Kevin Costner Says His Newest Western Film Was a Struggle
Kevin Costner is going through it. He recently shared the first trailer for his upcoming Western film Horizon: An American Saga while dealing with a divorce from his estranged wife Christine Baumgartner. Costner stepped away from the wildly popular Western series Yellowstone in order to direct and star in the four-part post-Civil War Western, which he also co-wrote with John Baird. The first film will be released on June 28, with the second chapter coming out just two months later. Costner is still working on the final two movies of the saga.
The films are very near and dear to Costner’s heart as he even took out loans to help finance them and revealed they have been in the works for over 30 years. When asked if Horizon or his film Dances With Wolves was a bigger struggle to make, it was Horizon hands-down. He explained, “This is by far the biggest struggle. I shot Dances in 106 days. I shot the movie you’re just seeing right now in 52. I learned a lot and I was able to use every trick in the book to bring this movie to an audience — and there’s four of them.”
Warner Bros. Discovery/Everett Collection
Costner continued about the journey to make the movies, “When no one wanted to make the first one, I got the bright idea to make four. So I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But I wanted it to step away from what we usually see in Westerns where there’s a town that’s already there. No one knows how [the town] came to be. There’s a guy comes in off the horizon, if you will. We don’t know much about him, except that he has some skills he’d like to put behind him and this town ends up needing those stills desperately … Too often, it’s just a convenience for the hero guy to knock down a dumb guy.”
Ben Glass/Orion Pictures/Everett Collection
Along with Costner, Horizon stars Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Jena Malone, Abbey Lee, Michael Rooker, Luke Wilson, Isabelle Fuhrman, Jeff Fahey, Will Patton, Tatanka Means, Owen Crow Shoe, Ella Hunt, and Jamie Campbell Bower. This is the first time Costner has directed a film in over 20 years, with the latest being Open Range and The Postman, after the success of Dances with Wolves.
Watch the first trailer and let us know your thoughts!
Wild West- Heroes & Villains
November 2022
Celebrates the unique sense of justice, compassion and adventure in the Old West as seen on TV and in the movies
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