Former star of the smash hit television series “Yellowstone” and film director, Kevin Costner, recently took an opportunity to explain how faith influenced his latest Western movie, “Horizon: An American Saga,” that is due out in theaters June 28, 2024. Costner’s film tells the story of the plight settlers faced while living on the frontier. The actor revealed during an interview that there would be no way to tell the complete story of these settlers and their life journey without depicting the critical role their faith played in their lives.
A report from The Christian Tribute said that Costner discussed how many American settlers at the time decided to leave their old lives behind, pack up all their belongings, and head into unknown territory, blazing a trail through a part of the world that was totally foreign and posed many challenges that even they could have never imagined. These folks relied on their faith to help drive them through the difficulties they experienced.
”Faith is what guided people out there to the unknown,” he said in the interview with The Christian Post. “They just leaned on it. There was this promise, but the promise was not enough. You had to go on faith. And people brought the religion with them west.”
The award-winning actor and director further explained the impact his Christian faith and church participation have had on his life. Costner stated that his experiences from growing up as a practicing Baptism have bled into his work. While he doesn’t “force it” into the movie, he explained that it was inevitably an integral component of the settler experience.
“I grew up a Baptist and church has always been a part of my life, my grandmother. the whole thing, so I don’t mind it bleeding into a movie,” he commented. “I don’t force it in. But when I think about why people went west, when they said goodbye to people back east, they never saw them again, there was some kind of trust that people needed to lean on, because they were often times in situations where they didn’t even know what they were doing. They were out of control, they needed faith.”
Costner has become a defining force in the modern Western genre, known for his star role in “Yellowstone” as John Dutton. Reportedly, Costner has been working on the “Horizon” project for decades, investing millions of dollars. The actor noted that it required substantial faith that the movie would come to fruition.
“I’ve had hands over me, for sure, in my life, and I’m like anybody, I try to force it,” the actor further explained. “I try to force things through force of will, and I’ve been able to do that a lot in my life. But I’ve also found that things come in their own time. I think that’s how my career’s gone, to be honest. Everything in its own time, I didn’t burst onto the scene as a teenager. It took me a while. So, I trust my journey.”
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Now, before anyone thinks this is a “Christian” movie, it’s got an R rating for a reason. It contains quite bit of adult material such as sexuality and violence, though Costner himself stated that there is also quite a bit of wholesomeness in the film such as themes of faith and family.
Costner then said he wanted Scripture to “obviously relate to the situation.”
In other words, he was trying to paint an accurate and realistic portrait of the world of the Old West and the people who actually lived through it. He isn’t trying to sugar coat it in order to please a specific audience. This would water down the power of the story and honestly, it would also water down the impact of the settlers’ faith on the situations they faced. Good call on his not toning things down.
Reportedly, the movie features a variety of moments where Biblical Scripture is interlaced into the content. For example, a settler reads Psalm 91 in one scene, stating, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.” See a trailer of the “Horizon: An American Saga” below: