Kevin Costner on “Yellowstone,” “Horizon,” and Why the Western Endures 31:51

This is The Political Scene, and I'm David Remnick. Kevin Costner has been a leading man for 40-odd years, and he's been in all kinds of movies during that time. Crime, romance, drama, comedy, thrillers, baseball. But if there's a constant in that long filmography of Costner's, it's the Western. One of his first big roles was in Silverado, alongside Kevin Kline and Danny Glover.

In 1990, he directed "Dances with Wolves" about a renegade soldier's relationship with a group of Lakota Indians. Thirty years on, Costner starred in the very successful Montana epic "Yellowstone." You see that fence? That's mine. Everything this side of that mountain all the way over to here? Mine too. They're trespassing. All along, he's been working on a project called "Horizon: An American Saga."

It's a series of four films about the founding of a town in the West. And the first part of Horizon comes out next week. The idea for this started in your mind and on the page 30 years ago? Yeah, in 1988, I commissioned a screenplay called Sidewinder. It was a two-hander.

in the Western genre. And it was pretty good. I liked it. But ultimately, when it was done and I got it into a place that I thought it could be seen, there was a money difference on it. Not a big spread, but it was clearly people weren't as impassioned about making it as I was.

And so six, seven years passed and I don't really fall out of love with things. So I began to rethink some things, which is all our Westerns typically start with a town, right? There's a town there. We never really deal with how those buildings and those saloons and those blacksmith shops and those, you know—

you know, hardware stores. The whorehouse, the bar. How did they get there? Who put that first stake in and what trouble did it cause for the people who had been there for thousands of years? Because we were putting our towns the same place that indigenous felt that it was the best place to cross a river, the best place to access water, the best, you know what I'm saying? All the names of the famous cities we have, St. Louis, Denver, somebody was throwing a stake there.

And a proverbial sticking their finger in an ant hole.

And of course, there was always a tipping point, in our case, always positive for us because we had this sheer amount of humanity working its way across the country in seemingly unendless numbers. And that was the fact. And the indigenous had a hard time dealing with that and the technology that would come with each and every new wave. And so I started that way and I basically took that screenplay that was in 1988 and

And I reengineered four screenplays. So there's actually a fifth movie sitting out there somewhere, which is the original movie where there's already a town because I'm just as stubborn to make that one too. Tell me about another town. Tell me about how Hollywood does or does not embrace an idea from somebody who's got the stature that you have as a figure in Hollywood, as a talent in Hollywood. Yeah.

These things are expensive to make. It's not like my business where all you need is a pencil and a piece of paper or a laptop. What barriers did you encounter when you first decided you wanted to make this? And, you know, who were you coming up against? Yeah, it's not the first time it's happened to me. You know, and Dancers with Walls was the same thing. I did a movie called Black or White about racism that I funded completely with a friend. Yeah.

You know, open range, you know, I just did it without salary. And of course, this one, I have financed a great deal of it. The industry seems to have really big years, powerful years and off of sequels, off of the Marvel comics seem to be important. And I don't feel like I'm an avant-garde filmmaker by any stretch. I mean, I make baseball movies, political thrillers, romantic comedies and westerns.

So it's not like I'm making a movie that people scratch their head about and then there's a whole group of people say, it's really interesting. You know, I think I make mainstream kind of movies. But I make them in my own way. Whereas I give you some edges that maybe people don't want. Well, we don't want to see that particular scene. We don't need to see a woman bathing. You know, we know they had to.

Really? Do you know? We don't need to see characters start to flip on us. We think they're one thing and then they're another. I'm not rushing to my gunfight is what I'm saying. Do you feel that you're making a political movie? No. You don't? Not at all. Because – I wouldn't even conceive of that. No, no. I don't mean about politics in Washington. I mean a new look at how, quote-unquote, the West was won. Yeah.

You're looking at it maybe from a different political vantage point than The Searchers or High Noon. But no sense of being the authority of how it was done, no sense of setting history correct. I just appreciate movies where I feel like I can lean into them because I think I feel an authenticity. I feel I just start to lean in as a picture starts to tumble like the first pages of a novel.

When those ideas of landscape and language and costume and buildings don't match up with a reality, I have a tendency to dismiss Westerns. I'm not very interested in them. I find them to be our Shakespeare. And if we are able to lean into this Victorian language kind of muted by this American shortcuts, you can get somebody's intention wrong.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. You say it's America's Shakespeare. What does that mean? I just mean the way people talk, the way Danny Houston explains Manifest Destiny. It's not a series of yips and nobes. There are passages in there that are significant, the way people talk with each other. Your Apache, he thinks that if he can salt the earth with enough of our dead, he'll stop those wagons coming, spoil the place for us.

You study the newcomers. They'll look out at ever so many graves and it won't make the least difference. All they see is this. The place isn't unlucky. It's just a poor bastard under it. And that's what a man will tell himself, tell his wife, and they'll tell their children. But if they're tough enough, smart enough, and mean enough, all this will be there someday. That's how they'll reason in the face of fear.

What are the westerns that you admire most? I think probably, you know, I liked how the west was one early up, but I was a seven-year-old. But I tied in directly to a birch bark canoe and to the high sierras and to people dressed in skins and exotic feathers, whereas I've been watching lazy westerns and they didn't look right.

So I would say that Liberty Valance was a really well-written screenplay. The Searchers was a well-written Western. I found Lucy back in the canyon, wrapped her in my coat, buried her with my own hands. Thought it best to keep it from you. Did they? What was she? What do you want me to do, draw you a picture? Spell it out? Don't ever ask me.

Long as you live, don't ever ask me more. I think Fort Apache had a lot of really nice things in it. Rio Grande did, too. But there were certain dilemmas that those movies established in there that I thought they rooted me. And in a sense, they talked to me about character and just as important, lack of character. Mm-hmm.

You're sitting here at a moment when you've had to pour, I don't know how much of your own money into this project. It's significant now. It's well above 50. And Francis Ford Coppola emptied his pockets to the tune of tens and tens of millions of dollars to make Megalopolis. That seems a strange thing.

It's strange to actually pay yourself to go to work. I wouldn't do it. Exactly. Most people wouldn't do it. So I scratched my head a little bit at my own behavior. But I didn't know I was going to find my yellow brick road. I wanted to desperately. I didn't know I was going to translate into money. And it has. I didn't know it was going to translate into as much money. I mean, when you would have lunch or meetings with Hollywood executives and say, I want to do this, how did they say no?

They wish that I would do one of theirs first. You know, I tell them everything, all the bad news. It's this long. It's going to have subtitles. And those were bridges too far. I don't really stick to, you know, patterns, you know, what's in style, what's in vogue, you know, what's trending. That's not really up to me. I—

I want to try to make something that has classic implications, which means it's not going to be judged ultimately by its opening weekend, but more by will it be revisited. Weren't any of the kind of new streaming services, which have deeper pockets than some of the other studios? Yeah, I've gone down all those roads. You've had all the lunches. I have. And at the end, it's just a bridge too far because –

It's going to be expensive. You're talking about horses. You're talking about period costumes. And ultimately, I just looked at the pile over here that I had and I thought, well, I'm not going to let that control me. I'll let that work for me. And so I decided to put that at whatever you want to call risk.

in order to make this. How'd your family feel about putting your pile at risk? They've seen me do that before. They've seen me push it into the middle, not blink, because I'm not really bluffing. Push it into the middle poker-wise. That's right. Yeah. And...

And I have my reasons. I'm going to control this movie for the rest of its life. So I'm not dependent. I'll do exactly what studios do. It will be exploited its entire life. Every five, six years, it's relicensed around the world. It will be sold to those same streaming services.

But the difference is that money won't go missing in the accounting. So will I claw my money back? The hope is that I will. Will I make a lot of money? Anybody listening? Yeah, I hope so. Hope I make a boatload. But I'm not going to not do what I have a chance to do. I don't think I would feel very good about myself. Does age have anything to do with that? Not really. There is a shelf life on me playing certain parts.

But I think at the end of the day, I have a relationship with an audience. And it is when they go to dark and they see a movie I am, I want them at the end to understand, wow, I think I understood why I made that movie. I was really entertained by it. I'm speaking with actor and director Kevin Costner and we'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you're just joining us, I've been speaking with Kevin Costner, who's about to release a new film called Horizon, an American saga. It's a Western in four parts, which he refers to as one, two, three and four. Now, the Western is an old genre. It stretches from John Ford to last week. They've come, they've gone. And there's always the big sky scenery, unchanging and the politics ever shifting.

Costner gave a big lift to the genre in 1990 with Dances with Wolves. The reviews were mixed. Pauline Kael ripped it in The New Yorker, calling it a nature boy movie, a kid's daydream of being an Indian. And yet it won Best Director and Best Picture. There's nothing for you to do out here. You willing to cooperate in that? Well, speak up! What's that? What's that?

And once again, Costner is at the center of a surge in the Western. He starred for four seasons on Taylor Sheridan's hugely popular Yellowstone, playing the taciturn rancher John Dutton. There's now a whole universe of Yellowstone spinoffs. I'll continue my conversation now with Kevin Costner. Tell me about...

Your involvement in Westerns, some actors embody Westerns. They do their own writing. Is it the secret out that you do your own writing? Yeah. How hard is that? It looks like it hurts tremendously. No, it doesn't hurt. But I don't consider myself an absolute cowboy. I know guys that really ride well. I never –

I don't pretend. I don't pretend that I've won a Medal of Honor either, but I played characters who had. I don't pretend to be things. I can play— Have you seen that happen in Hollywood, where the actor begins to think that he or she is that— I'm not sure. Persona? But I can see how somebody could be seduced into thinking that they're that smart, they're that brave. I'm always suspect of everybody who's certain how they would have done on D-Day.

In terms of the native characters, the Apache community that's depicted here, how do you feel that you did this differently than, say, in Dance with Wolves?

I don't know that I did. The characters are different, but as human beings, they're the same. They are confused by the giant population that continues to roll towards them, and they think of it as unbelievable. What stands behind the people who kept coming were millions. They couldn't conceive of it. So we catch them at the point of –

They're at their most confused. These people keep coming. It's also they put their tents up at a point in a river that they no longer can now cross. It's happened a million times out there, not one, where we shut things off to them a way of life. And what did it do? Well, because they had technology down there called rifles, they had to go this way or that way. They couldn't go across anymore. And, of course, when they went this way, what happened? They would run.

into their neighbors that they had established natural boundaries a long time ago. What we did is because we built a bridge here, we threw their life into chaos. We threw them into contact with people they had already worked things out with. And so we were a mess. We were a wrecking ball for 200 years, 300 years out there. Kevin, what do you think we owe indigenous people in this country?

Well, it's clear that when we fly over the land and look down and most of it's not inhabited that we didn't need all of it, did we? But there's giant 30,000-acre farms and things like that that exist, and what do they have? But what did we lose? Think about that, this beauty, this – how did they become an inconvenience in their own country?

They had their own religion, their own way of life. They had children. And I don't know what I owe them, but I do if I put them on film to give them dignity, to give them high levels of confusion, to have their wives be smarter than their husbands.

you know, or more direct. So I want you to see a full-formed human being. I want you to see a father who understands that two children are wildly different. Tell me about the difference in your feeling of ownership of a project when you're the lead actor in something and when you're doing something as with Horizon where it is your project. In Yellowstone, for example, you are incredibly prominent

But you're not writing the script. Right. To what degree does it feel like yours as opposed to a project like Horizon? Yellowstone? Yeah. Well, I don't consider it mine. I consider it's something that I identified with and helped sell long before anybody else saw it. I'm really never surprised. I'm never surprised if something's good. I'm kind of surprised when something blows up.

But I would hate to have a career where I did something I didn't think, gee, people liked it. Some things that haven't performed well at the box office, Waterworld, is beloved around the world and continues to make money. But journalists won't admit that. They won't talk about that. They won't act as if that thing hasn't made tons of money. But they want to insist on a narrative that they do. But I knew at least it was good.

And it has stood the test of time for even younger audiences who found it, who understand they see something that's not just filled with CG. That's me flying around. You ever see a film that you think is close to perfect? Not yours, but something that you admire so much as a model. Yeah, I do. I think Wizard of Oz is a perfect movie. I think Giant is a perfect movie. I think Sand Pebbles is a perfect movie. I think Cuckoo's Nest is a perfect movie.

So they don't run a gamut of things, you know. I mean I just – I think Cool Pan Luke is a really wonderful movie. Do you care about critics? Do I care about them? I don't know them really. I've had critics be incredibly nice to me and be incredibly vicious. So I choose to just – I just don't – I don't have reviews brought to me.

You avoid them? Yeah, I just avoid them. My friends will go, can you believe what he said? I go, you just ruined my day. I wish he wouldn't have said that or she said that. But do you feel like some sense of –

Vengeance is mine when something turns out to be a success. Not really. Pauline Kael was really nasty about dancing with – Yeah, she was cruel. No, she was not nice. She was cruel. Yeah. She was flip with the risk that I took. And so I dismiss her and forgive her at the same time. You're just – she's just a – she's just a –

She was very cruel with her power. But I've had some other people really talk well on behalf and see the things that the film is going to be. But I can't be kind of looking over the table to see what they say. I'm already trying to make three. And I wish somebody would make a movie like this for me.

This is the kind of movie that I like to lean into and not know where it's going. I think we know too much about our movies. It used to be the curtain opened and you just leaned into a movie or you didn't based on the storytelling technique.

You're turning 70 this year. I turned 65. I don't like it. How do you feel about getting a little bit older? You'll get smarter in five years. You think? You'll be all right. All right. How does it affect your work? You're going to just like realize that you don't have any damn choice. What are you dealing with? How does it affect your work?

I don't know that it does. You know, there's some parts I can't play anymore. Could I fall in love with a young woman or a young woman fall in love with me or for me to fall in love with a woman my age and have that romantic thing take place on the screen and not spin anybody out? Only if it's done properly. Only if it's done well. Only if it's done with the nuance of behavior and you could understand how that just happened.

So there's these generalizations and you get by every generalization in life if you're willing to understand that there are circumstances. And if you're willing to put circumstances, character into your movies, then you can pull those things off if that's what's required. You spoke earlier about making mainstream films. But at this point in the modern entertainment world, is it only possible to reach a certain segmented audience, certain demographics? Yeah.

No, no. I don't think that. And I don't know what's so modern about today than 1980. I think movies, when they're working at their very best, can cut through. They can become about things you never forget. And I think a movie that shouldn't have cut through, Field of Dreams, became Our Generations. It's a wonderful life. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has ruled by like an army of steamrollers.

It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again. And so, you know, there are things in Horizon that I think will touch people. When a boy makes a decision to not go with his mother,

That's real. That battle is not— He stays with her father in incredible danger and the mother stays with the daughter. It's a fatal mistake, but it's noble. It's what you wish your son would be, but you hate him for his mistake. One of the trends is that fewer and fewer people seem to be going to the movie theater, seeing it on a big screen with other people, popcorn, soda, whatever. Do you worry about that?

I don't spend my life worrying about that. But you prefer people seeing your films on a big screen as opposed to on a laptop. I do. I would like that. I know it's going to be viewed as it works its way down. So I did everything I could to make sure it was going to be experienced on the big screen, which is hold out.

You hold out. I hold out a long time. I don't fall out of love and I don't kind of give in until I hear a good reason to give in. 30 years. Yeah, but I have had a life between that. And this work doesn't represent the most important work in my life. It's just I'm treating it importantly because it's what's right in front of me. It's not the most important work of your life?

I couldn't say that. Professionally speaking, you know, maybe it might seem that way. It's the hardest thing I've ever done professionally, what I've had to put into this, what I've had to do. But clearly, it's not more important than other work. It's just important that I treated that. It was so important that I have focused on it. Hollywood has been a pretty political place for a long time, and I think in the general

imagination in a lot of the press. Hollywood is seen as left-leaning in its politics. It was a big fundraiser the other night for Joe Biden with Obama there and Jimmy Kimmel and all the rest. How do you fit into the politics of Hollywood?

You seem fairly reticent about this. I do. Yeah. I spoke for candidates. That's not too reticent. Well, tell me. I spoke for Obama at one point. I spoke for Pete Buttigieg. I voted Republican for Bush and for other people.

George W. Yeah. How do you feel this time around? Pardon me? How do you feel this time around? Well, how I feel, but I want to clear up your reticence. Sure. Because that's not fair characterization of what I've done. What I've chosen to do is to talk when I thought I should and sometimes are willing to. And there are other times when I haven't.

You know, what I believe is in the sanctity of voting and I believe in the privacy of voting. And I also realize that what I say is used by both sides. But I think probably the most poignant thing I could say about where I stand is something I saw once. I was right on the Hudson River probably 15, 16 years ago.

And I looked up and I saw a billboard. It said this year, 92 million people made a difference. They didn't vote. So you want to make a difference, vote. You want people to appeal to your sensibility when elections are being won by a million votes or 100,000 votes? You'd be a block of 50 million and people are going to start catering to you. And so-

I won't be used in how I feel. I don't know what your leanings are one way or another. I don't know if you even characterize them as a host. I would. Yeah. Not reluctant to do so. We might be very similar in our thinking. I know where I'm at. I know what can heal the country and it's exercising your civil rights. Well, I'll ask and obviously you can answer or not. It's your right. But do you –

have a preference between Trump or Biden? I'm not going to answer that with you. And I don't even know why you go there because I tried to round you out that I didn't want to be put in that particular position. Well, that's fair. Um,

Imagine having a week off. It doesn't sound like you've had one in quite a while. What do you do with your time when you're not writing, acting, producing and obsessed with a film? Does such time exist? Well, if I'm at home, I'm able to do a lot of things, which is see all the kids' games and go to their stuff. We spearfish. We hunt for lobsters. We hunt. I fish. We play sports. I still have three kids in high school.

And then when I'm working movies, it's tougher. I try to get back. So my life is pretty pedestrian. I'm a single father now. So that's different. It's put an extra weight on me that comes from having a partner and now not having a partner.

What's the day like when you are filming? Most people listening to this have never been on a film set, never made a movie, obviously. What's it like? So for the last month, it's been seven days a week for me. But a normal shooting thing when I'm directing is about a 14 to 16-hour day. And then it goes to about a 10-hour, 12-hour day when I'm editing and when the movie's all done. What's the hardest thing about it?

That the questions never end. They just don't end. And people will not make too many moves without me weighing in. So that necessitates that all those questions have to be answered. What are the questions like? Do you like my hair?

Is the outfit dirty enough? Do I need sweat? We're not sure where we're going to set up catering. The questions, they just don't end. And then I have the ideas of how did my children's day go? I got to find time to get to the phone for that. So it's intense and I'm lucky that I have this work.

How do you get a chance to think? If everybody's asking you about where does the catering set up and is my dress dirty enough and all the logistics and – I get that.

Thinking is necessary too. Sure it is. How do you do that? Well, between the raindrops of everything. But I do a lot of thinking at night. So the directing is you are chained and balled to that movie. You cannot – you can't let go of the rope.

That sounds like the condition for a fair amount of time to come for this project, no? Well, yeah, but I'm going to take a month and a half off before I go back. So I'm going to – my mind will swirl around that, but I'll make sure that my children and I are together. More to your point, you're right. I still have a long way to go to finish to get all the way to four because it won't be complete without four.

But honestly, after four, I do need to rethink my life. I do need to think that I don't need to put it all in the middle again. I do need to understand that I'm not going to define myself by the movies and by the ones I'm doing or not doing. I need to figure out how to have more fun.

At 70, but later. You're so concerned about age. Yeah, you're goddamn right I am. Yeah, you are. I've been trying to tell you, smarten up. You're okay. Okay. You're in good shape. You know, I mean, you know, my mind is wide open to the possibilities for myself. And not just because economically maybe those things are possible. It's just I've always felt the –

air of possibility. I look at Scorsese who's in his mid-80s and he's got five projects ahead of him. Right. Is that the way you look at it? Well, I've collected at least that many. Will I do them? I don't know. That's part of my thought process, right? But, you know, not everybody gets to land on that yellow brick road. We just...

We just trudge down things and hope that we can step on it. And I was certainly not a person aware of what my destiny would be, only that I desperately wanted to find somebody that held something that held my attention. You feel lucky? Something that I could work 16-hour days and not know. You feel lucky? I do. Do I feel like I haven't been bruised? I don't. Kevin Costner, thank you. You're welcome.

Kevin Costner is the star of dozens of movies and recently of Yellowstone on Paramount. He won the Oscar for Best Director for Dances with Wolves in 1991. The first film in his series called Horizon comes out next week.

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