Kevin Costner premieres 'Horizon' at Cannes, likens making film to American settlers' plight

Record ID: 1814011

  • Title: Kevin Costner premieres 'Horizon' at Cannes, likens making film to American settlers' plight
  • Date: 19th May 2024
  • Summary: CANNES, FRANCE (MAY 19, 2024) (REUTERS) ***WARNING: CONTAINS FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY*** "HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA" FILM TEAM ON RED CARPET (LEFT TO RIGHT) ACTORS ELLA HUNT, ABBEY LEE KERSHAW, JENA MALONE AND SIENNA MILLER, FILMMAKER KEVIN COSTNER, COSTNER'S SON HAYES COSTNER, ACTORS LUKE WILSON AND ISABELLE FUHRMAN PHOTOGRAPHERS TAKING PICTURES WILSON / FILM TEAM POSING FOR PIC
  • Embargoed: 2nd June 2024 19:11
  • Keywords: Cannes Film Festival Horizon An American Saga Horizon film Horizon movie Jena Malone Kevin Costner Luke Wilson Sienna Miller
  • Location: CANNES, FRANCE / VARIOUS FILM LOCATIONS
  • City: CANNES, FRANCE / VARIOUS FILM LOCATIONS
  • Country: France
  • Topics: Arts/Culture/Entertainment,Europe,Fashion
  • Reuters ID: LVA001377318052024RP1
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Kevin Costner said the self-reliance he has needed to get his ambitious multi-part Western project "Horizon: An American Saga" to the big screen is akin to that of the subjects of the films: settlers expanding the American West in the late 1800s.
    "I'm just like the people going West," Costner told Reuters about the saga, the first part of which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday (May 19) night. "I have to figure this out because there's no one really going to help me," he added.
    Costner envisions "Horizon" as a sweeping, four-part series that takes a detailed look at the challenges settlers faced during the expansion and settlement of the American West over a 15-year period before and after the 1861-1865 Civil War.
    To call it a passion project is putting it lightly: Costner has taken out a mortgage on 10 acres of his waterfront property in California to help finance the film series, which he is also directing, producing, co-writing and starring in.
    "This has been so hard. And it's not over yet," said Costner, who had started filming on the third chapter before heading to Cannes. "I have to find the money," he added.
    The 181-minute first part, premiering out of competition at Cannes, will be released in North America, the UK, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands on June 28, followed by part two on August 16.
    In his favour is the fact that Costner's name has been connected with the Western genre in the public mind since his Oscar-winning "Dances With Wolves" in 1990, and more recently with the successful five-season TV series "Yellowstone."
    His need to tell the story of the West is almost compulsive, Costner said, comparing it to seeing a UFO.
    "You can't not ever come back from that, right? You see what you see," he said. "This is what I saw: I saw the bigness of what the West is, how hard it was to cross. I saw the minutia of a mistake that could cost you your life," added Costner.
    He added that "Horizon," with Sienna Miller, Jena Malone, Abbey Lee and Dale Dickey among the cast, was heavily oriented towards women.
    "It's not a movie that's racing for its gunfight," Costner said, but instead is more interested in looking at how the towns usually just taken for granted in Westerns came into existence.
    "They had to be fought for. They were contested over and over and over again. And we just simply don't do that in Westerns. We just act like things just happened," he said.
    (Production: Christian Levaux, Thomas Newey, Hanna Rantala)
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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