Luke Wilson enjoyed lengthy Horizon shoot

Luke Wilson "appreciated" taking almost a year to shoot 'Horizon: An American Saga'.

The 52-year-old actor plays Matthew Van Weyden in Kevin Costner's two-part Western - which is set to be followed by another four movies - and he enjoyed spending a huge chunk of time making the films because it is so "rare" to work at a slower pace in modern Hollywood.

He told Deadline: “It’s a long shoot. I mean, I was saying that I’d always kind of envied reading about those movies like 'Apocalypse Now', where it would last a couple of years where it really became your life.

"Because the way the movie business is now, the first movie I did was 35 days, and that was considered low-budget, but now they’ve got it whittled down to 22-day shoot.

"So to work on something like this, where Kevin really was patient and took his time with the storytelling, you did feel like it was something rare and definitely something to be appreciated.”

Kevin co-wrote 'Horizon' and put his own money into the project, and he has "inspired" Luke to take a more active role in the direction of his own career.

He said: “Definitely seeing how hard Kevin worked was very inspiring to me, and just kind of made me want to buckle down on the writing and trying to get a few of the movies I’d like to get made personally trying to get them made. Los Angeles and the film business, it can be an easy place to kind of drift or wait until somebody comes to you with a job and it was very inspiring.”

The 'Old School' actor praised his "sensitive" director's style of working.

He said: “Kevin was such a thoughtful and interesting director for me, and as hardworking as he is, and I’m saying he gets known as kind of a Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen type guy, but he’s very sensitive. He’s a really sensitive guy and that comes across in this direction.”