The Last of the Mohicans

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Speaker 4 Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a sweeping, sprawling, 18th-century set

Speaker 4 American romance that is, I would argue, somewhat more nuanced, perhaps much more nuanced than its more, arguably more popular counterpart from the early 1990s. Oh, we're going to talk about that too.

Speaker 4 Yes, as always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by my intrepid co-host, Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, what do you have for us this evening?

Speaker 14 Well, Chris, we have The Last of the Mohicans, but we don't just have The Last of the Mohicans because we're doing a double dose of Michael Mann this month. We're doing mono a mano, if you will.

Speaker 14 This week we are covering The Last of the Mohicans. Next week we will be covering Heat.
So you're going to get a lot of Michael Mann. And I, for one, am happy about it.
I love Michael Mann.

Speaker 14 And I actually love this movie. It was interesting to re-watch it.
But Chris, I'm curious to hear from you. Did you grow up with this movie? Had you seen it before?

Speaker 14 And what was it like watching it again for this episode?

Speaker 4 I'd seen it. I did not grow up with it.

Speaker 4 Again, I had seen it at some point in high school, I think. It's a poster that I was very familiar with, or a movie box cover that was very familiar with.

Speaker 14 DDL running towards the camera.

Speaker 4 And it doesn't even look that much like DDL in that particular photo. Like it could be a stunt double running towards the camera.
It's a little blurry. It is a little blurry.

Speaker 4 There are certain images from the film, specifically the third act on the cliffs, that remained with me for the 20 years between when I had last seen this movie and watching it this time.

Speaker 4 And they really made an impression because I thought, wow, that is the exact image of, you know, Wes Studi and Chingachi Cook standing on the cliff looking at one another in silhouette or Alice.

Speaker 4 Spoilers, taking a tumble. Yeah.

Speaker 4 So there was a lot of, there's a lot of poetic imagery in this movie that had stuck with me and it made an impression.

Speaker 4 Here's what I will say, and I've watched a couple other Michael Mann films this month, including Heat and his first film, Thief.

Speaker 4 What I really love about this movie, and I think it's true of movie making of the time, as well as Michael Mann in general, is that they don't slow down.

Speaker 4 They don't really spend a lot of time explaining things to you. They drop you in a situation.
They say, things are a little politically messy here. Things are complicated.

Speaker 4 It's not as straightforward as you might imagine. There are complicated allegiances and motivations.
And they trust that the audience will keep up. And the audience does keep up.

Speaker 4 And it's really fun to watch.

Speaker 4 And it is not like so many movies made today, which I think executives are afraid that because folks are on their phones, you know, they might miss something and therefore we need to spell it out.

Speaker 4 And this movie does not do that. And as a result, I think it has a somewhat of a maturity to it that maybe other films set in this time period lack.

Speaker 4 I also think it does some really interesting things. Yes, DDL, as we will call him.

Speaker 14 His name's too long.

Speaker 4 Drazillian Dretlift. Daniel Day-Lewis is...
the main character, but I think the movie moves him away from the center of focus at really interesting moments.

Speaker 4 And, you know, compare it to something like The Last Samurai, where it's really implied that Tom Cruise is the last samurai in that movie.

Speaker 4 And this movie, specifically, DDL is not the last of the Mohicans. No.
You know, his father is. And so I think this movie is actually very sweeping, very poetic.
I thoroughly enjoyed the rewatch.

Speaker 4 And I will beg whoever owns the rights to this, for the love of God,

Speaker 4 please restore it and do like a high-definition 4K release because that's.

Speaker 4 It's gorgeous yeah it's a beautiful film and the transfer is terrible it's like it looks it looks terrible there's so many shots that are like that looks like strange slow motion and i that has to be something yeah it definitely deserves a restoration because it's gorgeous and it yeah i watched heat i watched the 4k blu-ray of heat and i watched the 4k blu-ray of thief and those movies look incredible in their restoration.

Speaker 4 I mean, Thief made 13 years, 12, 13 years before this.

Speaker 4 They look incredible. This movie's locations and cinematography and production design are all incredible.

Speaker 4 And the transfer, this version does a disservice to all involved, in my opinion.

Speaker 14 Especially because the colors in this are so beautiful and the cinematography is just insane. And I would love to see it a little bit more clearly.

Speaker 4 Also, Madeline Stowe, one of my faves of the 90s. I forgot about her.
Yes. She was also 12 Monkeys.
She's great. And 12 Monkeys.
And also, however they style her in this movie, great job.

Speaker 4 She looks amazing. She's beautiful.

Speaker 4 She's very beautiful.

Speaker 14 Stunning. Well, we're not even going to have a lot of time to get to this, but she really appreciated the way that Michael Mann shot her.
And he spent a ton of time just like staring at her face.

Speaker 4 Like she would just have to stand there for three hours while Michael Mann, like

Speaker 14 she's gorgeous.

Speaker 4 It really, I think it's some of the best she's ever looked on screen. He does such a good job.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 She's very, very beautiful. Well, I have a bit of a different experience than you with this movie, which is that I did grow up with it.
My parents loved this movie.

Speaker 14 I watched it many times and I always, really, really enjoyed it. I always had the feeling that it was a more mature, more advanced point of view on this period of history.

Speaker 14 I'm pleased to say upon rewatch, I think that's true. I think it very much holds up.
And we will get into all of the reasons why today it was an extremely troubled production.

Speaker 14 The thing that has really sort of disturbed me a bit about researching this is that what's in front of the camera is so nuanced and beautiful and truly stunning and very human.

Speaker 14 And then I think the experience behind the camera was something far more negative for a lot of the people that were involved in this film. So also, Chris.

Speaker 14 I did not intentionally position this episode at the top of November, of course, Thanksgiving month, but I'm actually very, very glad that we are covering it because we're going to get a chance to talk about Native American representation in film in general.

Speaker 14 We're going to talk about some truly fantastic Native actors and you've already alluded to it, but another landmark film of the early 90s that set the stage for this one.

Speaker 14 And I think we're also going to discover how even the best intentions can miss the forest for the trees and why what's happening behind the camera matters just as much, if not more, than the story that you're capturing on film.

Speaker 14 So, Chris, you've watched some Michael Mann this month, as you mentioned.

Speaker 14 There's one major outlier in Michael Mann's filmography. What would you say it is?

Speaker 4 Well, I would say it's The Keep. Oh, okay.
From 1983.

Speaker 14 I go more with this.

Speaker 4 So The Keep is supernatural. So everything else he does is based in our world.
The Keep is the only supernatural films.

Speaker 10 It's horror.

Speaker 4 It's horror. Yeah, it's Nazi supernatural.

Speaker 14 Outside of Nazi supernatural.

Speaker 4 Outside of that, it would be the last of the Mohican.

Speaker 4 Like, if you think about Michael Mann, you think sweeping crime, epics, everything from thief, manhunter, heat, Miami Vice, Collateral, The Insider, Public Enemies.

Speaker 4 Yes, The Insider does have a criminal element to it, even though it's a whistleblower story. I actually love that movie, but yes.
Yeah, it's a beautiful movie.

Speaker 4 But yeah, definitely Last of the Mohicans,

Speaker 4 had I not known about The Keep, definitely would be The Outlier. But

Speaker 4 when you watch it, I think there's this verisimilitude and attention to detail that feels very in keeping with Michael Mann's other movies.

Speaker 4 So I think upon watching it, it feels very much like a Michael Mann movie.

Speaker 14 Man-oh Mann, does he love details? As we're going to get into.

Speaker 14 So as always, here are the basics. The Last of the Mohicans is directed by Michael Mann.

Speaker 14 It is written by Michael Mann and Christopher Crow, however, based on the novel by James Fenimore Cooper and the 1936 screenplay by Philip Dunn. I also watched the 1936 version.

Speaker 14 It stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Russell Means, Wes Studi, Madeline Stowe, Jodi Mae, Stephen Waddington, Eric Schweig, and many, many more, including a very fun cameo early on.

Speaker 14 Did you notice who the super bitchy British officer?

Speaker 4 Yes. Yeah.
Just

Speaker 14 that's one other thing I have to call out about this movie. I love how bitchy all the British people are.
They are just.

Speaker 4 They're so bitchy. They're so bitchy.

Speaker 4 And the French are so dastardly. It's like everything's.

Speaker 4 I will say, such nuance taken, well, perhaps relative to other films, to the colonists and the Native Americans, but then the British and the French are just the biggest stereotypes. I know.

Speaker 4 The British never have I seen the crown back. Elephant is like, oh, it should something happen to them.

Speaker 14 I cannot trust that they will not fight the same men again.

Speaker 14 Yeah, the French general is very funny. Very mustache-twirly, even with a lack of mustache.

Speaker 4 All right.

Speaker 14 As always, the IMDb log line is, three Mohican trappers agree to protect the daughters of a British colonel in the midst of the French and Indian War.

Speaker 1 Okay, let's get into it.

Speaker 14 So, since this is our first time covering Michael Mann, and again, we are covering heat next week, let's talk a little bit about Michael Mann's upbringing.

Speaker 14 So, he was born in 1943 in Chicago to, I believe, a Ukrainian, although a lot of places will list Russian, father who fled the Russian Revolution as a child, and a local Chicago mom.

Speaker 14 He grew up on the pretty rough rough streets of Chicago. Eventually, his father was forced out of business.
They had kind of a tough upbringing.

Speaker 14 And when he was a little kid, maybe three or four years old, he watched the 1936 version of The Last of the Mohicans in a church basement.

Speaker 14 And he says that's one of the first films that really made a deep impression on him.

Speaker 14 In Projections, a forum for filmmakers, he explained that, quote, I couldn't identify what was so fascinating then, but I can now.

Speaker 14 It's the combination of three discrete and very exciting cultures in the same motion picture, which happens to be a tightly plotted war movie. What do you think those three cultures are?

Speaker 4 Native American,

Speaker 4 English, and

Speaker 4 the nascent, not yet known as American American culture.

Speaker 14 Exactly. You've got the settlers.
You've got the Native Americans who've obviously been there forever. And you've got the Brits who just don't understand any of it.

Speaker 4 That's right. Not a thing.

Speaker 14 Who are marching into the woods in bright red coats?

Speaker 4 I know. I just

Speaker 4 look. I am not an innovative person, and I am not suggesting that I would have figured out that perhaps transposing that fighting style wouldn't work.

Speaker 14 Well, how many times are you all going to get murdered before you stop doing this?

Speaker 4 Oh, my goodness. The guerrilla warfighting tactics, it would seem obvious after the ninth ambush, in which you're like, we look like bullseyes walking through.

Speaker 14 You look like bullseyes, and they're all like waiting to fire. But I have to say, the battle sequences in this, I think, are fantastic.

Speaker 14 They're some of the things that hold up the best about this movie to me.

Speaker 4 Yeah, especially the midpoint fort siege is really pretty grand.

Speaker 14 The fort siege is great. And I love, I think it's the second ambush.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the second ambush towards the end of act two. Yes.

Speaker 14 It's really disturbing. And what I love about it is like.
He does not go in the braveheart direction of like everything being very grand and epic and exciting.

Speaker 14 Instead, it's like kind kind of weird the way it starts and you almost can't tell what's happening. It's confusing, which I think is exactly what it would have been like.

Speaker 14 And it makes it so much scarier as a viewer to watch that. So he goes to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 60s and he sees Dr.
Strangelove.

Speaker 14 And he is absolutely blown away by the ability to make what he considers a very artistic film that also has mass appeal to audiences.

Speaker 14 In the late 60s, he moved to London and he earned an MA from the London Film School. So he began his career very early on working in commercials and advertising.

Speaker 14 He moved back to Chicago in the early 70s and then he moves to Los Angeles and he starts churning out scripts for massive TV series like Starsky and Hutch and Police Story.

Speaker 14 So in the late 70s, he was approached by ABC to co-write a made-for-TV movie called The Jericho Mile. And this is about a prison inmate who starts training for the Olympics.

Speaker 14 But Michael Mann is like, I will only write this if I can also direct it. So it essentially becomes his directorial debut.
It was shot on location at Folsom Prison.

Speaker 14 It used real inmates as extras and in speaking roles. And it was so good that within three days of airing, he had received 22 offers to make his next feature.
It also earned him an Emmy.

Speaker 14 So that helps him secure funding for his first theatrical feature, which you've already mentioned. What is it, Chris?

Speaker 4 Thief, starring James Kahn.

Speaker 14 Which I believe was a pretty decent commercial and critical success.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and it was

Speaker 4 based on a book called The Home Invaders by John Seeboulder. I think he wrote it under a pseudonym Frank Hoheimer.

Speaker 4 And even at the time, I think it was really noted for being a really grounded, somewhat plausible, realistic approach to portraying what it is like to be one of these cat burglars.

Speaker 4 James Kahn is basically a diamond thief in Chicago, operating out of Chicago back in the 1960s, you know, 1970s.

Speaker 4 Certainly not like a sort of exaggerated Ocean's 11-style heist film, much more contained. Right.

Speaker 14 So he followed that up with, you've already mentioned it, a brief supernatural horror detour, The Keep, which was not a commercial success at all. It was a pretty big bomb.
So he returned to TV.

Speaker 14 And then from 84 to 89, he produced... What, Chris?

Speaker 4 Miami Vice.

Speaker 14 That's right.

Speaker 4 Starring half the cast of the Sopranos. If you guys are ever

Speaker 4 interested, you can watch the Sopranos version of their credits with the credits from Miami Vice. That's so funny.

Speaker 14 Well, Miami Vice, obviously, huge hit. Absolutely shot a lightning bolt through Primetime TV.
And Michael Mann is now, you know, a massive small-screen superstar.

Speaker 14 1986, he directed Manhunter, which I love. It's great.
We talked about it a little bit, I believe, in our Silence of the Lambs episode.

Speaker 14 If anybody doesn't know, this is the first Hannibal Lecter movie. It's also pretty strongly recognized now as a precursor to most of our modern serial killer movies in the way that they're made.

Speaker 14 Not a huge, huge hit, but I think critically it was, you know, people really enjoyed it and it has become a big hit over time.

Speaker 14 So by the early 90s, he also, however, had a reputation as a pretty uncompromising perfectionist, not unlike the man who had inspired him, Stanley Kubrick. So here's a fun example from Miami Vice.

Speaker 14 Michael Mann insisted on approving every single t-shirt color. Every episode required at least 75 costumes, including multiple for stuntmen and to account for the action, weather, and sweat.

Speaker 14 And he wanted to see every single one. And I know we'll get to more in heat.

Speaker 4 And you know what? That's how you get moments like in heat when that first bomb goes off on the armored car and all of the glass shatters on all the cars nearby from the concussive impact.

Speaker 4 Like, it sounds like it would be miserable to be on that set counting out the t-shirts. As an audience member, I'm grateful.
That's right.

Speaker 14 Okay, so we just talked about this at the top, but Last of the Mohicans does not really feel like a natural follow-up to any of the movies or TV shows that we just mentioned.

Speaker 14 So when asked about this in an interview, the interviewer is like, he says, this is obviously a very different kind of film for you.

Speaker 14 Apart from The Keep, which is set in the Second World War, you've made a crime melodrama, a highly stylized serial killer thriller, and been responsible for an entire subgenre of intensely modern, drug-related TV police dramas.

Speaker 14 Has Last of the Mohicans required you to make a major adjustment in terms of your aesthetic as a filmmaker? What do you think Michael Mann said?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 14 That's right.

Speaker 4 He just said, no.

Speaker 14 He said, it's just an accident that most of the other films I've done have been in that genre.

Speaker 4 Okay, Mike.

Speaker 4 Well, you know, or I'm sure it's also opportunity.

Speaker 4 I have no, I don't know the circumstances under which Red Dragon came across his desk, but it might make sense that that was brought to him based on Thief and Miami Vice, et cetera.

Speaker 4 And Miami Vice led to crime story, et cetera. So a snowball going downhill gathers.
speed and mass.

Speaker 14 Doesn't necessarily hit the French and Indian War.

Speaker 4 It does not.

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Speaker 14 So in 1989, though, he goes ahead and acquires the rights to Philip Dunn's 1936 Last of the Mohicans screenplay.

Speaker 14 So why do you think he would acquire the rights to the 1936 screenplay versus the novel?

Speaker 4 Well, if he likes the structure of the original screenplay, just option the screenplay and then remake it.

Speaker 14 That's right. It's because everyone pretty much agrees that the novel just kind of sucks.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Everyone's like, it's pretty bad.
And even if it doesn't suck, if somebody already took the time to trim a novel down to size for you and it works, why reinvent the wheel?

Speaker 14 I think that's what he figured. And I watched it, by the way, for this.

Speaker 14 You know, it does put into perspective what a massive breakthrough both Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were just three years later in 1939. There's

Speaker 4 interesting. Just from even like a technical perspective.
Big time.

Speaker 14 It feels very dated. I can understand why as a little kid, it would be very exciting.

Speaker 14 There are some pretty funny shots of wildlife where it's like, you know, everything is on a soundstage except for they cut to this, the only shot they could get of the beaver and the beaver's like half submerged and splashing around.

Speaker 4 Like, yeah.

Speaker 14 But it is pretty beautiful. There were some interesting things about it.
I actually thought that the women in it had more agency than I think you would expect for the time.

Speaker 14 There's a lot of holdovers from silent movies where they're still, you know, putting up the cards. You're having to read a lot of information.

Speaker 14 They definitely think their audience knows history a hell of a lot more than

Speaker 4 I did.

Speaker 14 There was one card at the beginning that was like, here in the Crown's royal court, the great commoner William Something Something visits the king. I was like, who?

Speaker 14 Like, somebody's going to need to explain this. And they don't.
It immediately starts from the British perspective. It stays very heavily in the British perspective.

Speaker 14 In fact, Hawkeye at the end actually joins the British Army. So definitely a different, different experience.

Speaker 4 Yeah, interesting.

Speaker 14 So let's talk a little bit about the novel. It was written in 1826 by James Fenimore Cooper as part of his Leather Stocking Tales series.

Speaker 14 And this series of novels forms a saga of 18th-century life on the New York frontier, describing interactions between Native Americans and white pioneers through the adventures of the main character.

Speaker 14 And Chris, here's where we get to one of the first problems with the novel. The main character's name is Nathaniel, yes, but

Speaker 14 he goes by Natty Bumpo.

Speaker 4 Oh,

Speaker 4 Natty Bumpo. Natty Bumpo.
Because he's got that Natty Bumpo. I don't know why.

Speaker 14 I don't know why. I'm going to have to change that.

Speaker 14 So he does take on other names throughout the series, including Hawkeye, which I think for obvious reasons is what they choose for both the 1936 version and this.

Speaker 4 Michael Mann just flipped a coin and it was Hawkeye in the end.

Speaker 14 It's not anything but Natty Bumpo.

Speaker 14 So Cooper was one of the first authors to really write like this about Frontier life, life, and he is in the process heavily romanticizing and even advocating for early American colonialism.

Speaker 14 The books were a big success commercially, but critically, they drew some pretty big complaints, in particular from professional insult comic Mark Twain, who had some choice words for Cooper in his essay titled Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.

Speaker 14 He wrote a whole paper on how much James Fenimore Cooper sucks at writing. So here's what Mark Twain had to say.
Cooper's word sense was singularly dull.

Speaker 14 In the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115.

Speaker 14 If Cooper had any real knowledge of nature's ways of doing things, he had a most delicate art in concealing the fact. And a work of art, it has no invention.

Speaker 14 It has no order, system, sequence, or result. It has no lifelieness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality.

Speaker 14 Its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words, they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are. Its humor is pathetic.
Its pathos is funny.

Speaker 14 Its conversations are, oh, indescribable.

Speaker 4 So basically, he's 19th century Dan Brown is what we're starting to.

Speaker 14 Except not as fun. He's like boring.

Speaker 4 No, well, Dan Brown is very fun, but like wildly commercially successful. Yes.
Critically,

Speaker 4 people like to pile on. Yeah.
But, you know, we're chasing down, what is he trying to find? The spear that I don't remember. It's the Holy Grail.
Is it the Holy Grail?

Speaker 14 Or like the Shroud, like a Shroud of Turin or something.

Speaker 4 Ron Howard made at least two of those movies. Oh, yeah.
I can't remember if he made a third. That is wild.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 All right. So Michael Mann essentially agreed with Mark Twain and acknowledged that, quote, it's not a very good book.

Speaker 14 But one of his biggest issues with it, other than it being dull, poorly written, and clumsy, is how it had contributed to some pretty damaging misconceptions about Native Americans.

Speaker 14 So Michael Mann said, quote, one of the first big realizations I had in my research was the extent to which James Fenimore Cooper, to add insult to injury, appropriated and discarded the entire history of the Northeastern Woodlands American Indians.

Speaker 14 What he took away was their power. If you're living on the frontier in 1757, the Mohawks were your rich neighbors.
They were not a group of manservants,

Speaker 14 which is a really, that's something I think that this movie does so well that I had not seen prior to this, and maybe even since, is that it truly shows the Native Americans and particularly the settlers as kind of economic equals, if not the settlers in a lower position in many scenarios.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I was going to say it may be lower and economically more interdependent

Speaker 4 too in an important way.

Speaker 14 Which would have been the case for sure.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 14 So there's a pretty obvious reason for Fenimore Cooper wanting to paint this picture.

Speaker 14 According to Mann, it's because Fenimore Cooper had massive real estate holdings when he wrote the book, and the novel is basically a justification for a massive land grab.

Speaker 14 There's also no romance in it. So there's no like sexy DDL running towards the camera with his shirt on sometimes and shirt off sometimes.

Speaker 4 Some of the cuts in this movie are crazy. That's fine.

Speaker 14 One other interesting difference is that Cora is actually mixed race in the books and is illegitimate.

Speaker 4 That is a big difference.

Speaker 14 I know. And I wonder why neither of them wanted to deal with that.
Maybe it's because it would make the romance angle more complicated. I don't know.

Speaker 14 The romance angle already doesn't make a ton of sense.

Speaker 4 Here's my pitch as to why. So I think that man is very focused on drawing a contrast between West Studies, Magua, and Hawkeye.

Speaker 14 Magua, as the British

Speaker 4 say. Yeah.
But Magua is the inverse, right? He's the foil. His family was murdered, and he was taken into slavery.
Day Lewis's family was murdered and then he was adopted.

Speaker 4 One is defined by the hatred. And to be fair to Magua's character, it happened much later and it included the death of his children.

Speaker 14 And his wife remarrying.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yes.
And one is not defined by the hatred.

Speaker 4 Instead, it kind of has this almost Buddhist-like quality of letting it pass through him as, you know, when DDL explains this to Stowe and she kind of falls in love with him.

Speaker 4 And I just think that man is so focused on pitting these two orphans like philosophically against each other that I do think that if Stowe's character, Cora, had been mixed race, she would, that would have been a third element of like kind of an orphan child.

Speaker 4 And maybe he just didn't want to deal with that thematically.

Speaker 14 Well, and I think also, like, realistically, I don't know how much he's reading the book. I think he's going pretty heavily off of the 1936.

Speaker 4 Paul Gerhoven, Starship Troopers. This is bad.
I'm not going to finish it. It is.
It is. I don't know if anybody finished it.

Speaker 14 There were a couple other actors who were like, yeah, I put it down.

Speaker 4 It was not good.

Speaker 14 It was not good. So, as we said, he's pulling much more generously from Philip Dunn's 1936 adaptation.
And a couple of quick things about that movie that are different.

Speaker 14 Again, Chingachkuk and Unkis and Natty Bumpo, if you will, all still rescue Cora, Alice and Major Hayward and accompany them to the fort and their father. Nathaniel still helps the settlers escape.

Speaker 14 All of that is pretty much the same. The big difference is that Unkis actually falls for Cora and Nathaniel for Alice.
And Alice is much more the lead than Cora is.

Speaker 14 It's also Cora that leaps to her death after Unkis dies.

Speaker 14 And there's a little bit more of a convoluted plot around Hayward offering to be burned at the stake, where I believe neither he nor Nathaniel actually end up dying.

Speaker 4 So they kind of just reverse the sisters.

Speaker 14 They do. They almost completely reverse the sisters.
I'm not really sure why. And of course, Nathaniel does the right thing for king and country at the end and joins the

Speaker 14 British Army, which does not make any sense. So Mann's biggest goal in tackling this script was to fix what he felt Cooper had broken.

Speaker 14 He wanted to be as historically accurate as possible and to portray Native Americans as sympathetic and also as actual human beings.

Speaker 4 Well, I think also complex and also different. Yes.
They were not the monoliths, right?

Speaker 4 Some of them were allied with the French, some were allied with the British, some were not allied with anyone.

Speaker 4 Right. Again, these are different groups of people with different motives.
Yes.

Speaker 14 And I think this is one of very few movies that does a pretty good job of exploring that.

Speaker 14 So we started working on the screenplay with Christopher Crowe, who would go on to write one of my favorite 90s thrillers, Fear.

Speaker 4 Starring William Peterson of Manhunter.

Speaker 14 Yes, of Manhunter. That's right.
But immediately they had some major challenges in front of them.

Speaker 14 First of all, they have to please historians while also making fans of the very historically inaccurate book happy.

Speaker 14 They have to weave in a love story that's central to the plot between Nathaniel and Cora, even though it's not in the book. Also, not really in the 1936 movie, as we discussed.

Speaker 14 The sisters are switched in that, and it's a very different dynamic. And they have to come up with historically accurate dialogue in historically accurate languages.

Speaker 14 So this is probably the hardest challenge that they had because many of the languages spoken at this time, I believe it's 1757 is the beginning of the movie, they were either gone by 1992 or had very few native speakers.

Speaker 14 Some of them are the way that you would think of Latin, like they may be getting still taught in schools, but almost no one is actually speaking them.

Speaker 14 And according to Wendy Murray, Mann's assistant, the actors playing Mohicans were actually speaking Muncie, Delaware, which was one of the closest remaining dialects, with many other extras just speaking their own languages.

Speaker 14 West Study actually ends up speaking mostly Mohawk, but did eventually revert to Cherokee, which is his native language.

Speaker 14 So Mann did extensive research while co-writing the script, including watching the French and Indian War film Northwest Passage and John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk.

Speaker 14 He studied Depression-era photographs by Dorothea Lang. Those are very famous.
If you've ever seen photos of, you know, people in the Dust Bowl, she took those. They're very beautiful.

Speaker 14 He wanted to understand sort of the struggles and determination of regular people during a time of hardship and also see what it looked like.

Speaker 14 And also a lot of 19th century landscape painters like Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole.

Speaker 14 And I have to say, there are so many shots in this movie that look like a painting, particularly that one where the carriage is going across the bridge. It's just stunning.

Speaker 14 And he wanted to really meticulously research the look of the various tribes to make sure that, to your point, they are differentiating between the different tribes of Native Americans and that they're as accurate as they possibly can be.

Speaker 14 So he'd put in the work. He had a pretty great script he was very happy with, and he's ready to take it to What Went Wrong alum and live show star Joe Roth at 20th Century Fox.

Speaker 4 Ooh.

Speaker 4 Yeah. That's fun.

Speaker 14 He's back. He's back to cause some problems.

Speaker 4 So, all right.

Speaker 14 Mann's put together this great pitch where he emphasizes the contemporary relevance of the film. There's early feminism, there's class struggles, you know, the commercial motivation for the war.

Speaker 14 He's like, it's not unlike the Gulf War. You know, this war was being fought over the fur trade.
The Gulf War is being fought over oil.

Speaker 14 And he tells Roth and his co-VP, Roger Birnbaum, that this is going to be vivid. It's going to be realistic.

Speaker 14 And it's going to be historically accurate because he feels an enormous responsibility to get this right.

Speaker 14 Now, knowing what you know about Joe Roth, what do you think he and Roger Birnbaum said?

Speaker 4 He says, do we care about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Uh-huh.
Sure, Mike. Whatever you say, take your green light.
Yeah, okay. Like, I care about historical accuracy, you know.

Speaker 14 So why do you think he green lit this so fast for something that sounds very, very expensive with a director who is notoriously difficult and detail attentive?

Speaker 4 Well, because if I'm getting my timeline correct, one of Hollywood's most difficult, prickly, leading men slash directors just turned in a movie that everybody thought would fail, no studio backed, and so was financed independently for $22 million and made $400 million.

Speaker 4 I can't even remember. It's crazy.

Speaker 14 $425 million worldwide. What was it?

Speaker 4 And that would be Bailar Con Lobos, Dances with Wolves,

Speaker 4 Kevin Costner, of course. And it was not just a runaway commercial success.
This movie cleaned up at the Oscars. That's right.
Costner was already an A-list superstar as an actor.

Speaker 4 All of the sudden, he was one of the most in-demand prestige directors in Hollywood as well.

Speaker 14 Yes. So this movie, to your point, was an absolute anomaly.
It is a pretty slow-moving, historical, three-hour-long

Speaker 14 blockbuster that, to your point, no one wanted to make. It won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Came out in 1990, and it grossed, as we said, almost $425 million worldwide.

Speaker 14 So I re-watched Dances with Wolves for this episode. And I don't want to spend too much time on it because we will absolutely cover it because there's a lot, and I'm excited to do that.

Speaker 14 But we do need to talk about it a little bit because it's going to come up a couple times across this episode.

Speaker 14 So before we get into Dances with Wolves a little bit more, let's really roll the clock back and talk about how Hollywood had, up to this point, portrayed Native Americans on film.

Speaker 14 Chris, any ideas of Native American portrayal? Was it great? Was it super accurate? Was it...

Speaker 4 I'm going to assume Hollywood patted itself on the back every time they cast a Native American in the movie, but I'm assuming it wasn't great.

Speaker 4 I'm assuming, you know, I'm just thinking back to a movie my daughter just watched recently, Peter Pan. Oh.
Cartoon.

Speaker 4 Not a great representation of Native Americans. No.
So I'm assuming it wasn't great.

Speaker 4 One thing that's interesting is I did read that very, very, very, very early on, I'm talking late 19th century, early 20th century, in New York when film was just starting.

Speaker 4 The original Westerns, which were shot in upstate and western New York, actually did a not, it's not like they were trying to be sensitive to Native Americans, but they were trying to go for a more documentary style in presenting Native Americans.

Speaker 4 And I've actually heard that those movies were better done, and then it things slowly got worse and worse until John Wayne. And then things get real bad.

Speaker 14 Yes. So the early sort of big commercial Westerns like Stagecoach offered essentially zero native perspective.

Speaker 14 I think what happens is they just stop even bothering trying to include them as characters at all. They're kind of just set pieces.

Speaker 14 They're usually like set pieces for the action or, you know, something terrible happening to the white characters. They were also almost always not played by actual Native Americans.

Speaker 14 That is true of the 1936 Last of the Mohicans. Those are some.
very white Italian men in makeup.

Speaker 4 Right, or like Italian or Hispanic or, you know, there's any other.

Speaker 14 Or just straight up the waspiest man you've ever seen.

Speaker 4 This.

Speaker 4 Jared Harris.

Speaker 4 Jared Harris. They would, yeah, they don't, they didn't care.

Speaker 14 Movies like John Ford's The Searchers, which of course did star John Wayne, really solidified natives on film as basically just very scary antagonists and not a whole lot more.

Speaker 14 In the 50s and early 60s, you do start to see some effort being made to portray natives as more than just savages. There's films like Jimmy Stewart's Broken Arrow.

Speaker 14 Actually, John Ford made made a film as sort of an apology for the movies he'd made earlier. It's called Cheyenne Autumn.
It did not do very well.

Speaker 14 But the indigenous people in these movies are still almost exclusively played by non-native actors.

Speaker 14 Across the 70s, you do start to see a bigger shift where there are some actual native actors appearing in more complex roles, but the progress is pretty uneven.

Speaker 14 And again, pretty much all of these movies are anchored by the white characters. Like an example of that would be like Little Big Man, starring Dustin Hoffman.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 14 You also, very famously in 1973, Chris, what happened at the Oscars?

Speaker 4 Oh, that's when Marlon Brando sent Sashine Littlefeather to collect his Oscar.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 John Wayne said,

Speaker 4 I'm going to knock her out.

Speaker 14 Yes, this is nuts. This is nuts.
So we talked about this a little bit in the episode on The Godfather. Marlon Brando sent Sashine Littlefeather to the Oscars to collect his Oscar, as Chris said.

Speaker 14 And she was there to speak about specifically the portrayal of Native Americans on film. That was Marlon Brando's goal with this.
John Wayne lost his goddamn mind.

Speaker 14 He was backstage and he tried to physically remove her from the stage. He had to be held back by six security guards.
This is confirmed by multiple people who were back there.

Speaker 14 He was literally going to go out there and physically assault this woman. for receiving the Oscar and speaking very briefly about Native American representation on film.

Speaker 14 So in case you don't know, John Wayne was an out-and-out racist towards both black people and Native Americans. And this is not conjecture.
This is not like, you know, revisionist snowflake history.

Speaker 14 This is the stuff that came out of his own damn mouth, particularly in a 1971 Playboy interview.

Speaker 14 He saw nothing wrong with the way that America was settled and he chalked it up to: quote, there were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

Speaker 14 So that's John Wayne.

Speaker 4 Now they're trying to take our Oscars. That's literally what he was mad about.

Speaker 4 We're going to cover this movie at some point. There's this movie called The Conqueror.
John Wayne plays Genghis Khan. Oh, God.
No. Yeah, well, we got to cover it because it's crazy.

Speaker 4 That movie was shot in a nuclear testing zone. And it's surmised that many involved developed cancer as a result of the hubris of deciding to shoot that movie.
Terrible movie there.

Speaker 14 Somehow John Wayne just got angrier.

Speaker 4 Well, it turned him into the Hulk.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I guess. So in the 80s, we talked about this a little bit, but you basically have the commercial death of the Western.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Outside of Clint Eastwood, there's not much going on.

Speaker 14 No, and even then, those were not his most popular Westerns. So when Dances with Wolves came out in 1990, it was for many a watershed moment.
A couple big things about this.

Speaker 14 Almost all of the leads outside of Costner are native actors. And there's some wonderful actors in this.
Graham Green is fantastic. Tanter Cardinal, Rodney Grant.
They're all really great.

Speaker 14 And they're also speaking Lakota with subtitles, which was kind of unheard of for the amount of this movie that's not in English.

Speaker 14 It also reverts the original stereotypes and casts almost all of the antagonists as white men, except for one, which we'll get to a little later because he appears in both movies.

Speaker 14 And most importantly to Joe Roth and Roger Birnbaum, it made an absolute crap ton of money. So that is why they greenlit it.
And that's not going to be the end of Dances with Wolves.

Speaker 14 We're going to come back to it for a little bit more of a critical conversation.

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Speaker 14 All right, so Michael Mann has the green light and he needs his natty bumpo. Thankfully now Nathaniel Hawkeye.

Speaker 14 And Chris, he only had one person in mind and it was Daniel Day-Lewis. To which the studio said, who?

Speaker 4 Right, yeah.

Speaker 4 Say, hmm, what?

Speaker 14 According to Michael Mann, they actually said, quote, you mean that skinny guy? That short skinny guy in a wheelchair? Now, Chris, what role are they referring to?

Speaker 4 Was that My Left Foot? from 1989? That is right.

Speaker 14 That's Daniel Day-Lewis's breakthrough and Oscar winning role as Christy Brown in My Left Foot.

Speaker 4 That's right.

Speaker 14 But even though he'd won an Oscar, he was considered a critical draw, but not a commercial box office draw, especially because he doesn't look like himself.

Speaker 4 No, he doesn't yet. And it's like a room with a view.

Speaker 14 Yes, My Beautiful Laundrette.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the Unbearable Lightness of Being

Speaker 4 My Left Foot. Yeah.
And he was so committed to these perform, and he did a lot of stage work, you know what I mean? But he would disappear into the roles. This is not.

Speaker 14 He's hard to recognize as himself for sure, especially across the early roles.

Speaker 4 Exactly.

Speaker 4 Candidly, and I love Harrison Ford, but Harrison Ford brings Harrison Ford to the movie.

Speaker 14 Yeah, it's like George Glunde.

Speaker 4 Daniel Day-Lewis embodies the character more. Yes.
And it's easier to market Harrison Ford if you're a studio. Right.

Speaker 14 But there was another problem, which is that Daniel Day-Lewis was emotionally and physically exhausted after My Left Foot because it was during this film that he discovered the way that he really liked to work, which was

Speaker 4 hard. Really hard.
I know.

Speaker 14 yeah so he refused to do anything the character wouldn't do during filming and the character had severe cerebral palsy which meant production staff had to carry him around feed him and lift him across the lighting cables every day in order to reach the set sounds like someone didn't want to work just saying i'm just kidding bad joke well so you know people are like oh my god that sounds exhausting it sounds so restrictive and daniel j lewis is like no it's actually the opposite he said that the reason he does this is because he wants to be so immersed in the character.

Speaker 14 And it would be so much harder for him to be jumping in and out of the character that that would drain him more than just staying in it. Not for me, but you do you, Daniel.
I get it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think it's person, you know, the famous example in contrast, Edie Falco has said with the Sopranos, she could show up to set, get in hair and makeup. They would hand her a script.

Speaker 4 She could, I mean, I don't think she did this all the time, but she could learn her dialogue while in hair and makeup, go perform the scene, go home, and not think about it anymore.

Speaker 4 I mean, she's ridiculously talented. And James Candolfini had to live in Tony Soprano.
Yeah. And, you know, there was a darkness to that.

Speaker 14 I think it does. It takes a toll on you when you're doing that.
Yeah. Yeah.
So a little bit about Daniel Day Lewis.

Speaker 14 He was born in London to a British mother and Irish father, but they were not exactly regular peasants, Chris. His maternal grandfather was Sir Michael Balkan, who headed up Ealing Studios.

Speaker 14 And his father became the UK Poet Laureate when Lewis was 11 years old.

Speaker 14 But when he was young, his father insisted that he attend a working-class Southeast London school with some rough and tumble kids.

Speaker 14 So he got a taste of a different life, although he would later attend some prep schools.

Speaker 14 His father sadly died when he was 15, leaving Lewis with some serious regret about the fact that, quote, when he died, I hadn't achieved anything at that time to give him any pleasure.

Speaker 14 When things go well for me, I often think about that.

Speaker 14 He joined the National Youth Theater and seemed to be heading towards a career in acting, except there was one other thing that he loved just as much much as acting. Do you know what it was, Chris?

Speaker 4 I know he became a shoemaker at some point. It's not shoes, but it is.
Okay. It's cabinet making.
Oh, so he's Harrison Ford.

Speaker 4 The same person, because that's what Ford did, you know, before. He was a carpenter.
He was a carpenter, yeah.

Speaker 14 But did he love it as much as Daniel J. Lewis loved it? I don't know.
Because Daniel J. Lewis wants to be the best at everything he does.

Speaker 14 So he applied for an apprenticeship with a cabinet maker, but he was actually turned down for it. And instead, he was accepted at the Bristol Old Vic Theater School.
School and the rest is history.

Speaker 14 So as you said, he broke out in the UK in the mid-80s with a room with a view and my beautiful laundrette, which, like, I don't know how big an impact those made in the US.

Speaker 4 Oh, I don't think they made a big impact at all in the US from a studio perspective. No.
Critically, I'm sure they did well.

Speaker 14 He also played Hamlet on stage in 1989 at the National Theater, and he famously left the run early. due to a bit of a breakdown.
At the time, he said it was due to seeing the ghost of his father.

Speaker 14 He's since backed off that a little bit and said that he meant it metaphorically, but regardless, the experience was so traumatic that he has actually never returned to the stage, Chris, since 1989.

Speaker 4 You know, he also said he retired from acting, but when his son made his first movie, that's right. He unretired and then he said, coming back.
To his credit, he said, I shouldn't have said anything.

Speaker 4 He said, I shouldn't have announced it. That was silly.
Oh, I love him. He's great.

Speaker 14 So all of this taken together paints a picture of a pretty intense guy and a potential liability in the studio's mind. And also he was skeptical of the project.

Speaker 14 He said, in rereading the script, I kept thinking, I cannot afford to be interested in this. But part of the attraction was that the first human sign you find in the script is a foot.

Speaker 14 So he's like, it's a sign.

Speaker 4 Now, Michael, which foot is this exactly?

Speaker 14 It's definitely your left foot.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 14 So he eventually agreed, particularly because of the physicality required, and he really liked the opening El Cunt sequence. He was very into that.

Speaker 14 Now there's another person that Michael Mann pursued for a lead role in the film right away. I notice I said person and not actor because prior to this film, this person had never acted before.

Speaker 14 Chris, do you have any guesses as to who it is?

Speaker 4 Could you tell me which role?

Speaker 14 It is one of the leads.

Speaker 4 Had Eric Schweig never acted before? No, he had.

Speaker 14 Okay. But you're very close.

Speaker 4 It was Russell Means?

Speaker 14 Yes, it was Russell Means, who plays Chingachkuk.

Speaker 4 Very good.

Speaker 14 Yeah, Uncasa Nathaniel's father. Now, Means was a very well-known Oglala Lakota activist.
He was not an actor at all.

Speaker 14 In 1968, he joined the American Indian Movement right as it was being founded, and he ended up becoming one of the organization's national and most prominent leaders. He was extremely influential.

Speaker 14 both for native rights and also civil rights. He was present at a lot of protests, including the occupation of Alcatraz.

Speaker 14 Probably most famously, he was a spokesman and leader during the American Indian Movement's occupation of the town of Wounded Knee opposite the FBI in 1973. Admittedly, I don't know enough about that.

Speaker 14 And researching it, I was like, they never taught me about this in school. I should probably look into this a little bit more.

Speaker 14 So Means was an early political hero to Michael Mann, and Mann felt like the qualities that he naturally embodied made him perfect for Chingachgook, despite literally zero acting experience.

Speaker 14 Unlike Daniel Day-Lewis, Russell Means did not take a whole lot of convincing, although he did actually have to audition a bunch because everybody was like, I am not sure this man could act.

Speaker 4 I mean, it is a major character who has the final showdown with your antagonists, you know, in the end.

Speaker 14 I think it's actually really impressive, the performance that he turns in. It feels very natural and beautiful.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 14 So here's the thing. When he read the script, he was very, very happy with it.
And he felt like the Native American characters were way more fully developed than he was used to seeing.

Speaker 14 But really, Chris, it seems like he took the role because of a movie we just talked about that came out in 1990. What was it?

Speaker 4 Dances with Wolves?

Speaker 14 That's right. And Russell means

Speaker 4 hated it. Oh, interesting.
Yeah, really didn't like it.

Speaker 14 Really didn't like it. So he referred to it as Lawrence of the Plains, which is a pretty intelligent play on Lawrence of Arabia.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 So he said, despite his good intentions, actor-director Kevin Costner utilized almost every known stereotype except the drunken Indian.

Speaker 14 Even though the white man he plays eventually throws in his lot with the Indians because they're so much more spiritual and decent. He said it was factually and historically inaccurate.

Speaker 14 There wasn't any character development of the Indian people. The Indians were interchangeable cardboard figures.
I found it personally insulting. Also, I'm quoting him directly.

Speaker 14 You know, if I'm going to use the words that he uses, I know they may not be politically correct today, but just saying that now, I have no problem quoting him directly. So this is why I rewatched it.

Speaker 14 And I'm conflicted because I will say on the one hand, I actually really enjoyed it. As much shit as I've given Kevin Costner in this movie in the past, it's an incredibly well-made movie.

Speaker 14 And at three hours long, it's not boring at all. Made me cry a couple times.
However, I completely understand what Russell means is saying here. What do you remember about Dances with Wolves?

Speaker 4 To me, it feels a little closer to a Braveheart than this movie does. I think it's better than Braveheart.
It's closer to Braveheart, is my point. I think it's very entertaining, but it's also,

Speaker 4 you know, easy for me to say, yeah, I can project myself into that Kevin Costner protagonist roles because we share a couple of qualities. And

Speaker 4 I also, I agree, I think it's an incredible accomplishment. I think that movie for what it was made for, I mean,

Speaker 4 I believe it was made for like $20 million. Yeah.
Yeah. I think my guess.
I don't know. I don't want to let Costner off the hook.

Speaker 4 When I watch it, it feels like a classic Costner movie in the sense that everything in the movie exists to serve Costner's character at the end of the day.

Speaker 4 And that includes the Native Americans, that includes the women, that includes the white antagonists, it includes everybody.

Speaker 4 And so it reminds me a little bit of when you discussed in Braveheart how you felt how it was a bit of an equal opportunity caricature across the board.

Speaker 4 You know, Dances with Wolves feels similar to that to me. I agree.

Speaker 14 As wonderful as those native actors are, and they are, Graham Green is particularly wonderful in this, and I think Rodney Grant is too.

Speaker 14 They don't have a lot of complexity. They don't have a lot of development.
They have almost none.

Speaker 14 And also, the way that the two white leads end up taking on the Sioux culture is handled by pretty ham-fistedly. Their haircuts are insane, but it was 1990.

Speaker 14 So I guess it's fine for them to have hairsprayed, windswept mullets.

Speaker 4 I don't know.

Speaker 14 But yeah, it's an interesting movie that I think we should cover and we should talk about in more detail because,

Speaker 14 you know, Russell means is right. At the same time, it's a good movie.

Speaker 4 So it's really well made. It's really entertaining, but I completely understand why he would think this is so much better.
And I do prefer this movie.

Speaker 14 I think I do too. So when he read Michael Mann's screenplay, he felt like it was really showing Native Americans as intellectual, social, and importantly, economic equals of the colonial settlers.

Speaker 14 He said, what am I doing in the movies? I have been asked whether whether my decision to act in The Last of the Mohicans means that I've abandoned my role as an activist.

Speaker 14 On the contrary, I see film as an extension of the path I've been on for the past 25 years, another avenue to eliminating racism.

Speaker 14 Now, he particularly called out that Magua, the villain, was a very fully developed character who was frequently portrayed as smarter than his British and white counterparts.

Speaker 14 So, let's talk a little bit about Magua, who is played by Wes Studi. I think he is one of the most underrated actors ever.
I think this performance is unbelievable.

Speaker 14 I think he deserved a supporting actor nomination for this, which he did not get. He's so scary.

Speaker 14 And at the same time, when he explains why, you're like, yeah, I get it.

Speaker 4 I get it. The whole, you know, justified villain trope.
This plays really well.

Speaker 14 It's very well done. Yeah.
It does not feel like it's being shoehorned in at all. So Studi is Cherokee.

Speaker 14 He was born in rural Oklahoma and he actually only spoke Cherokee at home until he went to school. He served in the Vietnam War, and when he made it back to the States, he went to school for acting.

Speaker 14 He also was very involved in Native American activism, and he was there alongside Russell Means at Wounded Knee. I'm not sure about this.
I don't think they knew each other at that point.

Speaker 14 So, his first feature film role was in 1989, but he broke out as the leader of the Pawnee Warriors in what film, Chris?

Speaker 4 Dances with Wolves.

Speaker 14 Dances with Wolves. That's right.
That's right. He is technically the villain in Dances with Wolves, even though I don't even think he has a name in that movie.

Speaker 14 There's one line that hints at some of his motivation. But this is a big problem that Russell Means had with Dances with Wolves was that he is not explored in any way, really.

Speaker 14 And I think that his two performances across these two films kind of best explains the dichotomy between the two and the different approach to the two movies.

Speaker 14 You said it earlier, but Native Americans are different people. There is a tendency to paint them all very similarly.

Speaker 14 And I think that Dances with Wolves is guilty of that, particularly in the case of West Study's character.

Speaker 4 But yeah, it's like the British and the French. Like they're from the same continent, and yet they're warring and they're very different culturally.

Speaker 14 Exactly. Same thing.
So Michael Mann also pursued Madeline Stowe for Cora.

Speaker 14 She'd broken out a few years earlier in the stakeout opposite Richard Dreyfus and had actually starred with the wolf dance man himself, Kevin Costner in Revenge.

Speaker 4 That's right. And then Ed Harris in China Moon.

Speaker 14 She did the two Jakes, the Chinatown.

Speaker 4 And the two Jakes, that's right. Yep, 1990.

Speaker 4 Yep.

Speaker 14 But she was pretty tired of being handed action movies that were disguised as period pieces at this point, and she didn't even want to read the script.

Speaker 14 She was also fed up with how women were portrayed in action movies. But her agent and Michael Mann were like, no, no, please read this.
Like, we promise this is not the same thing.

Speaker 14 And Michael Mann in particular was like, Cora is an early feminist. She has, you know, her own agency.
She's entering the new world. She doesn't understand the dynamics.

Speaker 14 Like this is a very complex character.

Speaker 4 She headshots a motherfucker with a child. She sure does.

Speaker 14 She sure does.

Speaker 14 I actually, I really love her character in this movie. I think the way that she plays those scenes opposite Duncan is pretty great.
I love that early scene when they're having tea.

Speaker 14 outside and you know he's like david pointed this out but she's like my answer's no and duncan's like well you know you're being awfully indecisive about this.

Speaker 14 Maybe you should trust me and your father.

Speaker 4 And David was like, she's not being indecisive. That's right.

Speaker 14 And it's just like the quiet frustration that she has during that of having to continue to be like, sure, Duncan, yes.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Stephen Waddington, very good performance.

Speaker 14 He's so good in this. He's so good in this.

Speaker 4 He makes a character that's pretty unsufferable, not only redeemable, but a hero.

Speaker 4 She says she has that moment where she says, like, your few admirable qualities, basically the sum of the parts doesn't exceed the whole. And yet you can see his admirable qualities.

Speaker 4 I like that they, even though he's a bit of a presumptuous bastard at the beginning with her, he's also very brave. He's competent in battle.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 They don't do this thing where they just make him a giant asshole across the board to get you to root against him.

Speaker 14 No, I think he is one of my favorite performances in this movie, to be honest.

Speaker 4 It's a really good performance.

Speaker 14 And it like absolutely breaks my heart when, spoiler alert, he sacrifices himself at the very end. Yeah.

Speaker 14 so they round out the rest of the cast with as we just mentioned stephen waddington as major duncan hayward jodi may as alice she was only 16 during the filming of this her mom was on set with her the whole time i think she's also really really good in this she has almost no dialogue yeah it's mostly just looks i know but she's very which we'll actually get to she had more dialogue got it and eric schweig as uncas who we did mention in our one battle after another episode he's also in that as the bounty hunter i love him.

Speaker 14 I think he's so good in this. Obviously, physically, he's very beautiful, but he also has a great screen presence.
But according to Schweig, one of the reasons he may have been cast was his height.

Speaker 14 Despite what the execs originally thought about Daniel Day-Lewis, he is not short. He is 6'2 ⁇ , and actually a pretty big dude.
So they needed Uncas to match him in size.

Speaker 14 And Eric Schweig is almost the exact same size as him. Russell Means is also very tall.
I think he was 6'2 ⁇ as well. So they needed the family.

Speaker 4 No, they must be because there's the scene where they're putting Day-Lewis in shackles and he stands up and he's shirtless and all of those native actors are around him.

Speaker 4 Day Lewis doesn't look big compared to those guys. And so you're like, wow, this must be a pretty big cast.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I think they cast for his height.

Speaker 4 And Stephen Waddington also seems pretty big.

Speaker 14 Oh, he's a huge dude. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 14 So Schweig and Day-Lewis were sent to a month of training at an anti-terrorist camp that absolutely whipped their butts into shape.

Speaker 14 They were shooting firearms, running five to eight miles a day, lifting weights for several hours, downing protein shakes. And Schweig was like, this was the best time I had in the whole process.

Speaker 14 And it was downhill from here.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 14 So do you know where this movie was shot? Because it's obviously set in upstate New York. It is not shot there.

Speaker 4 Is it shot in the United States? Yes.

Speaker 4 Vermont? It's North Carolina, where a lot was shot. Yes.
Oh, cool.

Speaker 14 I will tell you, as someone who grew up in this area, it looks like North Carolina.

Speaker 4 I don't know. I'm from the West Coast.
I have no conception of anything east of Denver.

Speaker 14 It's very beautiful. There were a couple of big reasons why why they did this.

Speaker 14 First of all, it's a lot more rugged and wild than what you can find in upstate New York, which is far more developed at this point.

Speaker 14 And as we're going to get to, it allowed an awful lot of tax breaks and some other things they were able to do financially.

Speaker 14 So Daniel Day-Lewis and Michael Mann spent a lot of one-on-one time together foraging. Did that a lot.
And Daniel Day-Lewis remained in character the whole time. And these two loved each other.

Speaker 4 I was going to say a matchmaker. Made in hell.
Yes.

Speaker 14 So his prep included immersing himself in freezing cold water for up to 15 minutes at a time. He worked with a fitness trainer five times a week for six months to develop the physicality.

Speaker 14 He looks great in this. He spent a month in the North Carolina woods, sometimes joined by Michael Mann,

Speaker 14 but essentially just living out in the wild to understand the skills that Native Americans would have needed at the time.

Speaker 14 He underwent an intense crash course with a survivalist to teach him, you know, trapping, firebuilding, skinning animals, cooking. He also trained with historical reenactor Mark A.

Speaker 14 Baker on probably the most difficult thing he does in the entire movie. What do you think, Chris, is the hardest thing that Daniel Day-Lewis has to do physically in this whole movie?

Speaker 14 I'll give you a hint. It's in the opening sequence.

Speaker 4 Either load or fire the musket? That's right.

Speaker 14 Handling, loading, and firing a 12-pound flintlock rifle while running.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 14 And yes, he really is doing that. According to Michael Mann, Daniel Day-Lewis became one of about four men in America who could actually do that and hit the target while running.
Wow. That's insane.

Speaker 4 I will say this movie, it feels very grounded, very realistic until the final sequence when he is hip firing muskets as he's sprinting along the cliff like Sylvester Stallone. And he hits.

Speaker 4 Oh, he's just nailing bolt guns akimbo, grabbing muskets, blasting mofos down.

Speaker 14 At that point, I'm fine with it, but yeah, it's fine.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 14 The rifle was custom-made by Wayne Watson, who's known for reproducing exact copies of colonial era firearms, and it was named Kill Deer.

Speaker 14 And Daniel Day-Lewis became so attached to Kill Deer that he took it everywhere, including famously to a Christmas dinner with family and friends.

Speaker 14 No word on how thrilled they were with him showing up with a musket. He probably had live ammunition.

Speaker 4 They're probably like, at least we don't have to like carry him inside like when he was doing musket.

Speaker 14 At least he's carrying his own 12-pound musket. Yeah.
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Speaker 14 He also trained with Colonel David Webster, a special forces soldier who taught survival skills to downed pilots.

Speaker 14 And interestingly, they use the same methods that colonial settlers would have acquired from Native Americans to do that. Makes sense.

Speaker 14 By the end of his training, Michael Mann said, Daniel would be walking three feet behind you and you'd never know he was there.

Speaker 4 Great.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 4 Cool.

Speaker 14 So Mann also went to insane lengths to make sure the production design was as accurate as possible. They built that 20-acre farm from scratch, as well as the Huron village.

Speaker 14 Also, one breech cloth, which all the native actors are wearing, took months to make because they did it by hand. They did it accurately.

Speaker 14 Russell Means was not stoked on how small the size of the breech cloths were, by the way. He asked them to please, please make them bigger.

Speaker 14 This is an interesting conversation because Michael Mann was like, But I saw them in a museum, and this is historically accurate. Russell Means was like, That is a museum built by white people.

Speaker 14 Like, I'm telling you, this is not quite right, And it's also just too small.

Speaker 4 Also, people were smaller back then. Yes.
For a whole host of reasons.

Speaker 14 They're not six foot two size

Speaker 4 and Daniel J.

Speaker 14 Lewis.

Speaker 4 They were not getting protein shakes every day.

Speaker 14 No, no, they were not. Although neither was Daniel J.

Speaker 4 Lewis at this point, as we will learn. That's fair.

Speaker 14 Yeah. I believe they did make Russell Means's bigger so it didn't show his butt so much, but they sure didn't for the other ones.
Because if you're looking, those are shmall.

Speaker 14 You can see a lot of man thigh. I'm not complaining about that, but I understand his point.

Speaker 14 As Lee Teeter, a visual consultant on the movie told Entertainment Weekly, quote, it wasn't good enough that the moccasins looked as though they would have back then.

Speaker 14 We had to wear them out to see how they looked after 60 miles. And they're doing that.

Speaker 4 This movie, like The African Queen, does a really good job in making everything seem lived in. Yes.

Speaker 14 But at a massive scale.

Speaker 4 Yeah, down to every extra. I think

Speaker 4 it really looks dirty and

Speaker 4 it looks great. And even Madeline Stowe, even though she looks wonderful, she does look a little disheveled, which I think is really nice and important.

Speaker 4 And I do think that sometimes, even when the costuming is really, really excellent, it is let down by the fact that it doesn't have that layer of grime or dirt on top of it.

Speaker 14 Yeah, they do a remarkable job in this movie. And by the way, Chris, even though a replica of Fort William Henry already existed, Michael Mann was like not good enough.
So he built his own.

Speaker 14 It took 11 weeks to build. The chosen site near Lake James in North Carolina was so remote that a road had to be built just to access it.
It cost $6 million.

Speaker 14 And after filming, it was dismantled and the land was reseeded. This really tested everyone in the crew who was like, Michael, they already have this.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 because he built it, he can blow it up.

Speaker 14 That's right. He can blow it up and it looks perfect.
Historians agree everything in that sequence looks right. Well, Chris, before filming started, there was already trouble.

Speaker 14 Academy Award-winning costume designer James Acheson walked off the set with a case of nervous exhaustion after overseeing the outfitting for 800 cast members and extras in Asheville, North Carolina.

Speaker 14 Other sources say he was fired because he could not handle Man's Man Paws getting into every single detail of his work.

Speaker 14 He was replaced by Elsa Zambarelli, who took over as costume designer and received on-screen credit.

Speaker 14 By the way, James Acheson, three-time Academy Award winner at that point for The Last Emperor, Dangerous Liaisons, and Restoration. So not exactly a slouch.

Speaker 4 And The Last Emperor has some pretty big scenes as well.

Speaker 14 And it's gorgeous.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so it's not as if he has been only costuming a dozen players.

Speaker 14 No, no, no.

Speaker 14 He's just not used to Michael Mann.

Speaker 14 All the wigs were human hair wigs. They were handmade.

Speaker 14 In terms of the costuming, the people who had it the worst were the Brits because their costumes were pure wool and they were filming in the spring and summer in North Carolina.

Speaker 14 And fun fact, the moccasins that the actors are wearing are actually mounted on hidden running shoes for the lead so that they're able to maneuver.

Speaker 4 I was wondering because they do run at basically full speed through those woods and you would hurt yourself.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that would be brutal. Yeah.

Speaker 14 A hairstylist named Vera Mitchell also walked off set and there was some drama around Russell Means and Eric Schweig's beautiful hair.

Speaker 14 According to Schweig, there was an early dispute about whether or not Uncas and Shinguchkuk should shave their heads. But Russell Means was basically like, go fuck yourself.

Speaker 4 I'm not doing that.

Speaker 14 And Eric Schweig pointed out that if Nathaniel was going to have long flowing hair, that should probably match the hair of his family. So it didn't make sense for them to shave it.

Speaker 14 So they let that one slide.

Speaker 4 All right.

Speaker 14 June of 1991, principal photography began near Asheville, North Carolina in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Speaker 14 The shoot involved 250 crew members and hundreds of extras who were hired from all over the country, anywhere from 300 to 900. There's some differing on the sources here.

Speaker 14 And it wasn't long before things really started to go pretty wrong. Madeline Stowe told the Mohican Press, quote, the extras and crew were courageous with very little given back.

Speaker 14 They weren't fed well, and the fact always bothered me. I hated seeing them in those heavy red coats and sweltering in the heat, and I remembered complaining to Hunt Lowry, who's a producer.

Speaker 14 It didn't seem just to me, but they were spirited and they gave their all. Eric Schweig said the problem started with the producers.

Speaker 14 He told Trail Dust magazine, quote, they were doing illegal tampering with time cards, skimming hours off the time cards, and the makeup artists went on strike. They worked everybody like dogs.

Speaker 14 So that was the only beef anyone had. Filming also was happening from Magic Hour late into and throughout the night with meals often coming around 1 a.m.

Speaker 4 There's a lot of night photography in this movie.

Speaker 14 I mean it's almost all night.

Speaker 4 There's like a 45 minute stretch in the middle of the movie that's just one night, basically.

Speaker 14 And they're also, there's like one thing that's shot on the soundstage and I believe it's when they're in the caves behind the waterfall. Everything else is outside in natural light.

Speaker 4 And I think there's one day for night sequence that I really noticed out by the river, and everything else is actual night for night throughout this movie, which if you remember in Deliverance, a lot of the time in wilderness environments, you got to shoot day for night.

Speaker 4 It's just too difficult to light. It's too hard on the crew.

Speaker 14 It's dangerous, too, to be doing some of that in darkness. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Michael Mann is pushing what you could do on film. And I think he would perfect it in heat in terms of night shooting.

Speaker 14 Well, so you might be wondering, how are they getting away with some of this? It was supposed to be a non-union shoot for all of the crew except for the team's core production crew.

Speaker 14 Now your face is like, how are they possibly getting away with that?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I don't understand how 20th Century Fox, Michael Mannon, DGA director, I'm certain they're, I don't do not understand how they could do that.

Speaker 14 Well, part of the appeal was North Carolina. It had less restrictive laws around that.

Speaker 4 Oh, right. New York would force you to do a union shoot for sure.
That's right.

Speaker 14 North Carolina did not. But also, despite the film's initial $35 million budget, the producers said, oh, no, no, no, it's being made independently as part of a negative pickup deal.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 14 Chris, can you explain what that means?

Speaker 4 Basically, you find the financing. You get a, it's almost like a promissory note from a studio saying, upon completion of the film, we will pick up the negative.
right?

Speaker 4 We will buy the negative, meaning you're shot and completed film. There are some stipulations.
It has to be between, you know, these running times and it has to be finished blah, blah, blah,

Speaker 4 within this window. And there's a set agreed upon price point.
And then you can take that promissory note to a bank or another financing entity and get a loan to finance your film.

Speaker 4 And therefore, technically, the movie is not financed by the studio. The movie is financed by, again, that bank or

Speaker 4 whatever entity is going to give you the money to make your movie.

Speaker 14 Right. So they're arguing that this means it's technically a lower budget and therefore a non-union crew.
IOTSI was not buying this.

Speaker 14 And within one week of filming, they successfully organized and unionized the crew.

Speaker 14 And apparently some of the producers were trying to intimidate people not to join, but they smartly realized they were probably going to need protection on a job like this.

Speaker 14 And so they all stuck together.

Speaker 4 The good news is, as a result, I mean now maybe a lot of people were working off card, but they probably hired a lot of non-union people who had the opportunity then to flip if they wanted to and then get union membership, which could be a really good thing.

Speaker 14 I think it ended up being a good thing. It certainly was not their intention from the beginning.
No.

Speaker 4 Yeah. At the end, they're like, and we flipped all these people to the union and we're the good guys.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 14 Nazi's like, no. Shortly after this, the Native American actors also went on strike, demanding better pay and better lodging conditions because they were terrible.

Speaker 14 They were being housed at an abandoned Boy Scout camp, which Russell Means said looked like a concentration camp. They had six to eight people jammed into rooms designed for maybe two boys.

Speaker 14 It also was not air-conditioned and it was 30 miles outside of town. And as you pointed out, these chutes are night shoots.

Speaker 14 So they're stuck in this place during the hottest part of the day and they can't leave. And the worst part, according to Eric Schweig, they had something like 400 people assigned to one bathroom.

Speaker 14 That may be hyperbole, but also maybe not.

Speaker 4 Even if it's 40 people assigned to a bathroom. Yeah.
It's still not enough. No, it's bad.

Speaker 14 Daniel Day-Lewis, Eric Schweig, and Russell Means all joined the picket line with these actors. And apparently the the strike was over in about four hours.
And thankfully, they got better pay.

Speaker 14 They got better accommodations. But Russell Means didn't blame Michael Mann for any of this.
He was like, Michael Mann was so heads down that he had no idea what his ADs were doing.

Speaker 4 And he has to rely on those people to do those things.

Speaker 14 I mean, I think you should be paying a little bit of attention to this, but yes.

Speaker 4 Well, if it's brought to your attention, and I don't know, you can tell me, but you should certainly, I think, jump to the side of, let's pay our people and get them the right accommodations.

Speaker 14 I don't know how he was responding to this. The way that Russell Means describes it is basically he had no idea what was going on.

Speaker 14 And I think probably when he did, I don't think he was fighting them on anything. But he doesn't have a great handle over the rest of the production.

Speaker 14 Sadly, Russell Means also experienced racism on set at the hands of the ADs and some other crew members. He was frequently called chief and redskin.

Speaker 14 He was jokingly accused of doing a rain dance when the weather turned bad and had his traditional choker referred to as a dog collar.

Speaker 14 Also, on a daily basis, he experienced the ADs yelling things like Indians over here when they needed to move a large group of people. He finally lost it and said, Do not refer to us by race.

Speaker 14 If you do, then say Indians over here, white guys over there, and the Jews behind the camera.

Speaker 4 Thanks, Russell.

Speaker 14 So he asked that they at least bare minimum distinguish between the French allied and English allied native extras rather than lumping them all together. That's a pretty fair request.

Speaker 4 Yeah, just do as the script does. That's right.

Speaker 14 So about five weeks into the shoot, in August of 1991, Michael Mann also fired his original DP, Doug Milsom, and replaced him with his long-term collaborator, Dante Spinotti.

Speaker 14 Now, Michael Mann said, if someone wants a country club shoot, they're in the wrong movie. Because I reserve the right to involve myself in every department.

Speaker 14 I need self-confident people with strong egos around me. Spinotti had been off doing another film, was finally available, and Michael Mann just said, come on over.

Speaker 14 And this decision would maybe come back around later to haunt them.

Speaker 14 So the shoot, as we said, is almost entirely outside, which called for a rain insurance policy and a local meteorologist on staff to measure rainfall so that they could get every cent of that insurance policy back.

Speaker 14 And even though Michael Mann was driving his crew insane, Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeline Stowe, and Russell Means ended up really enjoying working with him and his work ethic.

Speaker 14 But That work ethic was driving up the budget on an already expensive movie. 20th Century Fox sent a representative to the set whose only job was to tell Michael Mann, that's enough, Michael, move on.

Speaker 14 Each scene was taking at least 20 takes. There was a closing sequence that they later had to cut that required upwards of 60 takes.

Speaker 14 And according to IMDb, we couldn't confirm this anywhere else, but it is a very funny story.

Speaker 14 In the early hours of the morning after a long night shoot, Michael Mann is yelling out over the speakers, what's that orange light? Turn out that orange light.

Speaker 14 And someone's like, it's the sun, Michael.

Speaker 4 And he's like, excuses are for losers.

Speaker 14 So while everyone is getting exhausted, Daniel Day-Lewis stayed pretty strong and he stayed method, including, according to Mann, refusing to eat anything he didn't shoot himself.

Speaker 14 According to Madeline Stowe, he never complained, despite being the most, probably the most in-demand actor on the set. He's in almost every scene.

Speaker 14 In fact, Chris, he and Madeline Stowe lighten the mood by playing jokes on each other in their car rides home at night. And this started with some light, high-speed food fights.

Speaker 14 But because Daniel Day-Lewis doesn't do anything halfway, he escalated this to a car crash.

Speaker 4 Great. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Just snipped her brakes, made sure she's like, you know.

Speaker 14 No, he and his driver staged a bloody car accident complete with a moaning victim for Madeline Stowe to happen upon on her drive home.

Speaker 4 Very, very consistent with what Hawkeye would do. This is definitely

Speaker 4 him staying in character. Hawkeye, noted prankster in this movie.

Speaker 14 He has a little bit of a sense of humor. He's got some funny lines in this.

Speaker 14 Of this event, Daniel Day-Lewis told the New York Times simply, the location drove us to it. Madeline Stowe loved it, by the way.

Speaker 4 It's entertaining.

Speaker 14 I think she was happy to see sort of a sense of humor coming out of him.

Speaker 4 That's not like a mean-spirited prank either. Yeah, exactly.
It's not like it was at her expense. It's crazy, but oh, it's crazy, but at least it's not, you know, Jared Leto said

Speaker 4 gross things on set.

Speaker 14 So Roger Birmbaum said Michael Mann was, quote, tough and he had to be. Was he incredibly demanding? Yes.
Was he a pain in the ass? Yes. Would I work with him again? Yes.

Speaker 14 According to Russell Means, also, Michael Mann didn't really yell. When offering pointers, he almost always did it in private.
And Means had only two disputes with him.

Speaker 14 One, as we mentioned, was the breech cloths, but the other one was that he was very unhappy with the way the scene was told in the Huron village.

Speaker 14 And we'll get to this again a little bit later, but he did not appreciate that he felt was perpetuating stereotypes that were not necessarily accurate. You've got the two white women coming.

Speaker 14 They're trying to sacrifice them in the fires. You know, you've got Hawkeye walking through being attacked for essentially no reason, especially because he is a recognized member of another tribe.

Speaker 14 Eric Schweig pointed out that would not have happened. The way that the chief is positioned, sort of on the throne, all of this stuff, Russell Means was like,

Speaker 14 this is not right. But Michael Mann apparently told him when he becomes a producer and buys a script, he can make his own movie.
And that was the only thing he did not listen to them on.

Speaker 14 Michael Mann openly acknowledged and defended his directorial style. He said, I am obsessed with telling the story powerfully, and as such, I, the director, know what counts and doesn't count.

Speaker 14 And Daniel Day-Lewis, after this movie, had a little bit of trouble being inside because he'd been outside for such a long period of time.

Speaker 14 He started getting very claustrophobic and suffering slight hallucinations. But he shook it off.
All right, let's talk about post-production a little bit.

Speaker 14 So Arthur Schmidt and Dove Hainig were credited as editors, but of course, Michael Mann was heavily, heavily involved.

Speaker 14 Now, it was originally scheduled for release in July of 1992, but 20th Century Fox came out and said, ooh, it's so good. It's so good.
It's amazing.

Speaker 14 You know, we actually think it deserves to be an Oscar contender. So that's why we're going to move it to the end of September.
It's totally not because the edit's a mess.

Speaker 14 They were also concerned about it getting lost next to Big Summer Blockbusters.

Speaker 14 But of course, there were some sources on the inside saying it had a lot more to do with the massive fight that was happening over the edit.

Speaker 14 Good old fix-it-and-post Joe Roth felt that the cut was unevenly paced. And at about three hours long, they were concerned about how many screenings they could get in per day.

Speaker 14 I'm sure we hear that all the time.

Speaker 4 So, this is my actual major complaint about this movie.

Speaker 14 It's too short.

Speaker 4 It's too, it's weirdly short.

Speaker 14 I agree.

Speaker 4 There are so many underdeveloped. It's not actually the main storyline.
I feel like actually we get enough Daniel Day-Lewis. We get enough Madeline Stowe.
so many underdeveloped secondary plot lines.

Speaker 4 Yep. I mean, Eric Schweig and Alice is the big one.

Speaker 14 That's the main one. It was cut almost entirely.

Speaker 4 And you get like, I think you get just enough magua. I think we could have used maybe

Speaker 4 love him. I agree.
Again, I'm not talking, I don't think this is a three-hour movie necessarily.

Speaker 14 At least two and a half.

Speaker 4 220, 220. Like, it's under two right now.

Speaker 14 It's really short.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Think about adding 20 minutes and you're you're just getting the, you know, the Uncas Alice storyline, for example.
I mean, yeah, I really noticed it when we were watching.

Speaker 4 I just felt, oh, wow, we're really, we're careening towards the end now. This is it.

Speaker 14 I agree with you. I think that that is the only real downfall of this movie.
And it's freaking Joe Roth's fault. He was insisting that Michael Mann cut a third of the movie.

Speaker 14 I would love to know what was in that additional hour. I mean, we know some of it.
You just mentioned a lot of it.

Speaker 14 But I think this is also really interesting because Dances with Wolves is three hours long.

Speaker 14 And there's like 20 minute segments of that where he's straight up just trying to feed a wolf a piece of beef jerky and it made $425 million.

Speaker 14 Like you don't need to cut just for the sake of cutting. If it is actually important to the story, don't cut it.

Speaker 4 But I do think that Dances with Wolves was a true independent film. Yeah.

Speaker 14 If that had been made by a studio, it would not have been the same thing at all.

Speaker 4 I mean, well, not yet. Costner eventually would make movies with studios that he would refuse to cut down and then they would flop, you know, and Water World and the Postman.

Speaker 4 But yes, I do think Horizon.

Speaker 14 Although that's independent, but yes.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's in the wild now. Yeah, he, I think, was able to say, no, this is it, and this is how it's going to be and prove it.

Speaker 4 Whereas, again, and especially if you have a producer that's not 100% confident

Speaker 4 in that three-hour cut, exactly.

Speaker 14 They're not. And Michael Mann did everything that he could to push back.
According to Madeline Stowe, it was reaching a point where the disagreement was really pretty disturbing to him.

Speaker 14 And I don't know this for a fact, but I have to imagine it's disturbing because Joe Roth was almost certainly asking him to cut an awful lot of the native plot lines and character development.

Speaker 14 To your point, the biggest thing we're missing is the love story between Uncas and Alice to the point where it doesn't even really make a ton of sense when she throws herself off the cliff at the end after him.

Speaker 14 It's still beautiful. I mean, it's like very affecting.

Speaker 4 It feels more like she's doing it to flee Magua, not yes. She doesn't want to resign herself to a fate worse than death, as opposed to I'm joining my lover on the rocks.
Right.

Speaker 14 Which, like, I think in reality, it's both.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yes.
It doesn't bump necessarily, but it doesn't have the impact outside of being very gorgeously shot that it could have had. No.

Speaker 14 And also, I mean, I could have done with more interactions between Onkis and Shingachkuk and Nathaniel. It's such an interesting dynamic.
And when you watch it, you don't actually get a ton.

Speaker 14 You get just barely enough.

Speaker 4 I wanted more of him saying, referring to DDL as

Speaker 4 my white son, which is, I don't know why it just made me laugh every time.

Speaker 14 So Madeline Stowe actually called Joe Roth personally to try to advocate for Michael Mann's vision. And apparently they reached some kind of compromise.

Speaker 14 But as you pointed out, the final runtime is an hour and 52 minutes. So he did force him to cut more than a third of his movie.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 And I agree with you. I think that this really suffers because of that.
I think minimum 30 more minutes. I also think this could have made a fantastic mini-series.
There's just a lot to explore here.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 4 I don't know if you even need that, though. I do think that the whole movie is there.
It just feels a little truncated. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I think the music does a lot of work in papering over some of the narrative gaps that might have been excised, and we just kind of go with the feel. The music's amazing in this movie.

Speaker 14 Well, let's talk about the the music a little bit. So the score actually suffered a bit in post as well.
I think the end result is great.

Speaker 14 You'll notice there's two composers credited, Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman. Trevor Jones was brought on initially to do a more electronic score.

Speaker 4 Oh, interesting.

Speaker 14 But it really didn't work.

Speaker 4 So I was going to say, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 14 They had to kind of pivot pretty last minute. They bring in Randy Edelman, sort of tag team, finish the final.
I don't know how much Trevor Jones was a part of it at that time.

Speaker 14 I don't think he was like fired, fired, but it was a bit messy which may be why that main theme which is so good that plays throughout the whole movie so it is not original to the film oh really no i didn't know that no i love that main theme it's amazing and as you point out it does pretty much all the heavy lifting it's actually a song called the gale or the guile written by scottish folk musician dougie mclaine i was wondering it was out prior to this movie yeah it reminds me so so many of scenes of them traversing the landscape remind me so much of Braveheart when they're, you know, going through the highlands and whatnot.

Speaker 4 And so, yeah, that's interesting. Man, that song does humans' work in this movie.

Speaker 14 I know. And I went and listened to it because I was like, oh, is it just the fiddle part that's pulled? And no, it's the whole thing.
It like it's, you know, orchestrated very differently.

Speaker 14 It's orchestrated beautifully in the film, much more epic and grand. But that whole thing is pulled from

Speaker 14 something else. So that did, I believe, render it ineligible for the Oscars because it was not original.

Speaker 4 That would make sense.

Speaker 14 So, The Last of the Mohicans was released on September 25th, 1992. It grossed about $11 million opening weekend.

Speaker 14 In total, and I have seen conflicting numbers on this, but I believe it grossed about $75 million domestically and about $140 million worldwide on somewhere around a $40 million budget.

Speaker 14 So, break-even. Not bad by any means.
Minimum break-even, probably more, but also probably not what Moneybags Joe had in mind when he saw those Dances with Wolves dollars.

Speaker 14 It was still considered a financial success. It was a very popular film that year, which surprised a lot of executives who did not think Daniel J.

Speaker 14 Lewis could pull in audiences, to which I say, have you seen his hair? It's beautiful.

Speaker 4 It's long.

Speaker 14 It's wavy. Part of the reason this may not have hit quite as hard as it could have is that 20th Century Fox marketed and branded the film heavily as a love story in a war zone, which is interesting.

Speaker 14 Michael Mann was like, yeah, that's great. I think that's spot on.
Russell Means did not agree, and I have to go with Russell Means on this one.

Speaker 14 His point was they marketed it so heavily to the over 35 crowd, but it's really violent. And it's a lot more epic, sort of war epic film than it is necessarily just a love story.

Speaker 14 And again, they didn't market Dances with Wolves as a love story, even though that is also centered heavily around his relationship with a woman.

Speaker 14 This also could be due to the edit trimming an hour off the film. They may have been focusing it even more heavily on the love story at that point as well.

Speaker 14 So Means pointed out that boiling it down to just the love story really diminishes what the film was doing for its Native American characters, which was the focus and original purpose of the film.

Speaker 14 So I think they lose the plot a little bit here. Means told the Mohican Press, quote, 20th Century Fox shot themselves in the foot over that film.
It really burns me.

Speaker 14 A classic like that, and they messed around with it. It just goes to point out in Hollywood, they don't know anything about Indians, nor the audience, that they purport to know everything about.

Speaker 14 The audience wants more about American Indians. So it did win the Academy Award for Best Sound, awarded to Chris Jenkins, Doug Hempill, and Mark Smith, and Simon Kay.

Speaker 14 But Michael Mann received zero Oscar nominations, and Russell Means has a theory about that as well. Remember the firing of the original cinematographer, Doug Milsom?

Speaker 14 Means publicly theorized that this may have pissed off the Academy and that Michael Mann may have paid for it with no Oscars.

Speaker 14 I don't know, especially because I looked up what the best picture nominees were that year. It's pretty stacked.
It's Unforgiven, A Few Good Men, Howard's End, The Crying Game, and Scent of a Woman.

Speaker 14 Unforgiven one. I think this deserves to be in there.

Speaker 4 I would have put it in over Scent of a Woman, and I love Martin Brest. I agree.

Speaker 14 Out of those, I think that's the weakest of those movies.

Speaker 4 I don't know, though. I mean, no disrespect to our cinematographer friends, but you know, we've covered movies and cinematographers get let go, you know, all the time.

Speaker 14 I agree with you. I'm not sure if I buy that.

Speaker 4 You know, and it's not like man was some junior director usurping, you know, a veteran in this industry that he'd been working for a long time. So I don't know.
That doesn't.

Speaker 14 It is a bit strange that it's completely shut out of all of the other categories because it's pretty amazing.

Speaker 4 But that could be 20th Century Fox decided not to push for it.

Speaker 4 I mean, as we know, it's, it's who campaigns and how effectively do they campaign and how much money, you know, what was it, Coda recently?

Speaker 4 They spent more money on marketing it for the Oscars to, you know, success than they did on actually making the film.

Speaker 14 Well, that makes sense. It was an independent film picked up at Sundance, but yeah.

Speaker 4 It was still a $12 or $15 million movie, and they spent more than that marketing it for the Oscars. So it wasn't like it was a $2 million movie.

Speaker 4 My point is just, it could have been that 20th Century Fox decided, you know what, this movie's...

Speaker 4 It's a little...

Speaker 4 It's unclear where it fits in genre-wise. We didn't know how to market it to the audience.
I don't know if we're going to know how to market it, you know, to Academy members.

Speaker 4 Let's keep our gunpowder dry. It'd also be interesting to look at if 20th Century Fox had any other films

Speaker 4 that were nominated for Oscars that year that they were going for.

Speaker 14 Good point. So critics' reviews, I think, were surprisingly mixed.
Roger Ebert said The Last Mohicans is not as authentic and uncompromised as it claims to be.

Speaker 14 More of a matinee fantasy than it wants to admit, but it's probably more entertaining as a result.

Speaker 14 Janet Maslin at the New York Times really criticized the source material and basically was like, I don't know why you wanted to do this, saying the filmmakers may have done a better job of making their own tomahawks and rebuilding Fort William Henry than of breathing sense into their material, but the results are still riveting.

Speaker 14 So, Chris, how did Last of the Mohicans fare in the eye of historians? Does it win the Braveheart Award for complete historical disregard? No.

Speaker 14 I think most people agree that for the early 90s, it's pretty damn good. There's some very small nitpicks.

Speaker 14 The relationship between Cora and Hawkeye would have been extremely unlikely, nigh on impossible.

Speaker 14 And also, the whole idea that there was one living member of the Mohicans at that time is just simply not true.

Speaker 14 There were somewhere around 1,200 Mohicans living in Jesuit villages in Massachusetts and with Moravians in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 14 This is an issue with the source material, though, and Michael Mann justified it by saying he felt Chingachcook represented the last to live a traditional Mohican life, and that's what they were saying.

Speaker 14 By the way, thousands of Mohicans still alive today across the Hudson River Valley, Wisconsin, and more.

Speaker 14 As we mentioned, Russell Means took issue both during production and after with that scene in the Huron village where Hawkeye enters.

Speaker 14 And one other issue some people had was that Magua may have been perpetuating a stereotype that Hurons were bloodthirsty savages. I don't know.

Speaker 14 As far as villains go, I don't want to diminish those concerns, but I think he's pretty complex.

Speaker 14 Overall, Means was happy with the film, and for the first time, he felt that it really showed natives and non-natives interacting socially as they might have at the time as regular human beings.

Speaker 14 So that wraps up the coverage of our first Michael Mann film. Chris, what went right?

Speaker 4 Well, many, many things,

Speaker 4 but I will give mine.

Speaker 4 You know what? I'm not going to leave it to Michael Mann because I think I'm going to give it to him on the next one. Sure.
I think the cast is amazing, but we often give these to the cast. I agree.

Speaker 4 I think West Studi is fantastic. West Studio also in heat.
Yes. Michael Mann brings him along for that, although a smaller role.
I will give my

Speaker 4 what went right to

Speaker 4 the costume team,

Speaker 4 both the fired costume designer, because I'm sure he did a lot before he was fired. Yes, he did.
As well as his replacement.

Speaker 14 Elsa Zamparelli.

Speaker 4 James Acheson and Elsa Zamparelli. I don't think we give this department enough love on this show.
And the costumes in this movie are fantastic. And they had to dress so many people.

Speaker 4 And I also, I can't speak to this production, but generally speaking, I know that costumes and hair and makeup do a really nice job of taking care of the performers, extras and speaking roles and above-the-line cast in productions.

Speaker 4 And so I'd imagine on a show where it sounds like the producers and the ADs were not doing a good job of taking care of the cast.

Speaker 4 No, I wouldn't be surprised, although I can't say this for certain, if some of these other departments were. And so I will give my what went right to the costumes.
Five stars, five stars.

Speaker 4 They look dirty. It looks great.
I appreciate that attention to detail.

Speaker 14 They are dirty. They're living in a Boy Scout camp.

Speaker 4 All right.

Speaker 14 Well, I think I am going to give it to Michael Mann, but not just Michael Mann.

Speaker 14 I will give it to Michael Mann and Christopher Crowe because I think given how garbage the novel is, and there's quite a few problems with the 1936 version of this as well.

Speaker 14 I think that their adaptation of this screenplay is pretty fantastic. And I would love to read what they had before Joe Roth trimmed an hour out of it too.

Speaker 14 But I think he achieved what he was trying to do in terms of showing much more human complexity and just the cultural complexity of living in

Speaker 14 this place in this time.

Speaker 14 It was a weird time. And this is one of the few movies that I feel like really shows that.
It's a very like liminal space.

Speaker 14 You know, you've got obviously settlers who have established themselves to a certain degree, but they've done so in an area that obviously was established a very long time ago by Native Americans who have a whole different culture.

Speaker 14 And then you still have the British Empire coming in on top of that.

Speaker 14 So I agree with Michael Mann that what's so fascinating about this story is the layers of culture that you see at play in this and how some of them understand each other, some of them really, really don't, and how that's working to certain people's advantage and other people's great disadvantage.

Speaker 14 And it sort of sets sets up, you know, the American Revolution in a bit of a fun way as well, although I don't know how historically accurate that was since this was, you know, 20 plus years prior to that taking place.

Speaker 14 But I will give it to them for the screenplay. I think it's great.
I agree with you. I also have to give it to the native actors across this and particularly Russell Means.

Speaker 14 For him to take on this role, having never acted before, I think he gives such a beautiful performance.

Speaker 14 That scream he lets out at the end when he realizes that Uncus has fallen is one of the most haunting moments in this entire movie.

Speaker 14 He's very understated, and also the fact that he was still speaking up for people on set and using this as an extension of his activism and would continue to do so across some other films and TV appearances as well.

Speaker 14 So, I will give it to Russell Means, Eric Schweig, Wes Studi, and so many other fantastic native actors in this as well.

Speaker 14 Well, that wraps up our coverage of The Last of the Mohicans.

Speaker 14 I really enjoyed doing this one, although I was bummed out to hear that they did not treat people well behind the scenes, But we'll have to see how it goes on heat next week.

Speaker 4 It's a good crew, but did they treat that crew well?

Speaker 14 I don't know.

Speaker 4 That's a big question. So we'll find out.
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Speaker 4 Of course, for $50, you can get a shout-out just like one of these, which Lizzie will be doing in the traditional Mohican language. I'm just kidding.

Speaker 14 No, I sure won't.

Speaker 4 Which Lizzie will do as the wide-eyed Madeline Stowe. I don't know what Lizzie's going to do, but you're going to get a great shout-out.

Speaker 14 I'm probably just going to read them for this one as Natty Bumpo would.

Speaker 4 Just like one of these. You stay alive.
I will find you.

Speaker 14 All right, that's the end of my Daniel Day-Lewis impersonation, which sounded sounded more like Kiana Reeves. So here we go.
Thank you. Full stops.

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Thank you all so much for your continued support.

Speaker 4 All right, guys, thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of What Went Wrong. We will see you next week as you feel that heat coming around the corner.
That's right.

Speaker 4 And abandon everything you thought you loved. Four heats.
Can't wait.

Speaker 14 Mano a mono.

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Speaker 4 What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing music by David Bowman with research from Laura Woods and additional editing from Karen Krupsaw.