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, is a sprawling ensemble,
