Kevin Costner names the only perfect movies in cinema history: “They don’t run a gamut of things”
Kevin Costner is an all-or-nothing kind of star. He’s financed so many of his own projects over the years that when he mortgaged his house and allegedly lost his marriage over his latest epic western, Horizon: An American Saga, hardly anyone batted an eye. The fact that it was a flop was also not necessarily a shock either because ever since the star tried his hand at directing with the fantastically successful Dances with Wolves in 1990, his output has been decidedly uneven.
However, there is no doubting Costner’s commitment to cinema writ large. His movies often fall victim to grandiosity but never blandness, and there is honour in taking big swings, no matter how far they land from the intended mark. Given his track record in Hollywood, it’s no surprise that the star has an equally grand taste in the movies he watches as the movies he makes. In an interview with The New Yorker in 2024, he was asked which movies he thought were perfect, and he responded with five.
“I think [The] Wizard of Oz is a perfect movie,” he said. “I think Giant is a perfect movie. I think [The] Sand Pebbles is a perfect movie. I think One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a perfect movie. So they don’t run a gamut of things. I think Cool Hand Luke is a really wonderful movie.”
Despite what Costner said, his picks do run the gamut of things. Aside from being made before 1980, they bear few similarities. The scrappy, anti-establishment style of Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke and Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a far cry from the big-budget, Technicolor studio ostentation of Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz or George Stevens’ Giant.
The Sand Pebbles is the most unusual pick of the bunch. Unlike the rest, it isn’t considered one of the great classics of 20th-century cinema. Directed by The Sound of Music director Robert Wise, the film is set in China in the 1920s and stars Steve McQueen as a rebellious Navy engineer who clashes with his superiors.
Central to all Costner’s favourite movies is a thread of individualism, especially of the American variety. Whether it’s Randle McMurphy riling up Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Dorothy and her band of outcasts daring to confront the Wizard at the end of the Yellow Brick Road, all these films lionise the non-conformists who strike out into new territory to challenge the status quo.
Although Costner didn’t say that these five films were an influence on his work, it’s easy to see how they might be. There are obvious parallels between Giant and Horizon, where the American West is portrayed as a place of resurrection, stagnation, reinvention, and interpersonal struggle over the course of more than three hours. However, there is also the fact that his characters almost always reach for a mixture of Paul Newman’s relentlessly contrarian Cool Hand Luke and Steve McQueen’s rebellious Jake Holman. Zooming out even further, his movies tend to peddle a sense of nostalgia, harkening back to a time when Hollywood movies were character-driven above all else.
