Kevin Costner lives by the philosophy: If the mountains don’t feel the need to move, why should I? In that regard, the 69-year-old actor resembles his Yellowstone character John Dutton all too well. Both the actor and his fictional counterpart struggle to overcome their love for the past while maladapting to the changes of the futuristic today.
Taylor Sheridan, on the other hand, has been a driving force in making the Western star’s life come full circle with Yellowstone. What began as a naked appreciation for Westerns soon developed into an undying passion and obsession with the genre for Costner. The only problem was that films about the Wild West all tell the same fantastical story of outlaws, gunslingers, rodeos, and ho-downs. Yellowstone erases that constraint entirely.
Hollywood Has a Problem With Westerns in Film
For more than 100 years, Hollywood has been stuck with a singular recipe for Western culture. Although Kidnapping by Indians (1899) is officially the first Western ever made, it was director Edwin Porter’s 1903 film, The Great Train Robbery, that is widely considered as the pioneer in the genre.
Following a standard heist movie blueprint, The Great Train Robbery set the precedent for all Hollywood Westerns to come. Gunslinging outlaws became a staple of the genre which was further compounded by the Golden Age of the Western from 1940 to 1960. The period epitomized the cowboy subculture, while legend turned the historic Vengeance Ride of characters like Wyatt Earp into romantic notions about life in the American West. It has remained the same ever since.
But Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan cuts through the red tape of the Old West and br ings something refreshingly alive, real, and accurate to the table. Desperate for an escape from the fakery of the urban cowboy culture while erasing the ridiculousness of the past Westerns, Sheridan creates a world in the middle of Montana that witnesses the last surviving vestiges of the ranch lifestyle through the eyes of a seventh-generation cowboy family.
Kevin Costner Reveals the Yellowstone Secret Sauce
While Taylor Sheridan found a kindred spirit in Kevin Costner, that kinship burned bright and fast and gave the audience some of the best years in television ever recorded in Hollywood history. But it was not simply the contemporary freshness or the socio-political relevance of Yellowstone that made the tale so gripping. It was Sheridan’s effortless storytelling too.
In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Costner breaks down the blueprint of his Paramount series and describes why Yellowstone works so well, despite an abundance of Westerns in the industry, including his personal filmography.
Westerns specifically can look really dumb. They can look obvious. They are hard to make and that’s the problem.
Costner claims that it’s easy to make a bad Western, but creating a good one is Sheridan’s gift. Yellowstone and its prequel spin-offs are glaringly devoid of cowboy cliché and the writer-director refuses to give in to the age-old time-tested recipe that Hollywood put into Westerns until he came into the picture.
With Taylor Sheridan’s ambitious vision for the world of the Duttons, the political conniving, domestic tyranny, generational trauma, and corporate Machiavellianism always seem to leave a lasting impact on the audience. Teenagers to octogenarians have all been equally rooted in the show and that in itself is a signifier of how powerful Sheridan’s storytelling can be.
Not only has the Oscar-nominated filmmaker produced one of the most successful television shows ever written but he has also singlehandedly revived a dying genre in Hollywood and saved an entire subculture from going extinct by shedding light on the reality of ranch lifestyle and the life of a cowboy.