CANNES, France – A month before Kevin Costner put the first part of his multi-chapter western “Horizon: An American Saga” in theaters, the actor and director came to the Cannes Film Festival to reveal his self-financed passion project.
“Two of my boys are fishing right now,” Costner said with a smile in an interview at the Carlton Hotel. “And the three girls found their way to a boat. So dad is here, waiting for his movie.
The film actually has two, or if Costner has his way, four. “Horizon: Chapter One,” which runs three hours, will be released by Warner Bros. in theaters on June 28. “Chapter Two” follows on August 16. Costner has scripts ready for parts three and four.
It’s only the fourth time Costner, 69, has directed, after 1990’s “Dances With Wolves,” 1997’s “The Postman” and 2003’s “Open Range.” But when he does, Costner usually directs it. does so with a clear passion for the narrative and the character. This is on display in the sprawling epic “Horizon,” with a cast that includes Sienna Miller, Abbey Lee, Sam Worthington and Costner.
It’s also Costner’s biggest gamble of all time. To raise money for the more than $100 million production, he mortgaged his oceanfront estate in Santa Barbara, California. He has been trying to make “Horizon” for over 30 years.
“I thank God for Cannes. I’m an independent filmmaker, essentially, and I’m here alone,” said Costner, whose film was supposed to open on Sunday. “So this is an important moment for me because it’s helping me create awareness for a film. I don’t have all the money in the world to exhibit this film. But I have my time and a platform here.”
Comments have been lightly edited for brevity.
COSTNER: You can spend your life just trying to make your pile bigger and bigger. And I haven’t been very good at it. I’m like anyone else, I wish it was big. But not at the expense of not doing what I feel I love to do. If no one helps me do it and I believe strongly in its entertainment value, I have commerce in mind. But I don’t let that overshadow the entertainment value and the essence of what I’m trying to portray. I don’t try to let the fear of this control my instincts on any level. I don’t want to live like this. If I was watching a movie about myself and I thought, “Oh, don’t risk your money and do something like that,” what a (expletive).
COSTNER: No, it wasn’t an easy decision, but it was the decision I needed to make. It’s like, wow, why am I having to do this? I think I’m doing mainstream entertainment. I don’t know how you felt about the film, but I thought it was really popular. I don’t feel like I’m an avant-garde kind of person. But I still think my stuff is a little off. I’m willing (in a wagon trail scene in the film) to see a woman take a shower because her desire to be clean was so pronounced. If you are a woman, who wouldn’t want to be? But then the next moment you realize it’s against the rule, man. You could cost your life. So that scene became important to make the next scene important. For me, a scene like this is as important as a shootout. And if this type of scene doesn’t want to exist in a mainstream film…
COSTNER: I think. It will be. They’re going to split this into a hundred pieces, you know what I mean? After four of them, they’ll have 13, 14 hours of film and it will turn into 25 hours of TV, and they’ll do whatever they want. This is how we live our lives, but they will also exist in this form. And that was important to me, to make sure that happened. And I was the one who paid for it.
COSTNER: The studio wanted to try that. I knew this would come out quickly, every four or five months. That might have been easier. But this is something they think people might remember from the first and could be related to the second. I’ve included in all of them a montage of what’s to come.
COSTNER: I like to see behavior in men that makes sense. I make films for men. I just make sure there are great female characters because that’s really important to me. The backbone of our film is actually the women. I don’t like boys behaving stupidly. I like the little boy who (fleeing an attack) catches the two horses and effectively saves his life. I like seeing people behave honestly in desperate situations. The heroism of a boy saying “I’ll stay with you, Dad” is a truly powerful moment. That’s my son (Hayes Costner) and it was very difficult to watch.
COSTNER: Confusion about this. The colonel says, “If we salt the earth with enough dead, the carts won’t come anymore.” When you’re so far away, you can’t go. When people said goodbye on the East Coast, they didn’t come back. So the confusion for Native Americans was that they couldn’t understand this. Normally, if you kill enough people, they won’t bother you. But these Americans, these people were getting pamphlets saying you could have this land. There are sellers in every century, in every decade, selling something they don’t really know what it is. It’s just America. It’s just a giant experiment in hope.
COSTNER: When they weren’t useful, they were simply discarded. And they had to create a sense of community and they came in droves. They came together and were very hardworking. They will be the richest people in that city until there is a tipping point and racism emerges and suddenly they disappear too. You watch. This is what would happen in real life.
COSTNER: There is an inevitable tragedy in this. And there are divisions. You see an entire tribe broken in half. You see a father separating from a son.
COSTNER: I shot three days and I keep having to push for money to finish this. I have to figure out what else I can do to do this. But I’m not waiting to see how people feel. I know what that is and I think if people love the movie experience, they have a good chance of wanting to see the next one. That’s all I can believe. The prudent thing would be to wait, but I don’t think I was made for that wait.
COSTNER: “Yellowstone” was very important in my life. I really loved that world and what we were able to do in five seasons. I thought it would just be one, but I made five. I was willing to do three more – five, six and seven – but it just didn’t happen. Certain things were happening that just didn’t happen. So the idea of coming back, I’m open to that idea. But it’s based on everything the first three or four were based on, which is the scripts.
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