‘Horizon’: Kevin Costner crashes in Cannes with a western for which he mortgaged his four houses | Culture

Kevin Costner had not directed films for two decades. And now, at 69 years old, he has launched into what he knows will be the last big project of his career. The Californian has presented in Cannes Horizon: An American Saga, the first – and this one only lasts three hours – of the four installments that he hopes to be able to shoot: he has done the first two, and left filming the third “three days after starting to come to Cannes.” She has mortgaged his houses, she has scraped almost 100 million dollars from wherever she could (coppola style, she has played it all or nothing and 20 of those million have come out of her pocket) to complete her dream. he. “I don’t need four houses. I would like to leave them to my children, but they will have to live their own lives,” she confessed in a massive press conference this Monday at noon at the French competition. The filmmaker has earned the respect and hearts of everyone he has met in France, something very different is that his horizon have convinced. And we’ll see what the public thinks: both in the US and in Spain the first chapter premieres on June 28, and the second, on August 16.

In the conversation with the press, Costner has seemed relaxed, fun, aware of supporting the Cannes festival because the contest has opted for him, and very sincere with the bitter pill that has passed, and is passing, to lift his saga. “I don’t know why it’s so hard to get people to believe in the movie I wanted to make… I don’t think anyone else’s movie is better than mine. “I don’t go out into the world with something I don’t think is good,” he began. “It usually happens to me: Dances with Wolves, The Durham Buffaloes, Field of Dreams, Open Range… The films I want to shoot are more difficult than average. And on top of that, I don’t fall out of love with something that is good.” With horizon It began in 1988, “and for a long time I only had one name, Hayes (a character he embodies), to the point that I gave it to my son.” Now, as a teenager, Hayes Costner has made his acting debut: he plays a boy who decides not to abandon his father in a brutal attack on his Native American cabin.

Before delving into the mythology of the Western and why to make films of this genre, Costner summarized his days in Cannes: “The contest has breathed life into my project. I also tell you that I have called the deck of all the yachts to ask for help. The rich people wanted to take photos with me and I told them to take out their checkbooks, but they didn’t.” Regarding her emotion on Sunday night at the gala screening, she assured that it was real. “And I hope you all enjoy a moment like this in your lives. I am a lover of the magical part of cinema, of the spark that arises in the theaters, when you leave your work and your studies behind when the screening begins. And what happened last night belongs to this magic.” More jokingly, about his time on the red carpet, he blurted out: “Before I didn’t receive money to do this, then they paid me a lot of money to do this, now I need to pay my own money to do this.” Proof of his passion and his care as a producer is that he filmed Dancing with Wolves in 106 days and the first horizon in 52 days.

Unfortunately, horizon It is leaden and boring, with blurred characters, something that may be justified because those three hours serve as its presentation and as the start of the plots that will presumably develop in the following installments. As a filmmaker, Costner has taken great care of the visual development, but as a producer, despite hiring a guaranteed cast, he has not known how to put order in the soundtrack, simple and obvious, nor tell the screenwriter Costner that the script needed several more turns. “Why get involved in making a Western when the big studios don’t make them? The answer is in the question”, he started to immerse himself in his favorite genre: “Westerns are not simple, but complicated, and the best are put together thanks to great film architecture. Think about it: living in a city today is simple, but that West was very difficult. There were no laws, and there were plenty of weapons, and people spoke different languages. I have been reading books about that time all my life and I have written several and I know that it is complicated. And I care about the details, like the cleaning sequence. Do you know how difficult it was for anyone to be clean there, and the pleasure of a bath? They were people like us and those details are necessary.”

The filmmaker wanted horizon will reflect on man’s relationship with the environment, filming in landscapes that in many parts remain untouched, without traces of human beings. “In the United States we still have a lot of land, it is time for us to start valuing it.”

And of course, as in Costner’s entire career as a director, in horizon There are characters of Chinese origin, African Americans and the Native American part is taken care of. “I am very aware of race and the growing problem of racism that exists in my country. I live in a place called Compton, and I produced The best for her to talk about it,” he explained. “The film is a journey. It is not a plot film, and the Native Americans are represented as the script requested. I don’t feel the need to try to balance the story, but rather to make it as real as possible. But that was the West,” beginning his ethnography and history class. “Two hundred years ago, the United States was like the Garden of Eden. There were 90 million buffaloes and not a building. And if you were strong, clever, you could make a living, and that’s why many Europeans traveled there. What they didn’t know is that they had to take the land from people who had been there for 50,000 years. It was a massacre. In the fourth part of horizon “Native Americans will take center stage.”

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