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