Bill Paxton has come along way since his famous "Game over, man" line as Pvt. Hudson in the Sci-fi hit, Aliens. He has starred alongside some of Hollywood's elite in such films as Tombstone, Apollo 13, Twister, Titanic and the TV hit Big Love. But in 2005 he switched gears, as he took a seat in the director's chair for the Walt Disney film The Greatest Game Ever Played. With its release on Blu-ray this week, S&V sat down with him to talk about the film.

What did you like most about this story when you were asked to direct it? I was going to direct a movie for Lionsgate, but I wanted to do something completely different. So when I read this script I thought "This has got to be one of the greatest sports human interest pieces." I related to it a lot because I grew up on a golf course as a caddy. And this is kind of a safe that nobody cracked.

What was your biggest concern when you decided to take on this film? I knew my biggest challenge was going to be all the golf sequences, so I took all of the golf out when we were first thinking about the film.

During the golf scenes, you do some creative camera work to show how Francis Ouimet sees the game. How did that come about? I really focused on everything but the golf when I was storyboarding, and what also helped was having a great cinematographer named Shane Hurlbut, who worked on the recent Terminator film. I also felt the camera had to really be a participant because it would be fun to see things that the human eye can't see when they're watching a golfer.

How did you try to make this visually entertaining to the audience? What I loved about this film is I didn't need a lot of dialogue. We kept the action moving, even animating the scoreboard so it wouldn't drag on, especially, in the final round between Francis and Vardon.

What were your favorite shots in the film? I like to do title sequences to lay things out for the audience and get them familiar with the story. There were also a lot of western motifs in there. We shot the film so it looked like early Kodachrome. That made colors pop because people during this time period saw color like we did, which isn't how most period pieces come across on film.

What's your home theater like? I just got the Blu-ray hooked up after I saw this movie side-to-side at Disney. I said, "Man I got to get the Blu-ray player." I had a great widescreen TV, but I only had a regular DVD player that didn't work so great with that TV. Now it's amazing how much crisper the picture and the sound quality are on the Blu-ray player.

What makes this movie so good on Blu-ray? I am more of a classicist and I wanted to make an old kind of movie, and make it not look like a typical period piece. I wanted something that was lit and something that sounded great and the Blu-ray definitely shows that.