Kevin Costner cites epic westerns like Large and How the West Was Received for his tendency to make lengthy films.
Kevin Costner’s filmography as a director, one factor is obvious: the man loves his epics. His debut, 1990’s Dances with Wolves, clocked in at simply over three hours, whereas his 1997 follow-up, The Postman, ran just below that. After virtually making a brief movie with Open Vary (139 minutes), he took a two-decade break earlier than diving into his subsequent: the multi-part Horizon, with its first two elements surpassing the six-hour mark. So what drives Kevin Costner to make such prolonged films? It comes right down to the classics.
At Historical past Channel’s latest Historical past Talks occasion (through Deadline), Kevin Costner mentioned it was seeing films of an epic scale that not solely captured his curiosity for movie but in addition subconsciously made him lean in direction of films of such prolonged runtimes. Particularly, he cited 1962’s How the West Was Received, which credit three administrators – Henry Hathaway, John Ford and George Marshall – for the novelistic story (“It was a 4-hour movie. So it’s no surprise, mine are three.”) and George Stevens’ 1956 movie Large (“It’s another 3-hour movie. Get the picture with me.”).
Each movies are broadly considered a few of the most interesting American western films ever made, so it’s actually no marvel that they made such an impression on Kevin Costner, whose personal Dances with Wolves did one thing neither of these works did: win the Finest Image Oscar. Whereas folks wish to hate on it solely for beating Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, there’s no denying it is without doubt one of the most sweeping movies of the ‘90s. But as for How the West Was Won – which actually runs about 20 minutes shorter than Dances with Wolves (although there is an extended version of Costner’s film that hits 4 hours) – it was that movie that actually captured his creativeness. On it, he added, “Everybody left for intermission, and I didn’t. I wasn’t going to give up my magic seat. I waited for that movie to start again, and when I was over, it marked me.”
Within the dialogue, Kevin Costner additionally famous that it’s necessary to provide all of it – runtime be damned – when making films. “It doesn’t matter when you make a movie, it’s going to live forever, so it matters what details you put in it because if you put the right details in it, it’s going to be relevant, and that’s the one thing I hope in my life. It’s not hard to be popular; it’s very difficult to be relevant. I want my life to be relevant…”
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