Speaking to the Christian Post about the creation of his “Horizon: An American Saga,” a Western that is about the frontier history of America, actor and director Kevin Costner said that he felt the need to highlight the crucial role that faith played in the lives of the settlers on their tumultuous and dangerous journies across the fronter, often in hostile environments.
He said, commenting on how faith guided those brave men, women, and families as they traversed the hostile wilderness, saying, ”Faith is what guided people out there to the unknown.” He added, “They just leaned on it. There was this promise, but the promise was not enough. You had to go on faith. And people brought the religion with them west.”
Continuing, he said, “I grew up a Baptist and church has always been a part of my life, my grandmother. the whole thing, so I don’t mind it bleeding into a movie. I don’t force it in. But when I think about why people went west, when they said goodbye to people back east, they never saw them again, there was some kind of trust that people needed to lean on, because they were often times in situations where they didn’t even know what they were doing. They were out of control, they needed faith.”
He added, “I’ve had hands over me, for sure, in my life, and I’m like anybody, I try to force it. I try to force things through force of will, and I’ve been able to do that a lot in my life. But I’ve also found that things come in their own time. I think that’s how my career’s gone, to be honest. Everything in its own time, I didn’t burst onto the scene as a teenager. It took me a while. So, I trust my journey.”
Then, speaking about wanting scripture to be in the action-filled movie, Costner explained, “I wanted [Scripture to] obviously relate to the situation.” He further explained, “Anybody can make a movie about a gunfight, and I’m going to get you to those gunfights, and those gunfights are going to be terrifying, and they’re going to be loud. But I think just a woman trying to bathe because she feels so dirty, or a mother and daughter who realize that some hell is going on above them and the only way they’re going to survive is if they share breath, I feel the closeness. I feel like that really has an important part in Westerns.”
Building on that, he explained that he thinks the movie will help people understand what their ancestors had to do to settle the wilderness, saying, “I think a lot of people are going to say, ‘I’m going to bring my son and daughter because they need to understand what their great-great-grandmothers and grandfathers went through.’ This does have violence, but it also has a nobility, a sense of why family is important. When she says goodbye to her son, she has the faith that she will be with him again. Violence and humanity can go together. That’s my hope that while it’s an R, a lot of people will say, ‘I feel like my daughter should see this.’”
He continued, “I hope that it stands on its own. I’m not looking to reinvent the West or set the record straight.” He added, “This was hard fought for. The resourcefulness it took for the people that came out, not even being necessarily equipped to be in the West, is something that I admire. But I also understand the great clash that happened between cultures and what we lost. There were people that were displaced. So I don’t ignore any of it. I just go after it. I hope I land on the side of behavior and authenticity.”
Featured image credit: By Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24825154