‘Yellowstone’ Star Kevin Costner Reveals What Makes A ‘Good Western’

“Most Westerns aren’t very good because they reduce themselves to the black hat and the white hat,” he said. “But when they’re done well, you are kind of haunted by how you can measure yourself to wonder, Were you tough enough to make it? You were forced into decisions every day in the West which were kind of, ‘Wow.'”

“The word ‘stranger’ — we think a stranger is somebody down the hallway we’ve never met. But in the West, that was like the boogeyman,” Costner added as an example. “A stranger would scare people. Because they didn’t know where he was from. They didn’t know if he just come out of jail. And you had to measure things.”

“If you saw someone on the open plain, you didn’t know if they wanted what you had — including your wife, including your kids,” he stated. “So, you had to make these weird decisions all the time. So, when I think you create the architecture in a Western that shows you some circumstances where you go, ‘Ooh my goodness, would I have acted that quickly?’ It works.” 

Related: Yellowstone’ Star Kevin Costner’s Instagram Post Has Fans Anxious For Season 4 And Cliffhanger Answers

Watch Costner tease season five of “Yellowstone” in the video below.

Costner Preparing To Make Western Epic

At the end of August, Costner is set to begin production on his epic Western Horizon, which he plans to split into four movies.

“They’re all different films that all connect, so you’re watching a saga of these storylines that are happening,” Costner told Variety. 

The movies will reportedly span fifteen years in the settlement of America’s Western frontier, focusing on both the settlers and the indigenous people who live there.

“It’s a really beautiful story; it’s a hard story,” Costner said. “It really involves a lot of women, to be honest. There are a lot of men in it, too, but the women are really strong in Horizon. It’s just them trying to get by every day in a world that was impossibly tough.”

“They were often [dragged] out to these places because that’s where the men wanted to go; women were following their men,” he added. “They didn’t ask to be in these territories that were unsettled and dangerous, and life wasn’t easy. I’ve chosen to make sure that was really obvious, that that wasn’t easy, and how vulnerable people were.”

We can’t wait to see how Horizon turns out, and we can’t wait to see the latest season of “Yellowstone” later this year. Keep those Westerns coming, Mr. Costner, because we can’t get enough of them!