Kevin Costner breaks silence on Western Epic

Kevin Costner released the first full trailer for Horizon: an American sagahis wildly ambitious four-part post-Civil War western epic that helped steer the actor away from his other western – that of Paramount Network. Yellow stone.

The trailer (below) has a grandiose, old-fashioned grandeur and is packed with sweeping vistas, shootouts, romance, wagon trains, and a clash of civilizations between Calvary soldiers and indigenous people. “There is no army on this earth that can stop these wagons from coming,” warns a character played by Danny Huston.

Costner co-wrote, directed and starred in the Horizon series. The first film will hit theaters on June 28, followed by its second chapter two months later. The second two films have not yet been filmed. The film represented a 30-year journey for Costner, who even took out a loan on his Santa Barbara home to help finance the film (Costner notes that the first two films added $100 million to the economy of the 'Utah, where they were filmed).

“When no one wanted to make the first one, I had the brilliant idea of ​​making four,” Costner said dryly during a moderate discussion of the film. Horizon trailer. “So I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But I wanted it to move away from what we usually see in westerns where there is a city that is already there. Nobody knows how [the town] arrived at. There's a guy coming on the horizon, if you will. We don't know much about him except that he has skills he'd like to put behind him and this town ends up desperately needing those stills… Too often it's just a convenience for the hero to overthrow an idiot. .”

He continued: “We have a lot of westerns that aren't good either because they're simplified. [but] It’s not Disneyland. These are real lives. People are making their way, women are just trying to keep their families clean and fed… That appeals to me. I'll always get to my shootouts, but I'm drawn to the little things that people had to endure. So for me, Horizon It was worth keeping because I just felt like I wanted to tell it. It grew and grew and grew until suddenly I realized that I just had to make it happen, and that I had to rely on myself financially to do it – which isn't the smartest thing. But I'm counting on the film to speak louder than anything I can say.

When asked what the biggest struggle was, Horizon where to get your Oscar Dance with wolves, Costner said the new films – which he spent six years writing – were harder. “This is by far the biggest fight. Is hot Dances in 106 days. I shot the film you're just watching right now in '52. I learned a lot and was able to use every trick in the book to present this film to an audience – and there are four of them.

A lot of HorizonThe press focused on the film's impact on the actor's work on the hit Paramount Network western. Yellow stone. Costner was involved in a prolonged and complicated break from the hit drama as he focused on Horizon movies. The show's crew complained that Costner had made himself less available for the show, while the actor's crew blamed Yellow stone script delays. Either way, it's unclear whether Costner will return to the show to finish patriarch John Dutton's storyline when the show eventually returns for the second half of its fifth season. Paramount announced that the remaining episodes would end the series and then move on to launch a Yellow stone continued with working title 2024.

In the trailer, the film's palette is so bright that the images almost look like Technicolor – a contrast to the darker, grittier style largely adopted by westerns since Clint Eastwood's 1992 classic. unforgiven. “I think things that have a classic look don't fall out of [style]”, says Costner. “I think they exist in any decade, and that's the opportunity we have in cinema, is to do something that lasts… I don't tend to follow trends or [look at] which really works.

Regarding the film's depiction of clashes between white settlers and indigenous people, Costner said: “I'm ashamed of what happened – I don't know if I'm ashamed or if I'm ashamed – but I want to project what really happened,” he said. . “A great injustice has happened in the West, but that does not minimize the courage it took for my ancestors to break free and go there. And I recognized the ingenuity and the courage that it took to go out and make this walk across this country. It's just a film that shows the class of cultures. This is our story. I love it. I can enjoy watching a movie like this if I feel like I can see myself in it, and I really tried to make that happen.

Going a little further on the subject of morality and the Wild West – and touching on a potentially controversial topic – Costner added: “I think it's really wrong to judge other people on how they had to behave or act in another century. We're sort of applying our own sensibilities where we now live a life where, when we're offended, we have to call in a lawyer, an agent, or a publicist – someone to mediate our problems. At the time, you had to arbitrate your own problems, which was terribly dramatic, especially if you were dealing with a sociopath. You must understand that we were coming out of this terrible civil war. And if anyone believes in post-traumatic stress, there were only about 30 million people in America at the time and that war lasted four years. We lost 56,000 men in Vietnam. We lost 600,000 people in the civil war. People came West, sometimes with great hope, taking their families, and others came West because they were damaged and fleeing something.

He continued: “The stranger was a bogeyman. If you were a stranger 120 years ago, people were afraid of you because they didn't know if that was really your name or what you really did. Like the trailer says, if you were strong enough, if they were bad enough, they could hold on to something, they could take it away from you. And when you can create that architecture in a film where anything is possible, some people are lucky and some people aren't. And when they tried to look at their wife who asked, “Why are we coming out here?” The man simply said, “We’re going to be luckier than that.” And that's how this country was colonized and how the American Indians were crushed under this movement. They had no chance. »

Horizon also stars Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Jena Malone, Abbey Lee, Michael Rooker, Huston, Luke Wilson, Isabelle Fuhrman, Jeff Fahey, Will Patton, Tatanka Means, Owen Crow Shoe, Ella Hunt and Jamie Campbell Bower.

Costner executive produces with Howard Kaplan and Mark Gillard. These films come more than three decades after Costner won a directing Oscar for Dance with wolveswhich also won Best Picture.