Some kids love pretending to be cowboys when they’re little. Sometimes, those kids grow up to become famous actors who leverage their fame and fortune so they can continue to play cowboys for the rest of their lives. One of those kids is called Kevin Costner.

Between Yellowstone, Hatfields & McCoys, and his passion project Horizon: An American Saga, it’s clear that the Oscar winner is only happy when he’s under a Stetson. Everything else must be to pay the bills.

When he’s not giddying up (or in any other direction for that matter), Costner can be found in a number of other non-rootin’, non-tootin’ roles. If you want to see him play a former soldier suffering from PTSD, then watch The War. Yes, it’s just called The War. Released in 1994, the film revolves around Stephen (Costner) and his relationship with his son, Stu, played by a young Elijah Wood. The film was directed by Jon Avnet, who would also make the film that led to Richard Gere being exiled from Hollywood.

Costner might not have ended up on the blacklist for making this movie, but he didn’t emerge from it unscathed. Speaking to Vulture, the Oscar-and Razzie-winning filmmaker revealed that The War had a profound effect on someone very close to him, which fundamentally changed his own relationship with the picture.

“I will get emotional talking about this,” he said. “The War is the only movie my father can’t watch. The role I play reminded him so much of his dad.”

Both William Costner, Kevin’s father, and his father before him lived very humble lives. The actors used two literary metaphors to describe them, claiming that his parents gave him “a Huckleberry Finn childhood” of camping outside and climbing trees. William worked for an electric company, and his mother, Sharon, was a welfare worker. As for his paternal grandfather, whose name I couldn’t track down, Costner described him as “Tom Joad”, as he was left penniless by the Dust Bowl.

In The War (I still can’t believe they called it that), Costner’s character has recently returned from serving in Vietnam. As the actor was born in 1955, the same year that particular war started, it’s unlikely that his grandfather would have served in the conflict while his father was young. It’s much more likely that Grandpa Costner would have seen action in World War II or even World War I. You don’t need me to tell you how traumatic those campaigns were. The First World War is widely credited with defining PTSD as we know it today.

Fatherhood and the relationship between fathers and sons is a key theme of The War. This is very touching, but sadly not enough to rescue the film from picking up some horrible reviews. It’s probably a good thing that William Costner never saw his son in this film, if the press is to be believed. I

f he’s looking for a good father-son drama to get stuck into, he should just stick with Field of Dreams.