And I just gotta make sure it’s in America.Historian Mark M. I gotta just make sure we have a lot of bells and whistles it’s just too hard to be out there. I have an eight-hour Western that I’ve been working on a long time that’s pretty good.
#DIARIE LETTERS FROM HATFIELD AND MCCOY TV#
Is this going to be the first of many TV projects? We couldn’t have all the extras we wanted, we didn’t have all the bells and whistles when it came to steadycam, we didn’t have the kind of budget that is going to substantiate a lot of CG - things that could enhance the production value. What I’m talking about is production-wise. Now, when I say “perks,” it’s not like I’m looking for them. See, I kind of jumped before I leapt I didn’t really look how deep the water was, you know, I had already said yes and now it’s gonna shoot in Romania? That was harder, that was a big question. I knew exactly what I was stepping into I felt armed with the story. Were there any misgivings that this was a TV project? Just because I was doing the movie, I started to really absorb the violence, and the whole record is about the concept of the.
It’s not all bluegrass music it’s all themed around the Hatfields and the McCoys. So if you like music, I think you’ll really like it.
#DIARIE LETTERS FROM HATFIELD AND MCCOY MOVIE#
We wrote the theme song for the movie and then we did a concept album that spoke to the whole time of Appalachia called Famous for Killing Each Other, and that will come out about a week before the movie comes out. You and your band, Modern West, scored the movie, right? It’s a total today thing and those people will live with that, they’ll live with these middle-of-the-night killings for the next 50, 60 years in these countries, just like it was for us in the Civil War. Right, it’s not an 1800s thing, it’s a today thing too. It will go on in Iraq and Afghanistan there will be blood feuds there based on what happened to families. But I think what would be interesting to tell people is that this is going on every day it’s going on in Libya, it’s going on in Croatia, Serbia. Got myself a real McCoy, not a cousin or an uncle, and you think, Oh my God. It’s interesting to deal with that level of violence, that crudeness. And it was, for instance, when he kills McCoy, not a cousin, a real McCoy. I think what might strike people is that this is not folklore this is a real, American tragedy, a blood feud on a scale that has become an iconic nomenclature of American language. McCoy, you know, probably didn’t do as well, old-fashioned jealousy starts to seep in, and so what do they do? They drink, they hang out, and they get angry. One gets very industrious it doesn’t mean he doesn’t have nightmares. So basically, you have two guys, both probably dealing with post-traumatic stress, how they both deal with it is different. what you had is a lot of unemployment, you had a lot of listless people, and you had the hard feelings that came out of the Civil War. It’s a very big deal, and you know, it’s easy to laugh at people with beards and funny accents and hats that look odd. It seems like a stolen pig isn’t worth starting a feud over, but I guess in those times it could have fed a whole family. It goes down a lot of rabbit holes, if you will, with other characters, and I like that. I certainly didn’t do a thesis on it, and I couldn’t claim to know it the way some people did, but I had a pretty good working knowledge of them and that obviously increased when I read this script and then I started to do more research associated with it. I knew probably more than the average bear going into it.
Since you’re a history buff, how much did you know about the Hatfields and McCoys before you took this project on? Vulture spoke with Costner about diving into TV, what he knew about the feud going in, and how it’s relevant to the world today. And apparently it was all over a stolen pig. In the six-hour History Channel miniseries Hatfields and McCoys, premiering on May 28, Costner plays “Devil” Anse Hatfield, the family leader who went from being Civil War buddies with God-fearing Randall McCoy (Bill Paxton), to being his enemy. This time, the man who brought us Dances With Wolves is taking on the infamous and bloody centuries-old feud between the Hatfields of West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky. When it comes to historical dramas, Kevin Costner has never met a bearded guy he didn’t like.