This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC studios and the New Yorker.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

Kevin Kostner has been a leading man for 40 odd years

and he's been in all kinds of movies during that time.

Crime, romance, drama, comedy, thrillers, baseball, but if there's a constant in that long

filmography of Kostners, it's the Western. One of his first big roles was in Silverado alongside Kevin Klein and Danny Glover.

In 1990 he directed Dances with Wolves about a Renegade Soldiers relationship with a group of Lakota Indians.

30 years on, Kostner starred in the very successful Montana epic, Yellowstone.

You see that fence? That's why. Everything this side of that mountain all way over to here?

Mine too. You're trespassing.

All along he's been working on a project called Horizon, an American

Saga. It's a series of four films about the founding of a town in the west and the first part of

Horizon comes out next week.

The idea for this started in your mind and on the page 30 years ago?

Yeah, in 1988 I commissioned a screenplay called Sidewinder and it was a two-hander in the Western genre and it was pretty good. I liked it, but it ultimately when it was done and I got it into a place that I thought it could be seen

There was a money difference on it not a big spread, but it was clearly people weren't as

impassioned about making it as I was. And so six, seven years passed and I don't really fall out of love with things.

So I began to rethink some things, which is all our westerns typically start with a town, right?

There's a town there.

We never really deal with how those buildings and those saloons and those blacksmith shops and those, you know, you know, hardware stores.

The whorehouse, the bar, the...

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