by Gill Pringle
If Kevin Costner’s western Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 was deemed a flop, then the actor/director still considers his film to be an epic, asking for audiences’ patience as the next three chapters roll out.
Released four months ago, Chapter 1 made US$38 million at the international box office before it was pulled from screens, postponing ambitious plans to release Chapter 2 a few months later.
“We’re an epic and we’re a story that takes its time. And there’s four of these, and I’m so happy that you sat through this one,” a humble Costner said following an weekend awards screening of the three-hour-long Chapter 1 in Los Angeles.
It’s no secret that Costner, 69, put his heart and soul – and roughly US$38 million of his own cash – into making this four-part Western, starring opposite Australia’s own Sam Worthington and Abbey Lee.
Directed, co-written, co-produced and starring Costner, he defended every decision that he has made with Horizon. “There’s the movie you write, there’s the movie you shoot, and there’s the movie you edit. It was a disciplined thing. We didn’t just feel like we had footage and started carving something out. I wasn’t interested in writing a cliffhanger. I wanted it to come to a natural ending, but not an end,” he said, clearly in response to critics who felt Chapter 1 meandered and didn’t have a proper ending, instead culminating in a montage of future scenes.
“The montage seems to have confused a lot of people, but it’s where we’re going – and the second one is devastating. It’s where these actors and this story just begin to fly. And I appreciate that people understand that a foundation was built, a careful one with this first movie. And 2 is done. And 3, I’ve started in my own mind and my heart, and it’s devastating, and I just can’t wait to bring them to you.
“I wish somebody would have made this for me. But I’m making it for you, and…. If you haven’t listened to the noise of things – like when I made Dances with Wolves, it was ‘Kevin’s Gate’,” he says referring to Michael Cimino’s infamous bomb, Heaven’s Gate. “It made it hard to work. I didn’t understand. Sometimes, there are noises that come with a movie.”
The first of four films set in the pre and post-Civil War expansion of the American West, Horizon: An American Saga is surely Costner’s most sprawling epic since Dances with Wolves, which he also part-funded, netting him seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Talking about the driving force in taking on any movie – be it as a director or actor – he grins. “We all choose to be away from our homes for a couple of reasons. Either it’s the script that is attracted to you, or it’s perhaps the director that’s attracted you to it – or you’ve had a divorce and you fucking have to work!”
He can’t help show his pride when he talks about his own son, Hayes Costner, who plays the small but pivotal role of Nathaniel Kittredge, the son of a settler who joins his father in trying to defend their home from a surprise Native American attack.
While the boy’s mum and sister hide in a hole beneath the house, young Nathaniel bravely refuses to join them, even though death is almost certain.
In truth, Costner chose the name of Hayes for his son before he was even born – given how he was already dreaming up his Horizon epic, in which he would play a key character named Hayes Ellison.
“I just have to mention that was my little boy that wouldn’t go down in the hole – my son,” beamed Costner.
“He’d never acted, and he didn’t know what a mark was. He kept his foot on it like it was a base. My kids aren’t actors, they’re athletes, and I had to say, ‘that mark doesn’t own you. You own your own part’, and he quickly caught on. But he’s my son, so I just had to say something,” he added.
If Costner’s Hayes Ellison doesn’t appear until about halfway through the movie, he says that he has no ego about when he appears on screen.
“I’m never concerned where I land in a movie. I’m a part of it, and I don’t concern myself with that. We all are going to know that I was in it.”
As much as he enjoys the expansiveness of the West, for him, it’s all about the actors. “We can’t let the bigness of the film rob us of the nuance. I don’t care how big the horizon is, how big that thing is – it’s the nuance. And those actors believed in the dialogue. They brought their own voice, and they brought their own chance at an American western,” he said of his ensemble which includes Jena Malone, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Rooker and Will Patton alongside an enormous cast of Native American actors.
“I’d like to not box it in as a Western, because it was terribly dramatic, what the actors were going through, what Sienna Miller was going through; Danny Huston explaining Manifest Destiny the same way James Earl Jones explained baseball in Field of Dreams. He identified what it was to cross America.
“Too often, I say I grew up with a love of westerns – but I didn’t love very many. They’re hard to make, but when you get one right, you measure yourself against that moment in time and wonder if I would have made it [back in the wild west]? And that’s a big question.
“Those who are so certain that they would be brave in battle, I always question them. We don’t know, but there’s a heroism even when a man decides he will not let his wife and children be ravaged and he blows them up. That’s not a sensational moment. That’s a moment that occurred in the American West all the time, because it was fierce what they were losing to Native Americans, and what the people coming across this country were trying to build. They were at odds, and it would get ugly, and I’m not afraid to tell that part of the story and the level of heroism that goes with that,” he said.
Reflecting on his storied career, he said, “I haven’t done a successful job making the same movie that people liked over and over again. There’s been a lot of urge for me to make, you know, Field of Dreams 3, or Bodyguard 4 or something. I have fallen in love with the individual movie. I’m not against sequels. I think they’re great. They’re hard to write. That’s why this one’s already done. It’s not a sequel where I think, ‘Jesus! It’s successful. I better go make something up really fast’. This is a whole thing. I don’t know what to do about attention spans, but I cannot be swayed by it. So, if you find yourself in front of Horizon, it will take you for a ride. And as a filmmaker, you can’t dictate who’s going to come… I’m not good at the trends or what’s trending or what’s popular. I think this is popular. I just do. And when we do it right, it lives forever.
“I have to chase my own heart. And sometimes it’s movies that have a lot of history and sometimes it’s just trying to get Susan Sarandon in the bathtub!” he quipped referring to his 1988 baseball movie Bull Durham.
“It’s just that I like where movies take me. They have taught me more about how I want to be in this life than almost anything. For as phony as they are, we can look at the movies and decide who we want to be. When we see a character who hasn’t won, but we understood what they fought for was important… We know that that’s who we want to be. So, movies, they have a place; they can inform children about behaviour, about character – but we’re told that sometimes it’s not commercial. Well, I don’t feel that way, because I like subplot. and I like coming back. It’s a direction, it’s a style, and may we all have our own.”
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 is streaming on Stan. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 will release in 2025.