Kevin Costner has held a lot of great roles in his career as an actor, but at the end of the day, what he'll be remembered best for is Dances with Wolves. The Western film doubled as Costner's directorial debut, and it went on to win seven Oscars. Basically, the man knows his way around a Western and when he says that he's been thinking of returning for one more outing in the west, that's enough to gain our attention. He has a rough idea for the movie too, and it already sounds pretty ambitious.
Kevin Costner sat down with Variety for its podcast to talk about his upcoming role in Hidden Figures, the movie about the African American women who worked for NASA and helped land a man on the moon. When you have Costner in the room, though, you need to talk about his career, and the conversation eventually turned to Dances with Wolves, which won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars. When asked if he would ever consider doing another Western, Costner revealed that he has been working on developing a new Western. He said:
I have one. I've been working on it. It's about 10 hours long, how about that? Maybe I'll make three features out of it. There's a fourth one, too, so it's truly a saga. I could do TV, or I could also make it like every six months, have a big western that's tied together like 'Jean de Florette' and 'Manon of the Spring.' I think those are fun to watch.
We don't know anything about what this ambitious project could possibly be about, but it sounds epic in scope. It feels like Costner is still nailing down the details, but the references he drops could hint at what we are looking at. Jean de Florette and its sequel Manon of the Spring are two 1986 french language films that told one large story. Based on a novel, the two films were shot together over a seven-month period. They were wildly ambitious for their time, but also widely successful. The films have a huge legacy and Jean de Florette is said to be one of the greats of world cinema.
So saying you're working on a project in the same vein as those two isn't something to shake a stick at. The idea of a Western that unfolds over multiple films is definitely appealing, and here's hoping it all works out. Westerns nowadays aren't the surefire hits they used to be, but fingers crossed that this gains some traction or that we at least hear some more details.
Before this Western comes out in the possible future, you can see Kevin Costner in the non-Western Hidden Figures, which is currently in theaters right now.
