admin In the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood, people loved films like The Searchers (1956), A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965) to watch cowboys and outsiders fight against each other. With the upcoming release of Horizon: An American Saga, Kevin Costner brings back the ‘spaghetti-western’ genre, which he debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in France earlier this year.
Spaghetti westerns often hold the ideology of the American Dream. On selling and showing this idea in the film, Costner says “We’re being sold things all the time, so for us to think that the people in the 1800s weren’t being sold a dream? Well, they were. And they basically took their wives—who had very little to say about it—and they found themselves in the middle of the country. It was very complicated back then. Everybody tends to think of the West as simple, but it was complicated. Women, maybe, hated their husbands for ultimately taking them out in the middle of the West, where they had to work every day, where nothing was clean, where they worked themselves essentially to death. But they went because they thought they were going to create a better life. There was a bigger place to go to, and so all kinds of people accepted that challenge, accepted that dream. There was no going back. In this film, we meet couples, individuals, people who are running from something, all finding themselves going west, in pursuit of this giant need to have something they didn’t have.”
The need of the American Dream is personified by the nomadic cowboys; as well as directing, Costner also stars as Hayes Ellison. “Hayes Ellison, to me, is that character in a Western who comes off the horizon and you don’t know anything about him, but you realize he probably has a set of skills that he’d rather leave behind. He comes into a community that needs that kind of help, and once again has to take the guns out of the closet, a drawer, the saddlebags. He doesn’t want to, but most people don’t have that skill. He does. He just exists on this side of the line. I think one of the things about Hayes is he has this great yearning to belong somewhere. It’s a simple flier that has a picture on it that fires his imagination—he can’t even read what’s on it, but in his naïve way, he thinks he’d like to go there.” says Costner.
It’s an exciting time that Hollywood is bringing back the genre and we’re excited to see how the film will be received in these modern times.
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 releases in UK cinemas on 28 June 2024 and Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 releases in UK cinemas on 16th August 2024
