and God knows I?ve watched enough of his performances and listened to enough of his records to the point where I?ve driven all of my friends completely out of the room, I thought maybe that stuff?s going to percolate and it will be in me.

I never wanted to be on that set thinking, ?Oh, Bobby didn?t do his hands like that,? or ?Oh, he didn?t exactly do it that way.? I just never wanted to be standing outside of myself and being that nitpicky and anal about it. I wanted to enjoy it.

I started working with Roger Calloway just on the music, just learning a lot of Bobby?s catalog, just trying to get behind the way he got around songs. Then we went into the recording studio with Phil Ramone and we laid down all these tracks at Capitol Records, which aren?t the tracks in the movie. These were just rehearsal tracks so that wherever I went ? because I was taking acting jobs, they weren?t where my heart was, but I was taking acting jobs - and so wherever I was, I was listening to these tracks and singing in hotel rooms and keeping people awake at night.

Then we went onto a soundstage. I was doing a bunch of pictures for Universal and so I got a soundstage at Universal. We created a nightclub there with mirrors and a big huge computer screen. I could punch up any performance of Bobby?s. We had everything on these towers. It was great, every ?Dick Clark? show, every ?Ed Sullivan,? every television program he ever was on we had, all of it cataloged. I got so much material out of Warner Brothers, because I got all their scripts, all the documentation and all the interviews they did with everybody. So I didn?t have to do that over again, I had it all.

PAGE 3:Kevin Spacey on His Concert Tour and Bobby Darin's Short Life