Kevin Costner is finally back in the director’s chair after over 20 years with Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1. After quickly establishing himself as an acclaimed actor with his early roles in Silverado, The Untouchables and Bull Durham, Costner made a big splash in the director’s chair with the 1990 adaptation of Dances with Wolves, which earned him both the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars, as well as a nomination for Best Actor. While Costner has kept himself busy in front of the camera in the near-40 years since, he’s only returned to the director’s chair a couple of times, including The Postman and Open Range.

Costner has spent the better part of the past 40 years developing his idea for Horizon: An American Saga, with the Western epic beginning as one movie before he and co-writer Jon Baird took to expanding it into a four-movie story. The film is set both before and after the events of the American Civil War, chronicling the founding of the titular American West town. The story explores this founding through a variety of characters, including the skilled gunslinger Hayes Ellison, Union Army First Lieutenant Trent Gephardt, caravan captain Matthew Van Weyden, and grieving mother/survivor of a brutal Native attack on Horizon, Frances Kittredge.

Costner has assembled a massive roster for his Horizon: An American Saga cast, some of whom include Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Michael Rooker, Luke Wilson, Isabelle Fuhrman, Abbey Lee, Jamie Campbell Bower, Tatanka Means, Wasé Chief, Ella Hunt and Jena Malone. Establishing the backstory of many of its characters as well as featuring some harrowing action sequences, Chapter 1 is an ambitious start to a unique approach to the Western genre.

In honor of the movie’s release, Screen Rant interviewed Kevin Costner to discuss Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1, the 35-plus-year journey to get the project made, how it evolved from a single story to a four-film saga, how Chapter 2 differentiates from the first film, and how he balanced a sympathetic, yet “ferocious“, portrayal of Native Americans during the movie’s time period.

Costner “Couldn’t Get [Horizon’s] Story Out Of My Head” Even As It Took Him Years To Get It Made

Though he may have begun his directorial career with Dances with Wolves in 1989, Costner has actually been ruminating on his Horizon: An American Saga concept since 1988, around the same time he had convinced author Michael Blake to turn it from a spec script into a novel. In the time since, Costner says he “couldn’t get the story out of my head” for his new project, and that it was in 2012 when he and co-writer Jon Baird took to expanding it beyond a single movie:

Kevin Costner: Yeah, it started in 1988, tried to make the single movie in 2003, I wasn’t able to do it over some money issues. I went on with my career, but I couldn’t get the story out of my head. In 2012, I started to look at the story as it was conventional — and I don’t mean conventional in a bad way, but it was a two-hander of two guys in a town. I started to think, “What if we dealt with the idea — I don’t know why these towns in every Western are already there. How’d they get there? What was the battle? What was the reality?” Because people just didn’t give up these places in America. I really started to think about that, and I thought, “What if we” — along with Jon Baird — “could reengineer the characters from ’88?” because I liked them.

Hayes, I liked the character that I named my son after him. So what we did was we began to reengineer the story, and it just kept expanding from when you start at the beginning. We felt that women were really important. Every story, it runs through women. And I like stories to be fulfilling. I like them to have a narrative that I believe. I like to get to my gunfight, but I’m willing to go down these other rabbit holes, and make those gunfights feel arbitrary, which violence was. Random, which it was, and the great struggle between two cultures, one that was been here for thousands of years, and the other that were coming out based on a piece of paper.

Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 Doesn’t End On A Cliffhanger (But Does Set Up A “Harder” Chapter 2)

Despite the movie’s story taking place over the course of four titles, Costner confirms that Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 will not end on a cliffhanger, as he felt it wasn’t “the right thing” to do for both his story and characters. He does, however, tease that the next installment will see the situation getting “harder” for the characters introduced in the first movie, and that he’s keen on building the larger story before getting to the “epic gunfights” he loves to shoot:

Kevin Costner: Yeah, I didn’t want to create a cliffhanger, because I just think that’s not the right thing. What happens is 2’s done, I just saw it, and it’s harder. It gets harder for these people, it doesn’t get easier. This is a 200-year march across the country, 300 years, and people did it in inches. So, I take my time, and I do it through the story of these people. So, I’m going to get to my gunfight, but not at the expense of story, which I think can be just as compelling, so it’s important to me.

Horizon‘s Native Storytelling Is Meant To Symbolize The Frustration They Felt Of Settlers “Changing Their Way Of Life”

One of the more complex storylines in Horizon: An American Saga is that of the Native Americans residing near the titular settlement, who are shown both brutally attacking its inhabitants, while also grappling with the morality of their actions. For Costner, he felt that these more “ferocious” sequences were meant to symbolize how the Natives were “fighting for a way of life” at the time, and how they were “frustrated” by the settlers unknowingly running them out of their homes:

Kevin Costner: They just were so frustrated with so many people continuing to come, changing their way of life, and it just boiled over, and they had to be ferocious. But they were fighting for a way of life. The last battle you see at the end of 1, the scalp hunt. They’re fighting for commerce. There’s no heartbeat in those people, and those people existed out in the West, as well. So, you’re seeing a lot of sides, but the confusion with how many people were coming. It was something that happened from sea to shining sea.

About Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1

Academy Award-winning visionary filmmaker Kevin Costner directs New Line Cinema’s epic Horizon: An American Saga Chapters I and II, a multi-faceted chronicle covering the Civil War expansion and settlement of the American West. A story of America too big for one film, this true cinematic event also stars Costner, who co-writes with Jon Baird (“The Explorers Guild”) and produces through his Territory Pictures.

In the great tradition of Warner Bros. Pictures’ iconic Westerns, Horizon: An American Saga explores the lure of the Old West and how it was won — and lost — through the blood, sweat and tears of many. Spanning the four years of the Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, Costner’s ambitious cinematic adventure will take audiences on an emotional journey across a country at war with itself, experienced through the lens of families, friends and foes all attempting to discover what it truly means to be the

United States of America.

Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington and Giovanni Ribisi star alongside an impressive ensemble cast that includes Abbey Lee, Will Patton, Jena Malone, Michael Rooker, Danny Huston, Luke Wilson, Jeff Fahey, Isabelle Fuhrman, Ella Hunt, David O’Hara, Owen Crow Shoe, Tatanka Means, Tim Guinee, Scott Haze, Tom Payne, Alejandro Edda, James Russo, Jon Beavers, Jaime Campbell Bower, and Michael Anganaro, and more.

Stay tuned for our other Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 interviews with:

• Sienna Miller & Sam Worthington
• Abbey Lee & Jamie Campbell Bower
• Luke Wilson, Isabelle Fuhrman & Ella Hunt

Source: Screen Rant Plus