Sometimes Kevin Costner imagines that he’s watching himself in a film about Kevin Costner. He pictures himself in a theater; it’s dark and he’s gazing at himself in the same way we have over the years, rooting for him to succeed. In times of embattlement or stress, he says, “I’ve got to be my own movie.” In Westerns, Costner’s preferred genre, the hero tends to ride in, outmatched and outgunned, only to come away victorious. This often seems to be the way Costner sees himself too. Famously, Costner’s first big break as an actor was being cast in 1983’s The Big Chill; then, after shooting, all his scenes were cut. Before he was dropped from the film, “I had all my friends going, ‘Kevin, you’re in that movie. You should do press. You should ride this wave,’ ” he told me. “And I said, ‘No. It’ll be a more interesting story once I do what I know I’m going to do.’ ”
Image may contain Kevin Costner Yellowstone Horizon GQ Cover GQ Summer Issue Clothing Coat Vest Lifejacket Adult Person…
Kevin Costner covers the Summer 2024 issue of GQ. Secure your copy and 1 year of GQ for $29.99 $10.Jacket and shorts by Polo Ralph Lauren. Shirt, stylist’s own. Watch by Rolex. Necklace by David Yurman.
Costner is a lifetime devotee of the hard way. When Ron Shelton cast the actor in 1988’s Bull Durham, he tried to hand Costner the part, only for Costner to insist on auditioning anyway. “So we went from having lunch to the batting cage on Sepulveda with a bunch of quarters,” Shelton told me. “And we’re putting quarters in there and he’s hitting line drives right-handed and left-handed, and we’re playing catch in the parking lot. Girls are walking by him. They don’t know who he is. Three months later, they’re going to know who he is.”
A few years after Bull Durham, once Costner had become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, he used every bit of leverage he’d accrued to produce, direct, and act in a movie most studios did not want: Dances With Wolves. “I had a chance to do The Hunt for Red October for more money than I’d ever seen,” Costner said. “I felt like Gollum with the ring. I thought, Oh my God, I’m going to take that ring. But I made this promise that I would go do this movie. I had to watch my own movie.” When Dances came out, in 1990, it was nominated for 12 Academy Awards and won seven, including best picture and best director.
Costner is now 69. In the past decade, he has experienced a revival of sorts, doing nuanced and charismatic character work in film after film while starring on Yellowstone, the most popular show on television. Other actors might be content with their late-career good fortune. But other actors are not Kevin Costner, who is prone to obsession, regardless of what that obsession may cost. “I’m so grateful that I’ve never seen a UFO,” Costner said. “I’m a pretty sane person, although some people would think maybe something else. But what happens once you see one? You can’t let it go.”
One of those obsessions is a Western called Horizon, which Costner—as cowriter, director, and star—has been trying to make since 1988. Over the past 36 years, the story has evolved, from a two-hander about a couple of guys to a vast, panoramic portrait of the founding of a town—called Horizon—during a particularly bloody chapter of America’s western expansion, but Costner has never fully left it alone. In 2003, he was going to make Horizon with Disney, but the director and the studio were $5 million apart on the budget, and so Costner—never one to compromise on something he regards as important—walked away. Then, in 2012, Costner picked the script up again and, with the screenwriter and author Jon Baird, turned it into four scripts. “And what’s ironic, or if not ironic, maybe a better word is what is typical of me,” Costner said, “is that if my psychiatrist looked at me and they said, ‘Kevin, let me get this straight. Nobody wanted to make one, right? At least at that point when you stopped, they didn’t want to make it?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And she goes, ‘Why do you then go out and write four more? Why do you go and do that?’ And I guess the answer is: Because I believe. But I can also see that psychiatrist going, ‘Yeah, but no one wanted one, and you just did four.’ As if I didn’t hear her the first time. And I can’t defend that psyche. I can’t defend anything other than the story just kept getting better and better for me.”
But if no one in Hollywood wanted to make one, they certainly didn’t want to make four. And so Costner, a few years ago, decided to fund the film himself, with the help of two outside investors whose names he will not disclose. (More recently, Warner Bros. has also come aboard for the first two films, handling theatrical distribution.) Press reports have been wide-eyed about just how much Costner has put on the line to make the film. “I know they say I’ve got $20 million of my own money in this movie,” Costner told me. “It’s not true. I’ve got now about $38 million in the film. That’s the truth. That’s the real number.”
Image may contain Kevin Costner Yellowstone Horizon Grass Plant Accessories Glasses Adult Person Clothing Footwear Shoe…
Sweater by Bode. Pants by Ghiaia Cashmere. Shoes by Hereu. Sunglasses, his own, by Oliver Peoples. Necklace by David Yurman.
Even before production began on Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 in the summer of 2022, in the vast wilderness of Utah, Costner was facing some setbacks. In 2021, he lost both of his parents. Not long after, he began to have issues agreeing on a shooting schedule for Yellowstone, issues that eventually spiraled into a contract dispute and a messy—and, until now, one-sided—argument in the press between Costner and the show’s cocreator Taylor Sheridan, as well as the production companies Paramount and 101 Studios. Last year, Costner’s wife of 18 years, Christine Baumgartner, filed for a divorce. Somehow Costner, throughout all of this, found a way to make not one but two Horizon films. And soon, he and Warner Bros. will embark on a risky and grandiose experiment that has never really been tried before, releasing both films in one summer, with Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 coming to theaters in June, followed by Chapter 2 in August.
“There’s a lot that has happened,” Costner told me this spring at the home near Santa Barbara, California, where he has helped raise the three youngest of his seven children. He was once again seated in the theater of his mind. “I’m right now looking at myself in the dark and going, Are you going to fucking stand up and finish? Get up. I’m the audience. Get up, Kevin. Get the fuck up and deal with this and find the joy every day of seeing your kids play while you’re here—and then work your ass off to get this thing finished.”
In August 2022, when the filming of the first Horizon began around Moab, Utah, among a series of red cliffs by a muddy river, people were passing out from the heat; by November of the same year, when I visited the set, winter was already rolling in, and Costner was racing to finish production before the snow arrived. Early one frigid morning, the crew was clustered high up on Mount Peale, in the La Sal range, around a base camp reached via a dirt road that wound past grazing cattle and scrub brush, pine, and then ghostly white aspens, snow appearing on the ground as we passed 8,000 feet. In a muddy stand of trees, trucks and vans and catering trucks were clustered together; just beyond was a little wedge of ridge, overlooking a green valley, that Costner had deemed perfect for the scene he was about to shoot between his character, Hayes Ellison, and a woman on the run, Marigold, played by Abbey Lee.
This part of the country, in eastern Utah, is John Wayne territory. Rio Grande was shot here; so were The Searchers, Thelma & Louise, and the opening scene from Mission: Impossible 2 in which Tom Cruise free-solos a red rock wall. But Utah has fallen out of fashion as a film location because, unlike New Mexico or Georgia or California, there are fewer local studios or crew. Costner is trying to remedy this fact with Territory, a studio he is helping build in the area. But for now, you’ve got to truck a lot of people in from somewhere else. Costner’s producers told him: “Please don’t do any of this.” But he couldn’t help it, he said. “For me, when I see a place, I can’t let it go. It gets into my blood.” The London-bred Sienna Miller, one of the stars of Horizon, told me that when she got cast in the part, Costner told her: “I will show you an America you have only dreamed of.” (When I asked her if Costner always spoke that way, she responded: “Yes, that is how he talks. Have you not spent time with him?”)
Howard Kaplan, one of Costner’s producers, was standing outside Costner’s trailer. “This is John Ford stuff,” he said, shaking his head. There was a little circle of chairs set up for socializing, a rubber bucket labeled “Bear Spray,” and a small crowd of people who needed answers standing at a respectful but close distance. Some nights Costner wouldn’t even bother to come down from the mountain, Kaplan said. He’d sleep in the trailer, barbecue outside, look at the stars. “I kind of just kept dreaming about the movie,” Costner told me later.
