Costner has revealed the first trailer for Horizon: An American Saga, his hugely ambitious post-Civil War epic that pulled him away from another Western you may have heard of, a little show called Yellowstone. The trailer finds Costner marshaling an old-school, sweeping movie that promises all the hallmarks of the genre, including gunfights, wide-open spaces, and plenty of conflict, both at high noon and romantically.

Costner co-wrote the series with Jon Baird, with Chapter One arriving this summer (June 28) and Chapter Two following hot on its heels (August 16), a bold release strategy for a film that Costner has been working towards for three decades.

How personal is Horizon to Costner? He reportedly took a loan out on his home to help finance the series, which was shot on location in Utah.

“When no one wanted to make the first one, I got the bright idea to make four,” Costner said during a chat about the Horizon trailer. “So I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But I wanted it to step away from what we usually see in Westerns where there’s a town that’s already there. No one knows how [the town] came to be. There’s a guy who comes in off the horizon, if you will. We don’t know much about him, except that he has some skills he’d like to put behind him and this town ends up needing those stills desperately…too often, it’s just a convenience for the hero guy to knock down a dumb guy.”

Costner has long been connected to the genre—he directed the Oscar-winning Dances With Wolves way back in 1990—to say nothing of his star turn in the phenomenon Yellowstone. Yet perhaps no film, or, that is, films, are as personal to him as Horizon.

“These are real lives,” Costner said about Horizon. “People just making their way, women just trying to keep their families clean and fed … I’m drawn to that. I’m always gonna get to my gunfight, but I’m drawn to the little things that people had to endure. So, to me, Horizon was worth holding on to because I just felt like I wanted to tell it. It grew and it grew and it grew until suddenly I realized that I just had to make it, and I had to look to myself financially to do it — which is not the smartest thing. But I count on the movie speaking louder than anything I can say.”

Check out the trailer below. The first installment of Horizion hits theaters on June 28: