When Kevin Costner debuted Horizon, the first of what will eventually be four Westerns that will detail the sacrifices of settlers moving West and the cost to displaced Native Americans after the Civil War, at Cannes earlier this year, the film was met with a tepid reaction by critics. When the film hit theaters in June, the box office results were not what Costner or New Line hoped they would be. However, despite the shots that Costner has taken for his film (and for being unable to finish Yellowstone for Paramount), Costner remains undeterred by the type of setbacks that would lead other filmmakers to walk away from their passion project.
Kevin Costner is not one of those filmmakers.
Costner has an unshakeable belief that if Horizon and its forthcoming installments are given a fair chance by viewers, the payoff will be considerable. Count me among Costner’s believers. Horizon marries classic Western filmmaking with a forward-thinking vision that delivers plenty in part one but promises even more in the forthcoming sequels.
The Horizon films are a big, brave swing from one of the best filmmakers of his generation. Costner isn’t making four Horizon films just because he wants to; he’s doing it because he hears a calling for the type of storytelling and imagination that we seldom see in films anymore. Sure, it might be easy to take shots at Costner for walking away from the massive paydays of Yellowstone to pour millions of his own dollars into a series of films that may not recoup a comparable return on investment. While Costner wants the films to find an audience and believes they eventually will, Horizon is a story of belief on and off screen.
Here is my interview with Kevin Costner, a true believer.
The Contending: When I was about 12 or 13 years old, I saw a movie called American Flyers. I remember thinking to myself, who’s that guy? Because I thought that guy was really good. That guy turned out to be you. Then over the next decade or so, which was a formative time for me engaging with cinema, you made several movies that still stick to my ribs after all these years.
Kevin Costner: Thank you for that. I make movies with the idea that they can last forever, that they want to be shared, and that there are moments that a man or a young man can identify with. I’m not as brave as the people I play in movies or as smart or whatever, but sometimes I get to play those people. And then, trying to play them, I try to humanize the moment in a way that somebody thinks “I’d like to behave like that under that set of circumstances,” or “I’d like to not behave like that under that set of circumstances.” Movies are a guide to how we wish we behaved in certain situations, as phony as they are, unless we’re doing an autobiography and we get that right. And the person who’s doing something heroic, nobody knows how scared he probably was at that moment or how much he might’ve just let go of his life, which allowed him to do the impossible.
So I try to find that, whether it’s being on a bicycle or having failing health, and to just somehow connect with an audience watching me. I invest heavily in writing. I don’t do any movie where I don’t feel like the writing is strong. It’s the exact same thing for Horizon. It was my nod to Yellowstone. How long I choose to do something. and why I choose to leave is my business. They’re tied to my own character, meaning in real life, about what is important to me versus just being popular or making more money. Clearly, if I want to make more money, I stay with something. If I want to be the guy I see on screen, I better fucking act like it when it comes down to a critical moment. The things I do depend on writing, and writing creates doubt, and we all have doubt about which way we should go. Why isn’t that as important, being confused in the West and this gigantic horizon? It’s drama. We think it’s all about the gunfight, but it isn’t. It’s about a woman bathing and using water she’s not supposed to use. It’s about things that other people would normally throw out in American cinema because it doesn’t seem to drive the story forward. But I’m not built like that, David. I’m just not. I enjoy the drama of dilemma, and dilemma means you don’t know what you’re going to do. As long as you don’t know what you’re going to do, drama exists. For instance, there’s drama in not hitting you. The moment I hit you, it becomes action. So to try to find drama in the movies. That’s something that I did with (Horizon screenwriter) Jon Baird. That screenplay is incredible. All four of them. They all knit together. And I hope people, who maybe have not sensed how good it really is, will start to sense this in two and three and four and realize oh my god, we were watching something that is really melded together.
The Contending: I have this strong belief that courage does not exist in the absence of fear, it exists when fear is present. How heroic or courageous can you be if you’re not afraid at all.? To take on a project as large as this and invest your own capital into it, I imagine there was some sense of fear.
Kevin Costner: Here’s the fear, I’ve been able to be lucky in my life. I have the things I need, and then I amassed this other pile over here that I never thought would exist. I’m comfortable here, but I have this thing here and those things there I love. That’s why I have them. Those things over here, I share. I don’t put a fence up around my good luck. The thing that I’m pointing at over here in a sense, this big pile is property, it’s land, it’s things that my children will inherit. I have risked that to serve my own feelings about what it is I do as a writer, an actor, a director. They are at risk. They’re heavily at risk. Is there a fear of losing them? I would hate to lose them, but they don’t define me. I don’t want to lose them so I work as hard as I can on behalf of this movie. And I don’t run away from it because some critics in Cannes decided to try to bury it. And for some reason, American cinema being what it is, people started to roll with it.
I know what Horizon is. I made it for people. I didn’t make it for myself. I made it because I thought I had a big secret. Just the same way as when I read Field of Dreams or I read Bull Durham or Bodyguard or Tin Cup or any of these little things, JFK. I thought gee, if we get this right, this is a thing. This is why I go to the movies. What we do in America now is we make a movie. We may even hate it, but guess what? It was a hit. Oh my God. It was a hit? Let’s make another one. And they start writing that second one before the obituary comes out. I have confidence in storytelling. I actually have a lot of confidence in people who love movies to find these movies to share them. What happens is I’m willing to risk this pile over here to own it, in order to protect it. So I’m not going to let this movie become something that it is not. I’m not going to allow the panic that comes with something. There are people like yourself that see it for what it is. I’ve said, and I hate saying this, but there’s a lot of good movies this year and I’m not saying we’re better than any of them, but I’m not saying any of them are better than my movie. I know that in my heart. I know what we did. I know the literacy that went into an American Western, the costumes, the story–it is thought out. It’s not a movie done on a thumbnail. It’s done on the biggest possible landscape. And I’m comfortable with that. I won’t pity the man who doubts what he once knew to be true. I know what I know about it. And I’m thankful that you’re even taking this very close look when it’s maybe not even popular to do so, I’m looking at this and now that I’m looking at this and somebody is forcing me to measure it, I see how this movie stands up if your eyes are wide open.
The Contending: There’s a movie out that I won’t name, but it’s getting really good reviews and I did not think it was particularly great. I don’t give a shit if it’s getting good reviews. If it gets bad reviews, I don’t give a shit. It’s not that that stuff doesn’t matter, but it’s important to me to evaluate the film from what I see, not the film that other people see.
Kevin Costner: Does a movie transport you? That’s the fundamental letter I get. I’ve gotten more letters off this movie than any movie I’ve ever done, and actually from colleagues and colleagues that I’ve never met, saying that for some reason there’s this myth that Westerns are good and people keep wanting us to see them, but they often don’t stand up. And they said, I went to this Western, and it transported me. For some reason, it transported me. It was funny. It was sad. It was rough. It was violent. It was expansive. How did you do it? It’s the writing. I believe so much in writing, so I’ve been gratified by those ideas that people go this is a complicated Western, but it lets you in.
The Contending: You’ve always had a connection to this genre, and if I remember right, there was a quote when Dances with Wolves came out where you said I had to make it because nobody else could or would, or wanted to, or whatever. If it’s going to get made, I’ve got to do it. And then in 2003, you made Open Range, which is my favorite Western ever. The scene where you explained to Robert Duvall the difference between a fight and a death match is one of the best scenes I’ve ever seen in cinema. That came out in 2003. It got strong reviews, did a solid box office. Why haven’t you directed a film since 2003?
Kevin Costner: I don’t know. I always think somebody can do it better. I love that you highlighted that scene and you know how that scene ended that most people won’t even go to. You will, because you love everything about it. We do an exchange of names, real names at the moment, at the end. It also highlights the humanness of things. You said no one would make Dances. I went to three directors at the top of their game to direct Dances and they each singled out something that they didn’t like. One didn’t feel that you should start with the Civil War. Just leave that. Let’s just bring him out on the fort. Don’t even see the crazy general. Another one felt that it shouldn’t be a white woman that he falls in love with, that that’s a cliche. Number one, white women were kept as slaves by native tribes; they were commerce in the West, if you know the West at all. They kept them for a million reasons, not just to maybe make a wife of or a slave of. If they were attacked by white people, they could often avoid a fight by trading a white woman back. Would you leave us alone if we give you this white woman? Yes.
They were a piece of commerce that acted as a buffer. The second reason, though was because it allowed for me to ultimately communicate quicker because she could teach me the language. She could start teaching me, and our humor came from two people not knowing how to speak. The Civil War was just my way of setting the stage. So what happened was I had three experienced directors and all went at my movie with a fine tooth comb, and I guess I’m a baby because everything they didn’t like, I loved. I think they’re all better directors than me, they know all their lenses. I just know how I want something to look and what my story is, and I try to leave a window of opportunity. So, I haven’t directed a lot because I’ve always thought other people knew more than myself. I can clearly point out moments in certain movies where I realized we were going in the wrong direction and sometimes editorially I saw where they got off the mark and caving into conventional wisdom of it running too long or we don’t need this, we don’t need that. And I’m always thinking fuck, that’s why I ended up doing the movie, because those things were terribly interesting to me.
The Contending: There’s a funny thing that I think happens sometimes that you can trace back years and years. I think of Michael Cimino and Heaven’s Gate, and Sergio Leone and Once Upon a Time in America. These are films that at the time got harsh treatment and years later people find them and reappraise them as classics. There’s a desire to dump on ambition sometimes, which I find bothersome. I think that, oddly enough, you and Francis Ford Coppola with Megalopolis have suffered that same fate this year. You invested in it personally and financially, and there is this sense that maybe it’s because of you leaving Yellowstone that somebody wants to wag a finger at you like, “see, you shouldn’t have done this.” I take offense to that because I think ambition is important in films. It may be the most important thing in films.
Kevin Costner: I think you have to stand for something and that is how you conduct yourself in life. I pick and choose the things I do. I honor my contracts, and the moment I feel like something is not appropriate anymore, it doesn’t really matter how much money is there. I don’t like to let people down. I did five seasons of Yellowstone. I was only scheduled to do one, but in the end I didn’t want to see it turn inward on itself. There’s a lot of reasons why I do things. I don’t talk about all of them. I just go on with myself. Yeah, it happens. But the one thing I have is I own this movie, and it will travel through time. It’s individuals like yourself that have thought to highlight things. I consider myself a strong person, but you’d be surprised at how much I needed somebody to say they liked it. So I feel weak. I appreciate it because I’m thinking who the fuck is out there really taking a look at things. And I know that Horizon will stand the test of time because I insist on it in every decision I make.
The Contending: To do a film that’s going to be told in four parts, getting commitments from cast and crew, you’re asking people potentially to take this sizable chunk of their life and give it over to one project. How difficult was it to get those attachments to say I will be in place with you for as long as you’ll have me?
Kevin Costner: I never had a problem with anybody. Everybody just immediately wanted to do it. They believed in their parts. I mean, there’s a vanity in an actor that you want to be in something great. You want to live forever, and you can only do that through good writing. It’s not enough that oh, I don’t even have to read the script, Kevin’s doing it so I’m going to go with him. That wouldn’t entice me at all. I have to see the writing. I have to know how I can score, how I score inside the movie, how I play. And all these actors knew that this is our Shakespeare. The soliloquy that Danny Huston gives about Manifest Destiny, Jamie Bower walking up that hill, this thing is vested in language. It is not “yep and nope. It’s not I’ll get back to you in a moment.” This is Victorian language and the actors responded to it. They want these speeches. And if you see two, you’ll see the same thing. They want to be saying this language. These are great acting parts. They just happen to be in an American Western. They’re not like some junkie in New York. Oh, that’s great acting. And I get that. This is great acting in an American Western where you’re living in the dirt. You’re actually trying to keep your children clean. You know you can’t go back. You’re creating a level of drama and the same for the Native Americans, the confusion they had to have. There was nobody that didn’t want to come do this. I got some hate mail for not asking some people to be in it. (Laughs).
The Contending: This is a very kaleidoscopic telling of the move West. You’re dealing with Native American culture. You’re dealing with the real courage that it takes to just go out West and not know what it holds for you. And then there’s also soldiers that are trying to manage the territory to some degree. We’ve seen movies about the move West, but I don’t know that we’ve seen a movie that tries to tie as many pieces together about the move to the Old West.
Kevin Costner: What happened was when I had the idea in ‘88, a script came out and it was a two-hander, me and another character named Doak, who you’ll meet in chapter three, but the original movie was him and I wall to wall in a town that already existed. The town you’ve seen now. It still hasn’t emerged. It’s trying to, it’s being burnt down. It’s being fought over. It’s being contested. It just doesn’t happen right away. So what happened was I was going to make this in 2003, right after Open Range, because it had done really well for the studio and I decided I wanted to pay myself instead of work for free and they wouldn’t make it. And that was frustrating to me. It was just so frustrating how well that they’d done on the other one. I had to park it, so to speak, but I knew it was good. About five/six years later, I went to revisit it again with Jon Baird. We decided that look, most Westerns start with a town. We never talk about the idea that we displaced these people (Native Americans). Towns suddenly, magically are there. We don’t deal with the drama of how that happened. That’s why the first image is of a stake going in the ground, that happened in every town you fly across in the country. So we started to think about instead of the classic Western where you don’t know anything about the guy coming in on the horizon, you don’t know about him, he’s a mystery, you don’t know anything about the town because it’s just there. All you know is that somebody’s in trouble and this guy’s going to have to use his gun. He’s going to have to resurrect something that he was trying to run away from. Not all Westerns are that way, but that’s a formula. And when done well it is really good. Because it is the West, you did have to stand up for yourself. So when it’s done well in a way that you don’t recognize, but a way you hope that you would behave, you can fall in love with a Western. Once that happened, I didn’t put a lid on it because I don’t want to limit the writing process. Let’s write till we’re done. And so what we did in the re-engineering, it became four movies. That fifth movie is still sitting there. It’s still sitting there. This is where all these movies are taking you to. When I was done, I was so satisfied with it. I didn’t immediately want it to be a streamer or something, because it will eventually be that anyway. People will break this thing down for television and things like that. I wanted that cinematic experience. I felt that the story could live up to it.
The Contending: Speaking about not having the sort of conventional beginning, I didn’t notice as much because I was just involved in what was going on screen, but it occurred to me on my second viewing of Horizon, your character doesn’t show up for an hour. And I thought, you’re the name of this movie. Your name’s all over this movie, because it has to be to have it made. And I thought about the idea of asking the audience to have the patience to have the star show up until an hour in. Can you just tell me about that choice because obviously it’s a conscious one.
Kevin Costner: It was. I consider myself as a part of an ensemble. I understand how I have to stand out, but I also thought to myself I’m in this for the long run. There’s going to be plenty of me coming and I need to wean people off the idea that it has to be me. The studio didn’t like that. They didn’t develop the project, but they’re going to release it and they asked me is there any way you could come in quicker? And I moved me up by about 10 minutes. I just said if the writing is interesting, if these people are interesting, they will go for the ride. There’ll be plenty of me. In three and four, I really dominate. I’m in it about the same amount in the second one. I just believe in an audience. The studio believes in this other thing. It’s not that they’re wrong. It’s just that I can’t serve too many visions before the line gets too fat and we don’t know what we’ve done. At the end of the day, if this is what I hope it to be, I think people are going to be satisfied. It’s a big novel that begins to wind itself down and hopefully people can say, like you said about Open Range, I’m in love with it.
The Contending: Roughly 20 years ago or so I went to the Grand Canyon for the first time and you stand out at this farthest level you can, to get as close to the canyon, and you’re looking at it and almost feels like if you could reach out with your hand, you could touch the most realistic painting you’ve ever seen in your life. To me, it was a reminder of how incredibly small humans are, in the vastness of the space that we live in. And I think that’s something that the movie really captures with these wide open vistas, just how small heroes are in this huge landscape, and how little time we take up on Earth. Was that part of your goal here to be big and small at the same time?
Kevin Costner: Did you say how small a hero can be in the big landscape? Did you just say that? That’s beautiful, I never heard that before. We have to stand up at the moment, small or big. At the PTA, when our kid or some other kid’s being abused, very small moment, but a very heroic stance. There are moments where we have to do the right thing. Movies are built on isolating moments and turning them into bigger things, building, building. My character wasn’t even the head Cowboy. He was a drover on that mule team. It was the white hair bearded guy that was in charge. My character doesn’t read. He’s illiterate and he would much rather just be a worker, but there’s something about him, and you’ll see the pattern. When people meet him, they always want to move him to the next level. They don’t realize he’s very comfortable just being a hand. And he doesn’t read, he’s insecure about that idea. Like if somebody says you’re six foot 10 or something, you should be the center on the basketball team. No, I actually don’t even want to play. He’s modest in that particular way. He is a man that makes a living on horseback. He’s good with cattle and horses. He’s good with them and he can live with the items on his back and on his horse and that’s how he makes a living.
The Contending: You mentioned before Danny Huston talking about Manifest Destiny. I think there’s an interesting thing that the film does. You do show the plight of the Apache, you do show the plight of the settlers, and there’s this sort of convergence that’s unavoidable and it’s going to cause conflict. What is interesting to me is that the film doesn’t in any sort of heavy handed way, take a side. It just presents and lets you think about it, and lets you figure out how you feel about it.
Kevin Costner: Movies are emotional experiences and when somebody is trying to usually talk you out of an idea, they try to do it on an intellectual basis. We can’t start with the Indians. That’s a cliche. The Indians are fighting and being violent. And I’m thinking maybe you haven’t fucking looked at my life. I think I treat Native Americans pretty well in my work–gracefully. What they have to understand is that night represents probably three years of frustration. They can no longer hunt that valley. They can no longer cross the river there. In the second chapter we talk about that even a little more, that the settlers completely scared the game away. Now the Indians have to go either left or right, and that puts them in a conflict with neighbors that they’d already settled those borders with. We engage with the Native Americans and we turn their lives upside down. And so I’m content that okay yeah, this attack on the settlers goes on for 25 minutes. It’s unrelenting. And it’s a matter of anger. The Native Americans believe that if they do this, the settlers will never come back. Who would come back to this Valley after we just did this, but what they didn’t know was that there were millions of people in America coming. They felt that this was a moment they had to say enough, leave. You have to leave. This will make them leave. And then Danny Huston explains that we’ll never stop coming. We’re just not going to look at those people as anything other than they were unlucky and we won’t be. So I also knew that at the end of the movie I was going to show how vicious we could be in taking scalps. We didn’t really care if it was a woman, a Mexican, another tribe. It didn’t have to be those people that attacked that town. It was just simply commerce. And by the way, we can keep going and find those particular Indians, but let’s kill some along the way. It’ll just keep us sharp. It’s brutal. It’s brutal language and you only get it on a second or third viewing of it.
The Contending: The film played even better for me the second time because there is so much to take in. That sequence where there is the attack on the settlers and it does go on for a lengthy amount of time and it’s very complex– keeping track of where things are, but particularly the sequence in the house I thought was just phenomenal with the going underground and trying to find oxygen and pushing up a gun barrel basically through the ground. How the hell did you come up with that? No one’s ever done that in a movie before, not that I know of anyway.
Kevin Costner: I don’t know. You think of a survival instinct that you just have to have one and that they were proactive enough to actually dig that tunnel to know at some point this could become a possibility. It’s probably not something that they maintain, and obviously when they go down there, they find that it’s been clogged. They can’t get out. I just love to depend on the human resourcefulness. Since you like that detail, I hope you like the idea that she was smart enough, as a woman, to tear some of her dress and to plug the holes so that the dirt wouldn’t get in the barrel. She broke the stock. She pounded her way out. She was desperate to live.
The Contending: The movie ends with a montage, and my interpretation was that it served the purpose of taking us forward into the upcoming Horizon films.
Kevin Costner: It was a scripted thing but the montage is leading to other scenes that will play out and you won’t even immediately know till the third one. The second one has a montage and now that plays out, but then you still don’t know where it’s going. Things will begin to pay off. I just have the patience to believe in story. I love that intake of breath where I go now I know. Now I know. That’s an emotion to me, honestly. I know I’m not exactly in vogue. That’s why I let other people direct. I know my style isn’t in sync, but I don’t feel it’s out of touch.
The Contending: I know the financing is difficult for such a massive project, so I hope the production is moving along in such a way that you have confidence. I have a feeling you’re going to figure it out no matter what, to be perfectly honest.
Kevin Costner: (Grinning). Just imagine me in a tunnel with a shotgun and no air. I’m going to figure it out.
Horizon: An American Saga Part 1 can be streamed on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and HBOMAX
