Kevin Costner is gearing up for his upcoming film Horizon: An American Saga and with all the excitement, he says “History for me comes alive, and I want to tell all of it. It’s tragic. It’s embarrassing. It’s shameful. There were only 30 million people in the United States at the time of the Civil War, most of them on the east coast when the North fought the South.”
The film stars Kevin himself alongside a great cast compromising of Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington and Giovanni Ribisi,Abbey Lee, Will Patton, Jena Malone, Michael Rooker, Danny Huston, Luke Wilson, Jeff Fahey, Isabelle Fuhrman, Ella Hunt, David O’Hara, Owen Crow Shoe, Tatanka Means, Tim Guinee, Scott Haze, Tom Payne, Alejandro Edda, James Russo, Jon Beavers, Jaime Campbell Bower, and Michael Anganaro,
Speaking about his cast, he says ““Danny Huston plays Col. Houghton at the fort, this commander who really has a real level of empathy. As a storyteller, I wasn’t interested in telling the story of Manifest Destiny without also revealing its darker side and those who are typically left out of the story. Danny is a world-class actor and has a speech about Manifest Destiny that comes across in a way that I had never heard talked about. Although he simplified something very complex, it was very elegantly put about why people are going to continue to come west when so many haven’t made it. And the answer is simply that a man will tell himself that he’s going to be luckier than that man, and it’ll be different for our children.
“Those wagons will keep coming because there’s a deeply rooted need for belonging in all of us to pursue…at any cost. Will Patton came in and played Owen Kittredge, an uncomfortable person who’s come out of the war hard bitten, affected, traumatized, yet is raising three girls, forcing them to behave like men to do this work on the wagon train, and he’s unapologetic for it. Luke Wilson as Van Weyden really commands the wagon train, he’s an amazing actor. Ella Hunt has so much skill, and Isabelle Fuhrman is playing Diamond, who’s just going to get more broken, more beaten down, but tougher.”
Moreover, talking about the characters, he adds ““You can’t share the land, so the settlers decided to just take the land. They made a big deal about acting like they were willing to share it, but that was just to get a foothold. They really didn’t want any competition, and they pushed around 500 Native American nations from sea to shining sea. That’s the real story, that’s why we explore the Native Americans’ side in ‘Horizon’ as well. To render them as anything other than people with great confusion, great heroism, love of their family, children, would be a disservice to them. This is a movie about that collision.”
“It’s told mostly from the point of view of the settlers coming, but when we introduce the Native Americans, it was really important to me to give them the dignity, the ferociousness that they had, because they were fighting for their way of life, their religion, their existence. They weren’t fighting for a flag, they were fighting for their neighbor next to them, a child they grew up with, a mother and father and the future of their people. It was unfair to not show them in their beauty and the way they lived… I don’t pretend to be the best person to do that exactly, I just wanted to do the best I could with it because they’re important to me.”
A spectacle like you never seen before, filled with history and patriotism, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 releases in UK cinemas on 28th June 2024 and Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 releases in UK cinemas on 16th August 2024
