Kevin Costner on “Yellowstone,” “Horizon,” and Why the Western Endures
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 24 June 2024
⏱️ 32 minutes
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Summary
Kevin Costner has been a leading man for more than forty years and has starred in all different genres of movies, but a constant in his filmography is the Western. One of his first big roles was in “Silverado,” alongside Kevin Kline and Danny Glover; he directed “Dances with Wolves,” which won seven Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture; more recently, Costner starred as the rancher John Dutton in the enormously successful “Yellowstone.” Perhaps no actor since Clint Eastwood is more associated with the genre. Throughout his career, Costner has also been working on a project called “Horizon: An American Saga.” Too lengthy and expensive for studios (Costner put up tens of millions of dollars to fund it), “Horizon” evolved over decades into a series of four films about the founding of a town in the West. Part 1, which involves the destruction wrought on Native communities by white settlement, comes out next week. While the politics of the genre have evolved, “there were certain dilemmas that [Westerns] established,” he tells David Remnick, that were timeless. “They talked to me about character and just as important, lack of character.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the political scene and I'm David Remnick. |
| 0:07.0 | Kevin Kossner has been a leading man for 40 odd years and he's been in all kinds of |
| 0:18.1 | movies during that time. |
| 0:19.8 | Crime, romance, drama, comedy, thrillers, baseball, but if there's a constant in that long |
| 0:25.6 | filmography of Kostners, it's the Western. One of his first big roles was in |
| 0:31.1 | Silverado alongside Kevin Klein and Danny Glover. In 1990 he directed |
| 0:36.9 | Dances with Wolves about a Renegade soldier's relationship with a group of Lakota Indians. |
| 0:43.0 | 30 years on, Koster starred in the very successful Montana epic, Yellowstone. |
| 0:49.0 | You see that, Vince? |
| 0:52.0 | That's mine. Everything this side of that mountain all the way over to here, |
| 0:58.0 | I'm too. You're trespassing. |
| 1:02.0 | All along, he's been working on a passing. |
| 1:03.0 | All along, he's been working on a project called Horizon, an American saga. |
| 1:08.0 | It's a series of four films about the founding of a town in the west. |
| 1:12.0 | And the first part of Horizon comes out next week. |
| 1:20.0 | The idea for this started in your mind and on the page 30 years ago? |
| 1:25.0 | Yeah, in 1988 I commissioned a screenplay called Sidewinder and it was a two-hander in the |
| 1:31.6 | Western genre and it was pretty good. I liked it but it ultimately |
| 1:36.1 | when it was done and I got it into a place that I thought it could be seen. There was |
| 1:40.8 | a money difference on it not a big, but it was clearly people weren't as |
| 1:44.4 | impassioned about making it as I was. And so six, seven years passed and I don't really fall out of love with |
| 1:51.0 | things. I, so I began to rethink some things, |
... |
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