PIONEER SPIRIT

After a 21-year hiatus, Kevin Costner returns to the director's chair for Horizon: An American Saga, an epic self-funded western that he plans to take across four films. As the first two chapters land, Total Film meets the iconic star and his cast to discuss the bloody birth of a nation.

- JAMES MOTTRAM

Kevin Costner is riding out once again. More than two decades after his last film as director, the absorbing 2003 western Open Range, he’s returning to the Old West once more. Horizon: An American Saga is not just ambitious, it’s the culmination of a lifelong desire to tell a story on the grandest scale. When the moustachioed Costner sits down in the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, sporting a beige jacket and white trousers, he has an air of satisfaction about him. To borrow from his spiritual baseball drama Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come.

Largely self-financed, this epic western has been planned by Costner to span four films. Premiering Chapter 1 out of competition in Cannes, he has already shot the second chapter, due in cinemas in August – the same month he starts shooting the third instalment in earnest (preliminary shooting is already under way). In this risk-averse Hollywood era, studio heads looked at Costner like he was a madman when he proposed a quadruple movie series. ‘I said, “Well, we have to make four because the story’s not over until the fourth one,”’ he explains, eyes glinting. ‘Now I have to figure out where I can get more money to finish it.’

Set in the era of the American Civil War, beginning in 1859, Horizon is a sprawling ensemble, crossing Wyoming, Kansas and Montana, as Costner shows the expansion of the American West. Disparate characters make their way, ultimately, to Arizona’s San Pedro Valley, which plays host to Horizon, a new township. It’s here where the battle is fought between the white settlers and indigenous Native Americans, who stake their own claims to the land.