Cannes Daily: Costner's 'Horizon' Earns Tears, Jeers, Applause
The American West auteur admits he needs money to finish his four-part opus. Plus: Trump movie meets U.S. resistance; today's Jury Grid
Cue Gene Autry singing “Back in the Saddle Again.” Kevin Costner, who directed the 1990 best picture Oscar winner Dances with Wolves and more recently ruled the modern-day West as star of the TV series Yellowstone, rode into town Sunday night for the world premiere of his latest directorial effort, Horizon: An American Saga, at the Cannes Film Festival.
A three-hour survey of How the West Was Won — in some respects, it draws inspiration from the 1962 Cinerama epic of the same name — it tracks various groups of settlers, from struggling homesteaders to an organized wagon train, as they head for the frontier. The Native American characters are shown debating how to respond to the incursions into their territory; they attack one village, while one of their own settlements is subject to a massacre.
What might surprise some fans is that Costner himself, playing a lone horse trader, doesn’t appear on screen until about an hour into the three-hour film. Conceived as the first movie in a four-film series, Horizon will be released by Warner Bros. on June 28; its immediate sequel will hit theaters on Aug. 16; and a third installment has already begun production.
At Horizon’s Cannes debut at the Grand Lumiere Theatre, the movie, screening out of competition, met with sustained applause, causing tears to well up in Costner’s eyes. “I’m sorry you had to clap that long for me to understand that I should speak,” Costner finally said as he addressed the black-tie crowd. “Such good people. Such a good moment, not just for me, but for the actors that came with me, for people who believed in me. It’s a funny business, and I’m so glad I found it. There’s no place like here. I’ll never forget this — neither will my children.”
Unfortunately for Costner, though, the first round of critics’ reviews came out guns blazing. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney opined, “Running a taxing three hours, this first part of a quartet of films is littered with inessential scenes and characters that go nowhere, taking far too long to connect its messy plot threads.” Variety’s Owen Gleiberman complained the film “doesn’t feel like a movie. It feels like the seedbed for a miniseries.”
The next morning, at his official Cannes press conference, Costner offered a justification for the approach he took with the film, “We have a tendency to think of Westerns as simple. They are not simple. They’re complicated,” he said. “The West was terribly complicated. You had people who didn’t share language. They were at odds with each other. There were guns. There was no law. Try to live in that kind of environment and see how simple that is.”
He continued, “So when Hollywood makes simple Westerns, they are not appealing to me. They need to have a level of complication. Something has to be at stake, and it’s hard to write a good Western. I do not know if l wrote a good — I wrote the best Western with [co-screenwriter] Jon Baird that I could write, that had a level of compassion and humor. Would it translate? I didn’t know.”
Costner admitted that he doesn’t yet have the financing in place to complete the third and fourth features in his grand design. He facetiously suggested that the assembled press join him outside in surrounding a yacht and begging one of its billionaire owners for money.
But, he concluded, “Look, this is my journey. It’s hard, but I feel lucky to have found this business.”
Claire on the Scene
While Costner was taking his tearful bow, 12 miles up the Riviera Coast at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, UTA execs and guests watched the peach sunset melt into the blue Mediterranean. Vegan hamburgers came around with sides of French fries and triangles of mini club sandwiches, followed by chocolate coconut macaroons. (In the main restaurant, langoustines were going for a cool 160€, or $174.)
Agency partner Jeremy Barber, who represents fest jury president Greta Gerwig, mingled with the crowd and shared stories of wilder years of Cannes shenanigans. Wisely, he declined to put his reminiscences on record. The soiree celebrated the launch of UTA client Tiki Tāne Pictures and its first two feature films: The Assessment starring Alicia Vikander and Elizabeth Olsen, and Long Shadows from Dermot Mulroney, Jacqueline Bisset and Dominic Monaghan.
I caught up with former UTA executive Howard Cohen, co-president of Roadside Attractions, who said he felt optimistic about this year’s festival fare. “The movies here are very deliberately an antidote to the past 20 years of Hollywood — the superhero movies and franchises,” he told me, adding that the global film community took time to recover from the pandemic and find its voice. “You are seeing the crocuses of that,” he said, “the really exciting — and possibly commercial — movies coming out of the rest of the world.”
Meanwhile, day to day along the Croisette, it’s been business as usual, with hordes of lookie-loos crowding the premieres and snapping selfies. Photographers clicking away on the side of the red carpets are forced to listen to the Eagles’ “Hotel California” and Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” on repeat.
Brands are also out in full force. Nespresso, Campari and Magnum ice cream held events. Mastercard is plastered all over the entrance of the Majestic Hotel. The official car of the festival, BMW, has been inching starlets through the crowded streets studded with staff from Impact Security (ready to rifle through every handbag and block anyone without a badge from entering the hotel lobbies).
The brand hoopla was too much for one young journalist who told me she was fed up with online influencers being rushed to the heads of lines for red carpet events — and even the bathrooms — by the likes of TikTok and companies who are paying them to be “ambassadors.”
But this noisy mashup of commerce and art has long defined Cannes. “I love the energy, I love that people can walk down the street in a ballgown. I love sitting in hotel lobbies and getting lost in that creative energy,” says Zee West, cofounder of Picnic Bank and co-producer on the upcoming Blood and Ink, a vampire thriller starring Malcolm McDowell.
In 2024, tech is increasingly part of that energy. On May 16, on the roof of the Gray D’Albion hotel, where a woman in a sparkly mask twirled flames to entertain the crowd, I spoke with Margarita Grubina, a business development executive with Respeecher, a Ukrainian AI firm that had participated that morning in Cannes’ Next Tech on the Beach event. Respeecher is building a library of famous voices that can be adapted, Grubina told me, and has worked with Disney+ on its Star Wars series to recreate the voices of a young Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.
But silver-screen glamour in the flesh still holds the greatest sway in Cannes. On May 23 at the Hotel du Cap, Chopard and the Red Sea Film Festival are backing amfAR’s 30th annual Cannes gala. Demi Moore, whose competition thriller The Substance scored the fest’s longest standing ovation yet for its Sunday night premiere, will host the AIDS fundraiser, Cher and Nick Jonas are set to perform, and the night’s cheapest ticket is going for $25,000.
From Our Partners at Screen International
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Reviews
Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga Rides Into View
In contrast to the negative American reviews, Screen’s Lee Marshall says the movie is “beautifully shot, with a deft command of period detail and a starry ensemble cast” and “offers an old-fashioned celebration of the pioneer spirit.” Continue reading
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Today’s Screen Jury at Cannes
The long-running Screen International Jury Grid is a critical ranking of competition films in Cannes, according to an assembled jury of 12 international film critics, including Screen's reviewers. Click here for today’s full grid, but as you can see, The Substance has emerged as a new darling, topping yesterday’s leader, Caught By The Tides, which has an average of 2.6 stars.
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Interesting US reviewers don't like Costner, but he gets a good round of applause from the French and a better review in SI.