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Kevin Costner, at almost seventy, is still the living definition of “ruggedly handsome.” No one squints into the distance quite like he squints into the distance. His is a face made for Westerns. He has won Oscars and Golden Globes for directing and acting, and has just ended a five-season run as the patriarch-rancher in the TV hit “Yellowstone.” For more than thirty years, he’s been working on a multipart Western called “Horizon: An American Saga,” and, after taking countless meetings with Hollywood executives, he discovered that he was never going to get the money he needed to make the film at the scale that he envisioned. This is not exactly a relatable predicament, but it is Costner’s, and, in the end, he decided to go all in with his own fortune. So far, with the first “chapter” in theatres, the project has cost him more than fifty million dollars.
Historically, Costner is not alone. Charlie Chaplin self-financed “The Great Dictator.” D. W. Griffith poured a lot of his own money into “Intolerance.” Orson Welles, whose “Citizen Kane” is often regarded as the best movie ever made in Hollywood, had to dig into his own pockets and hustle to make “Othello.” John Cassavetes did the same to make “Faces” and “A Woman Under the Influence.” Much more recently, Francis Ford Coppola, whose “Godfather” films compete on the same best-of lists with “Citizen Kane,” sold off a part of his wine business to make the dystopian epic “Megalopolis.” For modern studio executives, Coppola told Variety, “the job is not so much to make good movies, the job is to make sure they pay their debt obligations.”
Costner came to the studio at One World Trade Center recently to talk about “Horizon” for The New Yorker Radio Hour. He arrived with an entourage worthy of a mid-century heavyweight champion. (Did the publicist’s assistant have a publicist?) He seemed distracted, and even irritated at times—money on the line, publicity to do. His personal life had been in the tabloids. And there was also the matter of the early reviews for “Horizon,” which were not entirely kind.
Nicholas Barber, of the BBC, called it disorganized, “dull and plodding,” and “full of stultifyingly slow dialogue scenes that spell out the issues but do nothing to establish the characters as human beings.” Barber’s broadside brought to mind Pauline Kael’s rough assessment, thirty-four years ago, of another of Costner’s Westerns, “Dances with Wolves,” which he starred in, directed, and co-produced. “This epic was made by a bland megalomaniac,” Kael wrote. Costner remembered her review only too well. “Cruel,” he told me. “Not nice.”
Before, during, and after our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Costner was as edgy as a gambler mid-game. With “Horizon,” he said, he had pushed all his chips to the center of the table. For “Dances with Wolves,” the gamble paid off: even if the bout with Kael and other critics had been a misery, the film was a hit at the box office and won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. The first part of “Horizon: American Saga” opened on June 28th, and earned just eleven million dollars at the box office during its first weekend. The second chapter was scheduled to come out in mid-August, but its release was indefinitely delayed this week; the third is in production, and a fourth, according to Costner, is coming, too.
Let’s begin from the beginning. My understanding is that the idea for this started in your mind, and on the page, thirty 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 there was a difference about money on it—not a big spread, but it was clear that people weren’t as passionate about making it as I was, and so I didn’t make it. And so six, seven years passed. I don’t really fall out of love with things. I began to rethink some things. All our Westerns typically start with a town, right? How did they get there? Who put that first stake in and what trouble did it cause for the people who’d been there for thousands of years? Because we were putting our towns in the same place that Indigenous people also felt was the best place to cross a river or access water. You know what I’m saying? All the famous cities we have—St. Louis, Denver—somebody threw down a stake.
I decided I would start at the beginning. Who were the first people to come into this valley besides the ones that had been there for fifteen thousand years? I basically took that screenplay from 1988, and I reëngineered four screenplays. It all debunks the theories about how these towns in America came to be.
Tell me about how Hollywood does or does not embrace an idea from somebody who’s got the stature that you have. These things are expensive to make. What barriers did you encounter when you first decided you wanted to make this, and who were you coming up against?
It’s not the first time it’s happened to me. “Dances with Wolves” was the same thing. I did a movie called “Black or White,” about racism, that I funded completely with a friend. “Open Range”—I just did it without salary. And of course, this one. I have financed a great deal of it. The industry seems to have really big years, powerful years, off of sequels, off of—the Marvel Comics seem to be important. I don’t feel like I’m an avant-garde filmmaker by any stretch. I make baseball movies, political thrillers, romantic comedies, and Westerns. So it’s not like I’m making movies that people scratch their head about. I think I make mainstream kinds of movies, but I make them in my own way. I give you some edges that maybe people don’t want. I’m not rushing to my gunfight.
Do you feel that you’re making a political movie?
No.
You don’t?
Not at all. I wouldn’t even conceive of that.
I don’t mean about politics in Washington. I mean a new look at how “the West was won.” You’re looking at it maybe from a different political vantage point than “High Noon” did.
Yeah, maybe. But with no sense of being the authority of how it was done. No sense of setting history correct. I just appreciate movies where I feel like I can lean into them because I think I feel an authenticity. I feel I just start to lean in as a picture starts to tumble, like the first pages of a novel. When those ideas of landscape and language and costume and buildings don’t match up with a reality, I have a tendency to dismiss Westerns. I’m not very interested in them. I find them to be our Shakespeare.
America’s Shakespeare. What does that mean?
I just mean the way people talk. The way Danny Huston explains Manifest Destiny. It’s not a series of “yep”s and “no”s. There are passages in there that are significant, the way people talk with each other.
What are the Westerns that you admire most?
I liked “How the West Was Won,” but I was a seven-year-old. “Liberty Valance” was a really well-written screenplay. “The Searchers” was a well-written Western. I think “Fort Apache” had a lot of really nice things in it. “Rio Grande” did too. There were certain dilemmas that those movies established. They rooted me, and they talked to me about character—and, just as important, lack of character.
How much of your own money have you poured into this project?
It’s significant now. It’s well above fifty [million dollars].
Francis Ford Coppola emptied his pockets to the tune of tens and tens of millions of dollars to make “Megalopolis.” That seems a strange state of affairs.
It’s strange to actually pay yourself to go to work.
I wouldn’t do it.
Most people wouldn’t do it. I scratch my head a little bit at my own behavior, but I didn’t know I was going to find my yellow brick road. I wanted to, desperately. I didn’t know it was going to translate into money. I didn’t know it was going to translate into as much money.
When you would have lunch or meetings with Hollywood executives and say, “I want to do this,” how did they say no?
They wished that I would do one of theirs first. I tell them everything, all the bad news: it’s this long, it’s going to have subtitles. And those were bridges too far. I don’t really stick to patterns: what’s in style, what’s in vogue, what’s trending. I want to try to make something that has classic implications, which means it’s not going to be judged ultimately by its opening weekend, but more by, Will this be revisited?
Weren’t any of the new streaming services, which have deeper pockets than some of other studios, interested?
I’ve gone down all those roads.
You’ve had all the lunches.
I have, and at the end it’s just a bridge too far because it’s going to be expensive. You’re talking about horses. You’re talking about period costumes. Ultimately, I just looked at the pile that I had, and I thought, Well, I’m not going to let that control me. I’ll let that work for me. And so I decided to put that at risk in order to make this.
How’d your family feel about putting your pile at risk?
They’ve seen me do that before. They’ve seen me push it into the middle and not blink, because I’m not really bluffing.
Push it into the middle, poker-wise.
That’s right. And I have my reasons: I’m going to control this movie for the rest of its life. It will be exploited its entire life. Every five, six years, it’s relicensed around the world. It will be sold to those same streaming services. But the difference is that that money won’t go missing in the accounting. So will I claw my money back? The hope is that I will. Will I make a lot of money? Yeah, I hope so. I hope I’ll make a boatload. But I’m not going to not do what I have a chance to do. I don’t think I would feel very good about myself.
Does age have anything to do with that?
Not really. There is a shelf life on me playing certain parts, but I think, at the end of the day, I have a relationship with an audience and it is—when they go to see a movie I’m in, I want them at the end to understand, Wow, I think I understood why he made that movie. I was really entertained by it.
In terms of the Native characters, the Apache community that’s depicted here—how do you feel that you did this differently than, say, in “Dances with Wolves”?
The characters are different—but, as human beings, they’re the same. They are confused by the giant population that continues to roll toward them, and they think of it as unbelievable. What stood behind the people who kept coming were millions of others. We threw their life into chaos. We threw them into contact with people they had already worked things out with. We were a wrecking ball for two or three hundred years out there.
What do you think we owe Indigenous people in this country?
Well, it’s clear that when we fly over the land and look down, and most of it’s not inhabited, that we didn’t need all of it, did we? But there’s giant thirty-thousand-acre farms, and things like that, and what do they have? How did they become an inconvenience in their own country? They had their own religion, their own way of life. They had children. I don’t know what I owe them, but I do try, if I put them on film, to give them dignity, to give them high levels of confusion, to have their wives be smarter than their husbands—or more direct. So I want you to see a fully-formed human being; I want you to see a father who understands that two children are wildly different.
Tell me about the difference in your feeling of ownership of a project when you’re the lead actor versus when you are doing something where it is your project. In “Yellowstone,” for example, you are incredibly prominent, but you’re not writing the script. To what degree does it feel like yours as opposed to a project like “Horizon”?
“Yellowstone”?
Yeah.
Well, I don’t consider it mine. It’s something that I identified with and helped sell, long before anybody else saw it.
I’m never surprised if something’s good. I’m kind of surprised when something blows up commercially, but I would hate to have a career where I did something and I didn’t think, Gee, people liked it. I believe people will like what I do. Whether it becomes immensely popular is not the business I can choose to be in. Some things haven’t performed well at the box office. “Waterworld” is beloved around the world and continues to make money, but journalists won’t admit that—they won’t talk about it. They want to insist on the narrative that they do. But I knew, at least, that it was good. And it has stood the test of time, even for younger audiences who’ve found it—who understand they see something that’s not just filled with C.G. That’s me flying around.
Have you ever seen a film that you think is close to perfect—not yours, but something that you admire as a model?
Yeah. I think “[The] Wizard of Oz” is a perfect movie. I think “Giant” is a perfect movie. I think “[The] Sand Pebbles” is a perfect movie. I think “[One Flew Over the] Cuckoo’s Nest” is a perfect movie. So they don’t run a gamut of things. I think “Cool Hand Luke” is a really wonderful movie.
Do you care about critics?
Do I care about them? I don’t know them, really. I’ve had critics be incredibly nice to me and be incredibly vicious. So I don’t have reviews brought to me.
Do you avoid them?
Yeah, I just avoid them. My friends will go, “Can you believe what he said?” I go, “You just ruined my day! I wish you wouldn’t have said that!”
But do you feel some sense of “vengeance is mine” when something turns out to succeed despite the critics?
Not really.
Pauline Kael was really nasty about “Dances with Wolves.”
Yeah, she was cruel. She was not nice. She was flip with the risks that I took. And so I dismiss her and forgive her at the same time. She was very cruel with her power. But I’ve had some other people really talk well on behalf of the film, and see the things that the film is going to be. But I can’t be kind of looking over the table to see what they say.
Hollywood has been a pretty political place for a long time, and I think, in the general imagination, Hollywood is seen as left-leaning in its politics. How do you fit into the politics of Hollywood? You seem fairly reticent about this.
I do? I’ve spoken for candidates. That’s not too reticent. I spoke for Obama at one point. I spoke for Pete Buttigieg. I voted Republican, for [George W.] Bush, and for other people.
How do you feel this time around?
Well, I want to clear up your word “reticence,” because that’s not a fair characterization of what I’ve done. What I’ve chosen to do is to talk when I thought I should or am willing to. And there are other times when I haven’t. I believe in the sanctity of voting, and I believe in the privacy of voting. And I also realize that what I say is used by both sides. But I think probably the most poignant thing I could say about where I stand is something I saw once.
It was right on the Hudson River probably fifteen, sixteen years ago. I looked up and I saw a billboard. It said “This year, ninety-two million people made a difference. They didn’t vote.” So you want to make a difference: vote. You want people to appeal to your sensibility, when elections are being won by a million votes or a hundred thousand votes. Be a block of fifty million, and people are going to start catering to you. I don’t know what your leanings are. We might be very similar in our thinking, but I know where I’m at. I know what can heal the country, and it’s exercising your civil rights.
Well I’ll ask—and obviously you can answer or not, it’s your right—but do you have a preference between Trump or Biden?
I’m not going to answer that with you. I don’t even know why you go there, because I tried to round you out that I didn’t want to be put in that particular position.
Imagine having a week off—it doesn’t sound like you’ve had one in quite a while. What do you do with your time when you’re not writing, acting, producing, and obsessed with a film?
Well, if I’m at home, I’m able to do a lot of things, which is see all the kids’ games and go to their stuff. We spearfish, we hunt for lobsters, we hunt, I fish, we play sports. I still have three kids in high school. And then when I’m working movies it’s tougher. I try to get back. So my life is pretty pedestrian. I’m a single father now, so that’s different. It’s put an extra weight on me that comes from having a partner and now not having a partner.
What’s the day like when you are filming? Most people reading this have never been on a film set, never made a movie, obviously. What’s it like?
For the last month, it’s been seven days a week for me. But a normal shooting thing, when I’m directing, is about a fourteen- to sixteen-hour day. And then it goes to about a ten-hour, twelve-hour day when I’m editing.
What’s the hardest thing about it?
That the questions never end. People will not make too many moves without me weighing in.
What are the questions like?
Do you like my hair? Is the outfit dirty enough? Do I need sweat? And we are not sure where we’re going to set up catering. The questions—they just don’t end. And then I have the ideas of, How did my childrens’ days go? I gotta find time to get to the phone for that. So it’s intense and I’m lucky that I have this work.
How do you get a chance to think? If everybody’s asking you about where the catering sets up, and is my dress dirty enough, and all the logistics—thinking is necessary, too.
Well, between the raindrops. But I do a lot of thinking at night. So that sixteen-hour day—I can’t turn it off. I can, as an actor; but when you’re producing and directing and editing, you can’t.
That sounds like the condition for a fair amount of time to come for this project, no?
Yeah, but I’m going to take a month and a half off before I go back. So my mind will swirl around that. But I’ll make sure that my children and I are together. More to your point: you’re right. I still have a long way to go to finish, to get all the way to Chapter 4. Because it won’t be complete without 4. But honestly, after 4, I do need to rethink my life. I need to think that I don’t need to put it all in the middle again. I need to understand that I’m not going to define myself by the movies, and by the ones I’m doing or not doing. I need to figure out how to have more fun. ♦
This article has been updated to include news developments.
