Luke Wilson urged to embrace Texas twang in new Western film saga Horizon directed by Kevin Costner
Born and breed in Dallas, Luke Wilson can’t help having a Texas twang, but some in Hollywood apparently had an issue with it.
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Luke Wilson was made to star in a Western.
Born and breed in Dallas, Texas, the Hollywood star has the Texas twang down pat and looks the part of the quintessential cowboy.
So starring in a leading role in Kevin Costner’s epic four-part film series Horizon: An American Saga was like second nature for the 52-year-old.
But surprisingly, Wilson has not starred in many Western films during his three decades in show business – and even he wonders why.
“I mean, I worked on a comedic Western [The Ridiculous 6] with Adam Sandler, which was very fun and a couple of low-budget Westerns, but nothing of this size and scope,” he told news.com.au from the Venice Film Festival while promoting Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1, which is now streaming on Stan.
“One thing I didn’t know before we made Horizon is Westerns can be very expensive to make, and somehow I think they just kind of maybe fallen out of favour a lot. Obviously they were big in Hollywood all through the kind of golden age, and then I grew up with the Clint Eastwood Westerns. But when I was starting in the mid-nineties, things were moving into that superhero territory where not as many Westerns were being made.”
Pushing Westerns to the side, Wilson went on to star in hit movies such as Old School, The Royal Tenenbaumbs, Legally Blonde and many other movies, some of which directors had tried to get him to lose his Southern accent.
In Horizon however, 69-year-old Costner, who directed, starred and co-wrote the film, told Wilson to embrace his Southern roots – accent and all.
“I did get to laughing with Kevin one time where he was saying to me, ‘You just have a good handle on the vernacular and you talk slow. Everybody else talks so fast.’ And I started to laugh,” Wilson recalled. “Usually, I’ve heard from directors, ‘Can you speak a little faster, please?’”
The four-part film is set before and after the American Civil War and follows groups and families who are lured to the Old West seeking to settle down in a fictional town called Horizon.
Wilson plays captain of the wagon train Matthew Van Weyden, an upstanding but reluctant leader of settlers navigating the Western frontier.
The saga chronicle events from 1859 and will cover 15 years over the course of the four films – a feat which left Wilson impressed by both the writing and directing of Costner.
“I think Kevin and [co-writer] John Baird must have done a lot of research because I told Kevin when I first read the script that it was kind of almost like a historical novel,” Wilson said. “It had all this action, but at the same time you were learning things too.”
“And Kevin really does take his time with characters. I’d see him directing people in the background, the people that were portraying the pioneers on the wagon train. That was always very helpful and interesting to me just to hear what he’d say to them.
“He really does take his time introducing each character, which again is something I appreciate about him. And I appreciate his dedication to storytelling because there’s always a reason financially to not take that time to really explain characters and people and where they’re coming from.”
Costner’s hard work has paid off with Chapter 1 receiving an 11-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival when it was premiered back in May.
And Chapter 2 – which will also air on Stan – received a 3-minute ovation when it closed out the Venice Film Festival this past weekend.
“That’s a great feeling to have seen that, and I got to see that reception in Cannes in person. I think a lot of that is also just the appreciation for Kevin Costner as a filmmaker and his legacy in Hollywood,” Wilson said of Costner, who won a Best Picture and Best Director Oscar in 1991 for his movie Dances With Wolves – his directorial debut in which he also starred.
“To have worked on Horizon and seeing how hard Kevin worked and how dedicated he is, it meant a lot. I found it very moving.”
And the shoot went on rain, hail or shine. Filming on location in Utah meant the cast and crew were battling the elements. Wilson got lucky and filmed in relatively mild conditions, but for others on set, the terrain was not as kind.
“I got lucky with my shooting where I shot in the fall in America in the months of October and November, and it was beautiful,” Wilson said. “And then I had time off and I came back in the springtime where it was also very nice weather. So I felt very lucky to shoot in these nice climates.”
“But the crew, they shot in the snow, the rain, the heat, the wind, so they really experienced it all.”
The ensemble cast also featured the likes of Sienna Miller and Giovanni Ribisi as well as Aussie stars Sam Worthington, playing First Lieutenant Trent Gephardt, and Abby Lee, playing a prostitute named Marigold who gets romantically involved with horse-wrangler Hayes Ellison, Costner’s character.
“These storylines are kind of interwoven with each other. I was shooting at the same time with Sam – we were working at the same time, but we weren’t working together. But I enjoyed being around Sam and Sienna,” Wilson said.
“It was always a question of just trying to get as much done as we could before the sun went down. And that was another great thing about the Western is getting to shoot outside. We were outside all the time, so it’s really just a matter of getting everything you can done before you’ve lost the light.”
Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1 is now streaming on Stan
Originally published as Luke Wilson urged to embrace Texas twang in new Western film saga Horizon directed by Kevin Costner
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