
Kevin Costner is one of the most successful and recognizable actors in the world. He has built a career of amazing performances in films like The Untouchables, Field Of Dreams, Bull Durham, and No Way Out to name a few. Costner cemented an even bigger career as a filmmaker, in 1990 he directed, produced, and starred in Dances With Wolves, which won Best Picture and Best Director and was a box office smash.
He continued starring in many indelible films like Oliver Stone’s JFK, and Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World, and he starred in and produced films like The Bodyguard, Wyatt Earp, and Waterworld and also directed Open Range – His creative vision always persevered in any endeavor he took on throughout the years. Costner would be the first to say, he wouldn’t be where he is without his collaborators. His most recent film Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 showcases some of the best craftspeople today, including John Debney’s music which has been shortlisted by the Academy Of Motion Pictures for Best Original Score. He recently spoke to Immersive via Zoom in a very candid discussion about this future classic American film.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.]
What was your inspiration for this film? I spoke with J. Michael Muro recently, and he was talking about how you had this idea dating back maybe 30 years.
I wanted to make another American Western like the ones I liked when I was young. The ones that spoke to me were where I felt the morality. Films like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where it was you felt the story was, it was supremely directed. It just shows you how much a great screenplay can mean you can have all the beautiful landscapes you want, but if the story doesn’t add up, it won’t work.
Let’s talk about the history of the project, when did you first conceive of it…
I had this original idea in ’88 and I tried to make it as a one-off picture in 2003. I was disappointed over the amount of money that someone was going to give me to make it. I don’t want to work so much that the movie suffers. I happen to think that the films that I do, I feel like in the end, are not going to be disposable, that they’re going to be movies that people want to revisit. So it’s up to me to make sure every detail goes into them so when they do revisit it, they enjoy it even more or see something they never saw.
Let’s talk about your collaboration with Screenwriter Jon Baird. How did that first come about?
Jon read that screenplay and liked it very much… We started talking and he said, “What if we started a movie when nothing was there? When these towns were all contested when the confusion began.” That happened across America and that doesn’t find our way into normal westerns. The towns always existed in those films.
There’s no mention of what the struggle might’ve been, the unfairness that was dealt out, the drama, the murder, everything else. I thought, let’s see if we can do that, start at the beginning. Take some of the characters that I had in the original version reverse engineer it and start backing into that story. In this version, we elected to go deeper and actually see what that trouble was.

How did you select where you would shoot the film?
I’m driven by script and then I’m determined to place a movie where it’s supposed to belong, not necessarily where the tax rebate is the best. I wanted to be in Utah, but this movie demanded a big landscape.
It’s beautiful. The opening shot is absolutely gorgeous and you feel like you are in this world now. Let’s talk about cinematographer J. Michael Muro…
Jimmy really came to mind for me as someone who is spontaneous and can work with tough moments and some DPs can’t. They have to have it perfect. The light has to be perfect. It has to be this or they won’t shoot. I couldn’t afford that. I needed somebody who was confident enough in themselves that understand they weren’t going to get everything they wanted.
We got 52 days right away his heart must have sunk because this is the one you want to put your teeth into, right? This is the one you can put your stamp on. It speaks volumes to his character that he’s a filmmaker first, and I tried to get him to moments where to plan my day so that he could have a little bit of advantage with the sun, but most of the time I couldn’t do it. And to his credit, you saw how the movie ended up looking.
Absolutely. Yeah. He did a phenomenal job… The production by Derek Hill is pretty amazing too. Talk a little bit about working with him.
I’ll tell you, films are constantly throwing roadblocks in your way. Derek came onto the film late because I needed him. I always intended to do it with him, but he wasn’t available. Then when I finally got my shot, the window didn’t fit his window and I started to go with someone else, and at a certain point I realized that it just wasn’t working the way that I needed it to work, and I called him and he stopped everything. I have some people around me that will, if I want to go west, they’ll go with me.

It’s pretty amazing. What was the research phase like for you in terms of getting the look right of this time period? Were there any specific books paintings or documentaries… and how did that inform the costume design?
There was no specific book. There’s like a hundred of ’em and there’s paintings, and I scoured for black and white photographs because those don’t lie. So you keep digging that way. You have to look at, even paintings can be very informative in an era when their moving pictures weren’t there. You also have to be careful with that because there are some artists, painters, if you will, that will embellish.
We had to try to make sure we stayed true to things, but these are fabrics. These clothes were broken down, these clothes were repurposed. We dealt with those themes of repurposed clothes. Things were passed down, things were repurposed, they were shortened, they were shrunk. Eventually, they were used for curtains. We consider that all, and costume designer Lisa Lovaas is so specific, and also really resourceful.
There are some pretty amazing actors in this…
I could single out Jamie Campbell Bower because he’s like a young Peter O’Toole. He was just so electric and dynamic. Sienna Miller is excellent…and Abbey Lee, she one of the most inventive young actresses I’ve ever been around. Ella Hunt, who is our generation’s Audrey Hepburn…
I’ve interviewed Ella Hunt, she is amazing as Gilda Radner in Saturday Night…
She is luminous. Jena Malone too… Sienna Miller is going to come on as a lead actress in the second one, and I just hope that people recognize how good she is in this one and then understand that she starts to dominate along with Giovanni Ribisi and Isabelle Fuhrman…
So many great actors in this film… Danny Huston, Will Patton, Jeff Fahey, and James Russo come to mind… Let’s talk a little bit now about your editor Miklos Wright and crafting this saga into something comprehensible and very striking to look at…
It’s not a jigsaw puzzle where there are all these pieces and he now has to figure out how they go together. But that doesn’t minimize how difficult it is to figure out the rhythms that we want to do. The script was our Bible and Miklos leaned into that. What happens during the process is these happy little discoveries happen, things that you think you need, you don’t end up needing.
He embraced my character-driven type narrative that we didn’t lose a line in walking up the hill with Jamie. We wanted to see that slow burn. I’m not looking for somebody to speed my movie up. I’m looking for someone to take advantage of the opportunity that two actors can create tension and leave an audience wondering what they would do.

There’s a great score that’s over the whole film. Let’s talk about that.
John Debney came to the project without a lot of time. He came in and he started to understand the movie. I didn’t want to have a bashful score. I wanted something that would compete with the landscape. I wanted an orchestra. I wanted to go to that place. We’re looking at something where you cannot see far enough. I said, let’s compete against that. Our actors are going to compete against that. I said, we are a character-driven movie set on a giant landscape, which always is going to have to be about character, about the smallest detail.
I have tremendous respect for you for putting this together and never abandoning it. Everything I’ve heard about from your collaborators, you’re ultimately about the work. What’s it like being on the other end of having the first one out and having people experience it…
I’ve gotten the best letters off of this one than any movie I’ve ever done. I’ve gotten letters that talk about how I didn’t expect to be transported this way. This is the one I want to show my kids. This is the one I want them to see. There’s a weird authenticity about it, yet it’s emotional. It’s also violent. It’s also funny.
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 is available to stream on MAX.