Costner, who also helmed the ‘Horizon’ movies, said that he’s “willing to do anything where I feel like what I’m doing is for myself,” which may not always include the genre
Kevin Costner is detailing what he sees next for his career following his departure from Yellowstone and overall embrace of Westerns.
The Academy Award and Emmy winner, 70, shared in a new interview with Radio Times that for his next projects, he’s “willing to do anything where I feel like what I’m doing is for myself.”
“It doesn’t have to be a Western, it could be something else. But when something is no longer interesting to me, or there’s some other reason that I need to move on, I’m willing to do that,” Costner said in the interview, published on Monday, Sept. 15.
“I think you can write a short story and it can live forever. You can write a novel and it can live forever. You can make a short movie and it can live forever. It’s about how you’re telling it. It’s about if other people are going to be able to relate to it and move to it,” he added. “That’s why there are certain books that continue to live with us, that we pass on to our children.”
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Costner notably departed the Taylor Sheridan-led western drama last year after announcing the exit on social media, while his character (patriarch John Dutton) was killed off in the second part of season 5. He has since kept his focus on forthcoming installments of his Western epic Horizon: An American Saga — the second of which premiered at Venice International Film Festival last year — and his recent docuseries, Kevin Costner’s The West.
“I think the hope for me is that I can stay relevant; not only to myself, but to people who find my work,” he adds. “I can’t create work that I think is going to find them. I can only create work that when they do find it, it reflects what I was feeling and my sensibility. And hopefully they’re moved by it.”
Costner previously caught up with PEOPLE in June, when he shared that he doesn’t “even think about retiring, because I’ll just move to the next thing that captures my imagination.”
“I think we’re all different and we have different things happening for us,” he said. “I’ve felt really lucky in my life. I’d like to think that I worked for all of it, but not everybody can live by the same blueprint.”
As for Kevin Costner’s The West, the eight-part docuseries premiered in May on the History Channel and follows what Costner called in a trailer “the real story of our wild past.”
“Everything that happened in Dances with Wolves or Open Range or Horizon actually happened out there. I didn’t make those stories up. There were interactions and they all have truth to them,” Coster told Radio Times. “They’re made-up ideas, but those interactions happened a million times.”
“The documentary serves to back up those kind of stories. There were slaves and there were captives in the West. We did mislead Native Americans for our own good — and we kept doing it, from one shore to the other shore. The Western movies that I did, in my mind, are true. They are honest. They are real. In some way, this documentary backs it all up.”
