Speaker 1: Hey, I'm Jefferson White and I played Jimmy Herdstrom on
Speaker 1: the Paramount Network original series Yellowstone, and I'm the host
Speaker 1: of the last season of the Official Yellowstone Podcast. I
Speaker 1: am so happy to say that the weight is finally over.
Speaker 1: Yellowstone is back.
Speaker 2: In celebration of the.
Speaker 1: Season five premiere, I'm excited to share with you a
Speaker 1: recent CBS Sunday Morning interview with Kevin Costner and Taylor Sheridan,
Speaker 1: the creator of Yellowstone, It's prequel eighteen eighty three and
Speaker 1: the prequel's upcoming sequel nineteen twenty three.
Speaker 3: Time Wise, westerns were a staple of television. Lee Cowen
Speaker 3: is here to tell us there's a new sheriff in town,
Speaker 3: along with a very different tale from out of the West.
Speaker 2: Not far from Montana's bitter Root River, a postcard for
Speaker 2: the American West, Kevin Costner was stoking a fire.
Speaker 4: I mean, this is how you do it. You just
Speaker 4: get it closed and you make everything a little convenient.
Speaker 2: For the last five years, this valley has been his campsite,
Speaker 2: the backdrop for a modern day Western that's taken off
Speaker 2: like a band of wild mustangs. Yellow Stone a Paramount production,
Speaker 2: our parent company by the way, was the most watched
Speaker 2: scripted series in all of television last year.
Speaker 5: Oh and I was supposed to talk about work at
Speaker 5: the dinner table in the morning. It's a breakfast table, Beth.
Speaker 5: You can talk business at the breakfast table.
Speaker 2: It's a show as sweeping as the family it depicts.
Speaker 2: John Dutton, a Montana rancher played by is a man
Speaker 2: with one boot in the past and one reluctantly in
Speaker 2: the present.
Speaker 5: Just in America, we don't share land here.
Speaker 2: Land. That's what John Dutton sees as his legacy. The
Speaker 2: only thing more important is loyalty.
Speaker 5: If you betray me again, you're tend to me.
Speaker 6: Son.
Speaker 2: You understand you think Bonanza meets the god Pond.
Speaker 6: Say it.
Speaker 5: I'll make a lawsuit much simpler, say stop building or else.
Speaker 4: I'm skipping straight towhere else with you you, but from
Speaker 4: now on what else is all you get? We're a
Speaker 4: little violent. We're like a little bit of murder incorporated
Speaker 4: our family. A little bit, a.
Speaker 5: Little bit, a little bit.
Speaker 2: Yellowstone is a reminder that our notion of the American
Speaker 2: West is hardly as romantic as we sometimes like to believe.
Speaker 4: The ranchers that came here they didn't own this land,
Speaker 4: and they basically banded together and pushed out the native population.
Speaker 4: The cattle wandered on to rest land. Cattle don't know
Speaker 4: the difference between your land and ours.
Speaker 3: Neither did we till the government showed us.
Speaker 4: It's still beautiful, but it's very easy to forget the drama,
Speaker 4: the things that will never recover from He looks warmed up.
Speaker 2: You have to know that world to write it with
Speaker 2: any real sense of authority, and few can do that.
Speaker 2: He like Yellowstones co creator and writer Taylor Sheridan.
Speaker 5: I just make movies to support my horse habit.
Speaker 2: If he looks and sounds the part of a horseman,
Speaker 2: well it's because he is one. He'll talk riding and
Speaker 2: roping all day long, but much beyond that he rains
Speaker 2: it in.
Speaker 5: My least favorite subject is myself. Yeah, I say about
Speaker 5: everything I want to say when I write a story.
Speaker 2: There's an economy to his language, a directness that he
Speaker 2: carries to the set too.
Speaker 5: I don't run much of a democracy. No, the words
Speaker 5: are the words.
Speaker 2: He wasn't kidding.
Speaker 5: I don't tell people how to act. I don't need
Speaker 5: anyone to tell me how to write.
Speaker 2: And as writers go. He's been called one of the
Speaker 2: most important Western storytellers in decades. He created eighteen eighty three,
Speaker 2: the Pioneer prequel to Yellowstone, starring Faith Hill and Tim McGraw.
Speaker 3: Fact Or Nato.
Speaker 2: It was so popular that there's now a sequel to
Speaker 2: that prequel starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren.
Speaker 5: It's ludicrous that I'm working with these people. It's fantastically insane.
Speaker 2: You don't find in any of his works are cowboy cliches.
Speaker 2: It's easy to make a bad Western, says Kostner. Making
Speaker 2: a good one, though, is Sheridan's gift.
Speaker 4: Western specifically, they can look really dumb, they can look obvious.
Speaker 4: They're hard to make, and that's the problem.
Speaker 5: It's like, it's hard.
Speaker 4: To make a Western that you can relate to.
Speaker 2: Sheridan relates to it so well because he lives it.
Speaker 2: He owns not one but two ranches in Texas and
Speaker 2: actually provides most of the horses for his productions himself.
Speaker 5: All the horses, for the most part in our business
Speaker 5: are terrible. They're not very broke, they're not very safe,
Speaker 5: which is one of the reasons you don't see actors
Speaker 5: on very often. And I didn't want to do that,
Speaker 5: so I bought all the horses for the show and
Speaker 5: then taught the actors how to ride it.
Speaker 2: He couldn't find an actor good enough on a horse
Speaker 2: to play a horse trader on Yellowstone, so Sheridan play
Speaker 2: the part himself. Try let me run and stop it.
Speaker 4: Just ones.
Speaker 5: You've been for three hundred thousand dollars, come on just once.
Speaker 2: He fell into Hollywood first as a model.
Speaker 5: I don't need to know your name money too.
Speaker 2: He later began to audition and over the years got
Speaker 2: parts and shows like Veronica Mars and Sons of Anarchy.
Speaker 5: Fortunally for you, I'm a cop actually bound by the law.
Speaker 2: But after more than two decades of trying, it never
Speaker 2: became a leading may What kept it going.
Speaker 5: In the acting world, I think stummornness a refusal to fail.
Speaker 5: An interesting thing about Hollywood is if you let it,
Speaker 5: if you listen, it will tell you exactly what you're
Speaker 5: supposed to be doing. Househo. I have never seen anyone
Speaker 5: bang their head against the wall for twenty years and
Speaker 5: then make it. I've never seen it. I've seen it
Speaker 5: take eight years, I've seen it take ten years, but
Speaker 5: I've never seen it take twenty.
Speaker 2: And is that where you would come to?
Speaker 5: I had cut, well, I had come to where what
Speaker 5: I the best I was ever going to to be was,
Speaker 5: you know, tenth on the call sheet.
Speaker 2: But one day a friend brought him a project, not
Speaker 2: to audition for, but to write.
Speaker 5: I said, look, I have no idea how to do this,
Speaker 5: but I have a fifteen year education on how not
Speaker 5: to do it. First thing that I wrote was Mary Kingstown.
Speaker 5: And I sat down and I wrote the first episode
Speaker 5: in about ten hours, really in one night. And when
Speaker 5: I was done, I said, man, I wish I had
Speaker 5: done this fifteen years ago.
Speaker 2: From then on he began writing at a furious pace.
Speaker 2: Out came scripts for films like Sacario, wind River, and
Speaker 2: his Oscar nominated screenplay Hell or High Water.
Speaker 5: He got to wait for this boy to make a mistake.
Speaker 5: So far they hang, but they will and they're gonna
Speaker 5: make it here.
Speaker 2: Not bad for only the second screenplay he ever wrote.
Speaker 2: But when it came to his idea for the series Yellowstone,
Speaker 2: almost everyone in Hollywood passed. Nobody's doing TV westerns.
Speaker 5: They said, Look, anytime that Hollywood says a genre is
Speaker 5: dead is because they made a bunch of bad movies
Speaker 5: about it.
Speaker 6: People think of westerns of good guys and bad guys,
Speaker 6: and it's really such a different show.
Speaker 2: It makes it much more complex.
Speaker 6: Much more and much more appealing.
Speaker 2: Chris McCarthy, Paramount Network President and CEO of MTV Entertainment,
Speaker 2: essentially bet the ranch that Yellowstone would resonate.
Speaker 4: What are you doing here.
Speaker 6: I've been in television early twenty years and there's very
Speaker 6: few times where my eighteen year old niece and my
Speaker 6: eight year old aunt asked me about the same show.
Speaker 6: And you know, this is one of those moments. And
Speaker 6: when you see the entire world, you get it. He
Speaker 6: not only creates his own world in the TV series,
Speaker 6: he creates that world for himself. And you know he's
Speaker 6: unique that way. He writes what he knows, absolutely and
Speaker 6: he writes it incredibly well.
Speaker 2: Sheridan now has no fewer than ten paramount series either
Speaker 2: on the air or in the works. Busy doesn't even
Speaker 2: describe his life, and that's just the Hollywood side. He
Speaker 2: just became part owner of the historic four to Six's ranch,
Speaker 2: consisting of more than a quarter of a million acres
Speaker 2: near Lubbock, which financially means you'd better keep on writing
Speaker 2: hits to pay it all off.
Speaker 5: I was about ready to retire. I had saved, I
Speaker 5: had done really good. We were My goal was retired fifty.
Speaker 2: Not that he was going to go play golf or
Speaker 2: something correct as a golf.
Speaker 5: I don't know how to I see that much grass.
Speaker 5: I want to put cows on it. How's he priced.
Speaker 2: It was? John Wayne to One said that nothing is
Speaker 2: so discouraging to an actor then to have to work
Speaker 2: for long hours upon hours in brightly lighted interior sets.
Speaker 2: Kevin Costner feels pretty much the same way. The outdoor
Speaker 2: world of the West that Taylor Sheridan has created is
Speaker 2: a place that no one really wants to leave. What's
Speaker 2: it like at the end of the days shooting though?
Speaker 2: Do you guys all come down here and hang out?
Speaker 1: And I do?
Speaker 4: So I come down here and sometimes I just don't
Speaker 4: go yeah home, you just stay here just because I
Speaker 4: just stay right here. I mean, if those mountains don't
Speaker 4: feel the need to move, why should I.
Speaker 1: If you want more Yellowstone, you can catch up with
Speaker 1: the podcast every Sunday. This isn't just your typical recap podcast.
Speaker 1: Every week you're gonna get exclusive access to cast and
Speaker 1: crew members who will take you behind the scenes of
Speaker 1: season five in a way that no other podcast can.
Speaker 1: Saddle up for All new episodes of the Official Yellowstone Podcast,
Speaker 1: available on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.