That’s certainly his hope, at least, with “Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1” finally galloping into theaters this week. Ahead of the release, Costner sat down with RogerEbert.com to reflect on his reasons for revisiting the West on such a massive canvas, the influence of John Ford’s filmmaking on his own, and what he considered in crafting one of the first chapter’s centerpiece sequences.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
The “Horizon” of the title suggests a wide-open expanse, but it’s also a specific setting in the film — a settlement in Arizona’s San Pedro River Valley, a site of importance to multiple Native tribes including the Apache — where many of your characters set out to secure their future. Tell me about that frame for these films, of grounding abstract Western ideas in real estate.
Yeah, well… What happened was that I had commissioned an original Western in 1988, and it was set there, in Horizon. There was the town, and there were many of those same characters in it. But, at the end of the day, I started thinking along with my co-writing partner that, in Westerns, we’re always seeing these little wood towns and never seeing how they actually got started. We don’t see the displacement of people. We don’t even understand what happened, and we are numb that we did that to others.
And so, what happened is that I started thinking, after not being able to make the first one, “What if we reverse-engineered that story and showed everything about what it took for a town to even bubble up in some place where it was not intended to be?” And so that was the genesis of switching our thinking to that idea: “Why don’t we discuss the idea of what got this town started and debunk the myth of what everyone else thinks has happened there?”
The myth of these “great, open spaces” is that, actually, they were already occupied by people. There were people who were doing quite nicely there, without us. And this national appetite to move across the country caused all this chaos and heartache. While one group is being broken in half, torn apart, and obliterated, another group is expanding and succeeding, but in a very tough, harsh environment. So, that really appealed to me.