Kurt Russell talks about the TV show he is making with Mel Gibson & Kate Hudson

I’m fooling right now with a project that was brought to me from my daughter Kate [Hudson], who had been approached by her two brothers, my two boys. It’s a great arena – it turns out Mel Gibson was interested in the same arena. So we all started talking about it, and it’s a longform TV series.

It’s about the birth of San Francisco. The template for it is this book called The Barbary Coast, which was written by Herbert Asbury, who wrote the book The Gangs of New York. It’s a fascinating story with fascinating characters, and it’s a good template. You don’t follow it necessarily, but it’s a good template.

So [unlike a movie] where you only have two hours to tell a story and get Machiavellian and find out about a character or characters, you’ve got all the time in the world. You can do what I enjoyed so much with Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, which I’m just starting to watch. When I saw this, I thought this is a great arena for that. I think longform storytelling is fascinating because you can get 360-degrees of a character, and there’s no place else you can really do that like in that long form.