VIDEO – Kevin Costner unveils the “Horizon” saga in Cannes: “America was a promise for the whole world”

He hadn’t realized since Open Range, 20 years ago. Back at the top thanks to the success of the Yellowstone series, Kevin Costner, 69, decided to return to film directing with Horizona saga about the birth of America that the Oscar-winning director of Dancing with the wolves co-wrote and financed himself. A great spectacle to tell the story of the risky march of the settlers towards the West, the resistance of the Indian tribes and a good dose of romance too. While the first part is expected on our screens on July 3, its author took a break from filming the third to climb the steps of the Cannes Film Festival and defend this extraordinary adventure.

Horizon is undoubtedly the most ambitious project of your career. Did people in the business tell you that you were crazy to embark on such an adventure?

Yes ! When I started working on Horizon in 1998, I was thinking of making just one film and no one wanted to help me. So despite being crazy, I finally decided to make four! Because I believe in the cinema experience. When people go and sit in the dark, they want something to happen. I don’t know if this has ever happened to you. But that’s the effect I wanted. I want you to say to someone you love when you leave the room: “Go see that!”

In America, there was nothing to protect you except your own instincts

Kevin Costner

Why were you drawn to this specific moment in American History. Violence, the wild side of their birth?

For the resourcefulness it took to exist at that time. Because there was no law. Nothing was there to protect you except your own instincts. There were many dangers. And you had to know the most basic things, like how to make a fire. We forget that America is still a very young country. This film takes place 200 years ago. The land is virgin.

Watching your film, it’s impossible not to think of America today. That violence is rooted in its birth, and that it is still present today. Is this country so different from then?

No, because I believe that when people arrived from Europe, they were all running from something. When they arrived, they had to reinvent themselves. When the United States was born, there were no cities, no monuments like your Eiffel Tower or the pyramids. There was no construction. It was a scary land, you had to make your way to take the land and then keep it. Fighting, using weapons, that was part of settling in America. Europe was also born in blood. But the first borders, you can no longer see them from the plane because they go back thousands of years. We are only 200 years old and the violence remains entrenched.

Despite everything, you still love your country just as much, don’t you?

I love my country. I love the opportunities that America has given to people who would not have been able to rise if they worked for a monarchy or a kingdom. Where your children, unless they are royalty, would only have the prospect of serving other people. America was the chance and the opportunity to recreate oneself. Its place in History is a blank page. Except for the people who were already there, the Native Americans, who were displaced and whom we destroyed. America was a promise for the whole world. And people always come because they think they’re going to find something they don’t have where they come from.

• Read also

  Emma Stone radiant, Richard Gere resurrected and Demi Moore early… What you shouldn’t miss in Cannes

You have shot many westerns, the Yellowstone series is a modern version. Do you feel like you were born in the wrong era and are some sort of cowboy from another century?

A little bit sometimes. Of course I have made political films, comedies, sports films. Lots of different things. But I always came back to the West because its history is so dramatic.

>> Horizon, an American saga Chapter 1 by Kevin Costner. With Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller. Sam Worthington. 3:01. In theaters in France on July 3