I enjoy Kevin Costner and I absolutely love a good Western, so combining the two for the first time in well over a decade should be a recipe for something great. The last time Costner held a six-shooter in the old west was alongside Robert Duvall in 2003's underrated OPEN RANGE, which he also directed. While speaking on Playback, a Variety podcast, Costner said that he still holds a great deal of love for the Western genre.
It comes in the language. Everyone’s looking for the shootout in a western, but the strength of them is what gets said leading up to things. There is an oddity about how people talk, yet it’s our Shakespeare, the American west.
When asked whether he has any Western projects up his sleeve for the future, Costner revealed that he has just one, but that it's turning into quite the epic.
I have one, I’ve been working on it. It’s about 10 hours long, how about that? Maybe I’ll make three features out of it. There’s a fourth one, too, so it’s truly a saga. I could do TV, or I could also make it like every six months, have a big western that’s tied together like ‘Jean de Florette’ and ‘Manon of the Spring,’ where there's a continuum. I think those are fun to watch.
I'm probably not the only one out there who would watch the shit out of a 10-hour Western epic from Kevin Costner, but our likelihood of actually seeing this project hit the screen is slim as Costner has said that while studios admit that it's an interesting idea. they're not all that keen on actually making it. Shucks. Kevin Costner appeared in the recently released HIDDEN FIGURES (check out a review from our own Chris Bumbray) and is currently in the midst of filming Aaron Sorkin's MOLLY'S GAME in which he will star alongside Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba.