A decade ago, I found myself on a school bus that had been converted to something more like a party bus, with a stripper pole and a DJ booth to power that stripper pole, taking a tour of the Warsaw Ghetto with 50 Cent. An overwhelmed tour guide was attempting to point out historically significant locations as we passed them in our bus, but she was inaudible, because the DJ booth had been commandeered to play Get Rich or Die Tryin’ at overwhelming volume. I remember sitting kind of slumped, staring out the window. This probably went on for a half hour, me staring blankly off into space, as the tour guide shouted into the void. At some point, I had to remind myself: You’re on a party bus with 50 Cent in Poland, you should probably pay attention.
I don’t know if this tendency is universal, but I’ve found over the years doing whatever weird job it is I do that the temptation is to normalize, almost immediately, situations that are not remotely normal. Everyone else you’re with is acting like the bus and the tour, etc., is unremarkable, so you do that too, and next thing you know, you forget to look up and notice that the sun is setting over Mount Peale in November and it looks like this:
That was Utah in 2022, when I first met Kevin Costner, who was then shooting the first part of what he hopes will be a four-part epic movie experience that he is calling Horizon. I wrote about all that just recently, here. This spring, I visited him in Santa Barbara at his house, and then not all that long ago I got a call inviting me back to Utah, this time around St. George, near the Arizona border, to ride around with Costner as he scouted locations for Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 3, which he is scheduled to be shooting as we speak, despite the fact that he doesn’t currently have the money to finish it. St. George, or thereabouts, looks like this:
Money was a theme of this story: Costner put $38 million of his own into Horizon. Along the way he got divorced and fell out with the creators of Yellowstone, the show that was responsible for his strong late-career revival. “There’s a lot that has happened,” Costner told me, . He said sometimes he saw himself as if he were in a movie: “I’m right now looking at myself in the dark and going, Are you going to fucking stand up and finish? Get up. I’m the audience. Get up, Kevin. Get the fuck up and deal with this and find the joy every day of seeing your kids play while you’re here—and then work your ass off to get this thing finished.”
The first chapter of Horizon premiered at Cannes last weekend, alongside Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. It was about two and half years ago that I was wandering around Coppola’s vineyard in the Napa Valley as he told me about his plans to put more than $100 million of his own money into that film; then he went and did it. I slept in a guesthouse on the vineyard and looked out at the sunrise in the morning and once again had to tell myself: You should probably pay attention.
St. George is a pretty weird place, to be honest. It’s in the middle of nowhere, but it’s also one of the fastest growing cities in the country. So you have this stunning natural beauty, and then you have about one thousand hideous housing developments pushing out into the wilderness, quickly making it not wild. At our last location of the day, Costner was dismayed to see a road being rapidly built in the background of a vista he had shot not all that long ago. The thing he was trying to capture was about to vanish. He did the camera framing thing, setting up a shot they still might get, one that cropped out the road and the houses in the distance. “We are going to eke out one last Western moment here,” he said, determinedly. I was glad to be there in that moment, paying attention.
Beautiful pictures. I just read a very interesting and well written piece you wrote a few years ago. I would like to ask you a question about a more current, but connected event. Please reach out, if you have a moment.