The actor and director, whose film βHorizon: An American Sagaβ has been in the making for decades, thinks of the Western as Americaβs Shakespeare.
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 βSilverado,β alongside Kevin Kline and Danny Glover; he directed βDances with Wolves,β which won seven Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture; and more recently, Costner starred as the rancher John Dutton in the enormously successful βYellowstone.β Perhaps no actor since Clint Eastwood is more associated with the genre. Throughout his career, Costner has also been working on a project called βHorizon: An American Saga.β Too lengthy and expensive for studios (Costner put up tens of millions of dollars to fund it), βHorizonβ 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. Although the politics of the genre have evolved, βthere were certain dilemmas that [Westerns] establishedβ which were timeless, he tells David Remnick. βThey talked to me about character and, just as important, lack of character.β