When Kevin Costner believes in a project that nobody else does, he has funded it himself. Sometimes, he’s hit it out of the park as in 1990’s Oscar winning film Dances with Wolves. Sometimes, he whiffs as in 1997’s often mocked The Postman.
Now Costner’s back in the Western genre again with a grandly ambitious epic dubbed Horizon: An American Saga. It’s a potential four-part film series with Warner Bros releasing the second film next month. Costner began shooting the third film earlier this month.
"It’s a powerful story," says Costner, who funded, produced and directed Horizon. He co-wrote the screenplay with Jon Baird. "It’s one I made to make people almost close their eyes in the dark and open them and go for a ride. I wish someone had made this movie for me."
The saga covers the 1850s and 1860s in Wyoming, where promoters are encouraging people to move to a new town called Horizon primarily using flyers. Shot in Utah, the film features a raft of name actors including Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington and Luke Wilson.
Horizon is not based on a book. It’s an idea Costner had in the late 1980s that he was never able to convince any studio to create. So he decided to invest his own money into the project. Hollywood trade publications estimate the first film cost Costner $US50 million out of his own pocket.
"It took so long because people don’t buy into something," Costner said. He is used to being second guessed, noting the sceptics before the release of eventual classic films like Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, his signature baseball movies.
The result is a sprawling film with multiple storylines, centred around Americans seeking to expand their territory.
"Cities don’t pop up like mushrooms after a storm," Costner says. "Cities were often fought over and contested."
The film also shows how the existing Native Americans grapple with this influx of gun-toting outsiders invading their land.
"Indigenous people lived lightly on the land," Costner said.
"The Americans who came in bent the land to their will."
The newcomers in the film show a blend of hope, heroism and violent opportunism in a land where rules were made up as they went along.
"We sometimes think of the West like Disneyland or Frontierland," Costner said. "There was this movement across this country with salesmen trying to sell a place they have never been to.
"But it was a brutal march from sea to shining sea.
"There was this ultimate crushing of cultures that had been here for thousands of years."
He said he went out of his way to ensure women are prominent in Horizon.
"Women are a dominant part of this movie," he said.
"I have my gunfights. But the women are taking care of their families and trying to survive and stay clean."
Costner, 69, has always been partial to the big screen, which is why he chose to release Horizon in theatres rather than turn it into a TV series for a streaming service.
"It was meant for cinema.
"You see horses running faster than you’ve ever seen. There are life-and-death moments.
"You get to see the rivers, the mountains. The character of America was in the land itself."
As an actor, Costner does not show up until the second hour of the three-hour movie.
He plays Hayes Ellison, a likeable but circumspect man who incidentally stops by Horizon, inadvertently gets involved in a murder and feels no choice but to help a woman who goes on the lam.
His relative late arrival in the film "was by design," Costner said. "We’re just getting our stories going. This is our novel."
Early reviews for Horizon have been a mixed bag. The consensus is that Horizon’s first chapter lacks focus.
Costner remains unfazed by the naysayers.
"I believe so much in my relationship with people who go to the movies," he said.
"They don’t always want to see the same things."
"I believe there’s room for all kinds of stories."
