WHAT WENT WRONG - The Last of the Mohicans

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

Michael Mann meets his match in one of the most dedicated method actors of all time: Daniel Day-Lewis. Join Chris and Lizzie as they chronicle Mann’s obsessively detail-oriented 1992 historical epic ‘The Last of the Mohicans’. Find out how on-set strikes and last-minute firings caused turmoil behind the scenes, and why ‘Dances with Wolves’ inspired Russell Means (Chingachgook) to join the cast… but not for the reasons you might think. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 American romance that is, I would argue, somewhat more nuanced, perhaps much more nuanced, than it's arguably more popular counterpart from the early 19-19th. Oh, we're going to talk about that too. Yes, as always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by my Intrepid co-host, Lizzie Bassett.

Lizzie, what do you have for us this evening? 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 mono, if you will. 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. And I actually love this movie. It was interesting to rewatch it. But, Chris, I'm curious to hear from you. Did you grow up with this movie? Had you seen it before? And what was it like watching it again for this episode? I'd seen it.

I did not grow up with it. Again, I'd 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 I was very familiar with. DDL running towards the camera. 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.

There are certain images from the film, specifically the third act on the cliffs that, you know, remained with me for the 20 years between when I had last seen this movie and watching it this time. And they really made an impression because I thought, wow, that is the exact image of, you know, West Studi and Chingachuk standing on the cliff looking at one another in silhouette or Alice. Spoilers, taking a tumble. Yeah.

So there was a lot of, there's a lot of poetic imagery in this movie that had stuck with me and made an impression. Here's what I will say, and I've watched a couple other Michael Mann films this month, including Heats and his first film Thief. 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. 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. 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. And it's really fun to watch. 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. 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. I also think it does some really interesting things. Yes, D.D.L. As we will call him. His name's too long. Drasillion Drutlift. Daniel DeLuis is the main character, but I think the movie moves him away from the center of focus at really interesting moments. 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 that movie. And this movie specifically, DDL is not the last of the Mohicans. No.

His father is. And so I think this movie is actually very sweeping, very poetic. I thoroughly enjoyed the rewatch. And I will beg, whoever owns the rights to this, for the love of God, please restore it and do like a high definition 4K release because that's... It's gorgeous, yeah. It's a beautiful film, and the transfer is terrible. It's bad.

It looks terrible. There's so many shots that are like, that looks like strange slow motion. And that has to be something, yeah. It's a bad transfer. It definitely deserves a restoration because it's gorgeous. 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. I mean, Thief made 13 years, 12, 13 years before this.

They look incredible. This movie's locations and cinematography. and production design are all incredible. And this version does a disservice to all involved, in my opinion. 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. Also, Battle and 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. She looks amazing. She's beautiful. She's very beautiful. 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. She would just have to stand there for three hours while Michael Mann like. Yeah. She's gorgeous. It really, I think it's some of the best she's ever looked on screen. He does such a good job. Yeah. 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.

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. 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. 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. And then I think the experience behind the camera was something far and more negative for a lot of the people that were involved in this film. So also, Chris, 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. 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. 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. So, Chris, you've watched some Michael Mann this month, as you mentioned. There's one major outlier in Michael Mann's filmography. What would you say it is? Well, I would say it's The Keep. Oh, okay.

From 1983. I go more with this. So The Keep is supernatural. So everything else he does is based in our world. The Keep is the only supernatural films. It's horror. It's horror. Yeah, it's Nazi supernatural.

Outside of Nazi supernatural. Outside of that, it would be the last of the most. If you think about Michael Mann, you think sweeping crime epics, everything from thief, Manhunter, Heat, Miami Vice, collateral, the insider. Public enemies. Yes, the insider does have a criminal element to it, even though it's a whistleblower story. Yeah, I actually love that movie, but yes. Yeah, it's a beautiful movie. But yeah, definitely, last of the Mohicans, had I not known about the keep, definitely would be the outlier. But 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. So I think upon watching it, it feels very much like a Michael Man movie. Man oh man, does he love details, as we're going to get into. So, as always, here are the basics. The Last of the Mohicans is directed by Michael Man. It is written by Michael Man 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. It stars Daniel Day Lewis, Russell Means, West Studie, Madeline Stowe, Jody Mae, Stephen

Waddington, Eric Schweig, and many, many more, including a very fun cameo early on. Did you notice who the super bitchy British officer? Jared Harris? Yeah. 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, they're so bitchy. They're so bitchy.

And the French are so dastardly. I know. 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. The British never have I seen the crown bowed. And the French is like, oh, should something happen to them? I cannot trust that day. We'll not fight the same men again.

Yeah. Yeah, the French general is very funny. very mustache twirley, even with a lack of mustache. All right. As always, the IMDB logline is, three Mohican trappers agree to protect the daughters of a British colonel in the midst of the French and Indian War. Okay, let's get into it. 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. 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. He grew up on the pretty rough streets of

Chicago. Eventually, his father was forced out of business. They had kind of a tough upbringing. 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. And he says that's one of the first films that really made a deep impression on him. In projections, a forum for filmmakers, he explained that, quote, I couldn't identify what was so fascinating then, but I can now. 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? Native American, English, and the nascent, not yet known as American, American culture?

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. That's right. Not a thing who are marching into the woods in bright red coats with drums every time. 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. Well, how many times are you all going to get murdered before you stop doing it? It's just, oh my goodness, the guerrilla war fighting tactics, it would seem obvious after the ninth ambush in which you're like, we look like bullseyes walking through. 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. There's some of the things that hold up the best about this movie, to me. Yeah, especially the midpoint fort siege is really pretty grand.

The Fort Sage is great, and I love, I think it's the second ambush. Yeah, the second ambush towards the end of Act 2. Yes. It's really disturbing. 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. Instead, it's, like, kind of weird the way it starts, and you almost can't tell what's happening.

It's confusing. Yeah. Which I think is exactly what it would have been like, 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, 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. In the late 60s, he moved to London, and he earned an M.A. from the London Film School. So he began his career very early on working in commercials and advertising. 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. 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. 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. 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. So that helps him secure funding for his first theatrical feature, which you've already mentioned. What is it, Chris? Thief starring James Con.

Which I believe was a pretty decent commercial and critical success. Yeah, and it was based on a book called The Home Invaders by John Seabolder. I think he wrote it under a pseudonym Frank Ohheimer. 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. James Con is basically a diamond thief in Chicago, operating out of Chicago back in the 1960s, you know, 1970s. Certainly not like a sort of exaggerated

Ocean's 11 style heist film. Much more contained. Right. 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. And then from 84 to 89,

he produced, what, Chris? Miami Vice. That's right. Starring half the cast of the Spranos. Yes. You guys are ever interested. You can watch the Sopranos version of their credits with the credits from Miami Vice. That's so funny.

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

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 of the glass shatters on all of the, cars nearby from the concussive impact. It sounds like it would be miserable to be on that set, counting out the T-shirts. As an audience member, I am grateful. That's right. Okay, so we just talked about this at the top, but Les the Mohicans does not really feel like a natural follow-up to any of the movies or TV shows that we just mentioned. 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. 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. Has Las the Mohicans required you to make a major adjustment in terms of your aesthetic as a filmmaker? What do you think Michael Mann said? No. That's right. He just said, no. He said, it's just an accident that most of the other films I've done have been in that genre. Okay, Mike. Well, you know, or I'm sure it's also opportunity. 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. Of course. And Miami Vice led to crime story, et cetera. So a snowball going downhill gathers speed and mass. Doesn't necessarily hit the French and Indian War. It does not. So in 1989, though, he goes ahead and acquires the right. to Philip Dunn's 1936 Last of the Mohicans screenplay.

So why do you think he would acquire the rights to the 1936 screenplay versus the novel? Well, if he likes the structure of the original screenplay, just option the screenplay and then remake it. That's right. It's because everyone pretty much agrees that the novel just kind of sucks. 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? I think that's what he figured. And I watched it, by the way, for this. 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. Oh, that's interesting. Just from even like a technical perspective.

Yes, big time. It feels very dated. I can understand why as a little kid, it would be very exciting. there are some pretty funny shots of wildlife where it's like, you know, everything is on a sound stage except for they cut to the only shot they could get of a beaver and the beaver's like half submerged and splashing around.

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. 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. They definitely think

their audience knows history a hell of a lot more than I did. Because 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... I was like, who? You know, 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.

In fact, Hawkeye at the end actually joins the British Army. So definitely a different, different experience. Yeah, interesting. 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, 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. 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 he goes by Natty Bumpo.

Oh, Natty Bumpo. Because he's got that Natty Bumpo. I don't know why. I don't know why. I'm going to have to change that. 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. Michael Mann just flipped a coin and it was Hawkeye in the end.

He didn't know anything but Natty Bumpo. So Cooper was one of the first authors to really write like this about frontier life, and he is in the process heavily romanticizing and even advocating for early American colonialism. 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. 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. In the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115.

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, it has no order, system, sequence, or result. It has no life-likeness, no thrill, No, stir. No seeming of reality. 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. Its conversations are, oh, indescribable.

So basically, he's 19th century Dan Brown is what we're starting to. Except not as fun. He's like boring. No, well, Dan Brown's very fun. But like wildly commercially successful. Yes. Critically, people like to pile on. Yeah. But, you know, we're chasing down. What is he's trying to? trying to find the spear that I don't remember the Da Vinci Code.

Is it the Holy Grail? Or like a shroud, like a shroud of Turin or something? Ron Howard made at least two of those movies. Oh, yeah. I can't remember if you made a third. That is wild. Yeah. All right.

So Michael Mann essentially agreed with Mark Twain and acknowledged that, quote, it's not a very good book. 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. 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. 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 man servants. 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.

shows the Native Americans and particularly the settlers as kind of economic equals, if not the settlers in a lower position in many scenarios. I was going to say it may be lower and economically more interdependent, too, in an important way. Which would have been the case, for sure. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So there's a pretty obvious reason for Fedimore Cooper wanting to paint this picture. 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.

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. Some of the cuts in this movie are crazy. That's fine. One other interesting difference is that Cora is actually mixed race in the books and is illegitimate. That is a big difference. 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. The romance angle already doesn't make a ton of sense. Here's my pitch as to why.

So I think that man is very focused on drawing a contrast between West Studi's Magua and Hawkeye. Magua, as the British officer should say. Yeah, but Magua is the inverse, right? He's the foil. His family was murdered and he was taken into slavery, DeLuis' family was murdered, and then he was adopted. 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. And his wife, remarryings, yeah. Yes, and one is not defined by the hatred. Instead, 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. 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, that would have been a third element of like kind of an orphan child.

And maybe he just didn't want to deal with that thematically. 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 adaptation. It's Paul Verhoeven, Starship Troopers. This is bad. I'm not going to finish it. It is. I don't know if anybody finished it.

There were a couple of actors who were like, yeah, I put it down. It was not good. 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. Again, Chingachuk and Uncis 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. All of that is pretty much the same.

The big difference is that Uncis actually falls for Cora and Nathaniel for Alice. And Alice is much more the lead than Cora is. It's also Cora that leaps to her death after Uncis dies, 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. So they kind of just reverse the sisters. 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 British Army, which does not make any sense. So, man's biggest goal in tackling.

this script was to fix what he felt Cooper had broken. He wanted to be as historically accurate as possible and to portray Native Americans as sympathetic and also as actual human beings. Well, I think also complex and also different. They were not a monolith, right? Some of them were allied with the French, some were allied with the British, some were not allied with anyone. Like, again, these are different groups of people with different motives. Yes. And I think this is one of very few movies that does a pretty good job of exploring that. So he started working on the screenplay with Christopher Crow, who would go on to write one of my favorite 90s thrillers Fear. Starring William Peterson of Manhunter.

Yes, of Manhunter, that's right. But immediately they had some major challenges in front of them. First of all, they have to please historians while also making fans of the very historically inaccurate book happy. 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, 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. So this is probably the hardest challenge that they had because many of the languages spoken at this time, I believe it's 1757 as the beginning of the movie. They were either gone by 1992 or had very few native speakers. 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. 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. West Studi actually ends up speaking mostly Mohawk, but did eventually revert to Cherokee, which is his native language. 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.

He studied Depression-era photographs by Dorothea Lange. very famous, if you've ever seen photos of, you know, people in the Dust Bowl. She took those. They're very beautiful. 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. And also a lot of 19th century landscape painters like Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole. 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. 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. So he'd put in the work. He had a pretty great script who's 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. Oh, that's fine. He's back. He's back to cause some problems. So, all right. Man's put together this great pitch where he emphasizes the contemporary relevance of the film. There's early feminism. There's class struggles. The, you know, the commercial motivation for the war. 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. And he tells Roth and his co-vap Roger Burnbaum that this is going to be vivid.

It's going to be realistic and it's going to be historically accurate because he feels an enormous responsibility to get this right. Now, knowing what you know about Joe Roth, what do you think he and Roger Burnbaum said? He says, do we care about that? 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. 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? 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? I can't even remember. It's $425 million worldwide. What was it? And that would be bailar con loboes, dances with wolves. 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. All of the sudden, he was one of the most in-demand prestige directors in Hollywood as well. Yes. So this movie, to your point, was an absolute anomaly. It is a pretty slow-moving, historical, three-hour-long 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. So I rewatched 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. But we do need to talk about it a little bit because it's going to come up a couple times across this episode. 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. Chris, any ideas of Native American portrayal?

Was it great? Was it super accurate? Was it... I'm going to assume... I'm going to assume Hollywood patted itself on the back every time they cast to Native American in the movie, but I'm assuming it wasn't great. I'm assuming, you know, I'm just thinking back to a movie my daughter just watched recently.

Peter Pan. Oh. Cartoon. Not a great representation of Native Americans. No, so I'm assuming it wasn't great. 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, the original westerns, which were shot in upstate and western New York, actually did. 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.

And I've actually heard that those movies were better done. And then things slowly got worse and worse and tell John Wayne. Yeah. And then things get real bad. Yes. So the early sort of big commercial westerns like Stagecoach offered essentially zero native perspective. 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. 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. That is true of the 1936 less of the Mohicans. Those are some very white Italian men in makeup. Right. Or like Italian or Hispanic or, you know, there's any number of... Or just straight up the waspiest man you've ever seen. This. Jared Harris. Charity They didn't care. 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. 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. Actually, John Ford 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. But the indigenous people in these movies are still almost exclusively played by non-native actors. 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. And again, pretty much all of these movies are anchored by the white characters. So like an example of that would be like Little Big Man starring Dustin Hoffman.

Right. You also, very famously in 1973, Chris, what happened? the Oscars? Oh, that's when Marlon Brando sent Sachine Littlefeather to collect his Oscar, and John Wayne said, I'm going to knock her out. Yes, this is nuts. This is nuts. So we talked about this a little bit in the episode on The Godfather. Marlon Brando sent Sassie and Little Feather to the Oscars to collect his Oscar, as Chris said, 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. 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. 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. So in case you don't know, John Wayne wasn't 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. This is the stuff that came out of his own damn mouth, particularly in a 1971 Playboy interview. 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. So that's John Wayne. Now they're trying to take our Oscars. Literally what he was mad about. We're going to cover this movie at some point. movie called The Conqueror. John Wayne plays Gagis Khan. Oh, God. No. Yeah, well, we got to cover it because it's crazy. 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. Somehow John Wayne just got angrier. Well, it turned him into the Hulk. Yeah, I guess. So in the 80s, we talked about this a little bit, but you basically have the commercial death of the Western. Yeah. Outside of Clint Eastwood, there's not much going on. 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. Almost all of the leads outside of Kostner are native actors. And there's some wonderful actors in this.

Graham Green is fantastic. Tantio Cardinal, Rodney Grant. They're all really great, 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. 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. And most importantly to Joe Roth and Roger Burnbaum, 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. We're going to come back to it

for a little bit more of a critical conversation. All right, so Michael Mann has the green light, and he needs his Natty Bumpo, thankfully now Nathaniel Hawkeye. And Chris, he only had one person in mind, and it was Daniel Day Lewis, to which the studio said, Who? Right, yeah. Say, what? 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? Was that my left foot from 1989? That is right. That's Daniel Day Lewis's breakthrough. an Oscar winning role as Christy Brown in My Left Foot. That's right. 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. No, he doesn't yet. And it's like a room with a view. Yes, my beautiful laundrette. Yeah, the unbearable lightness of being my left foot. Yeah. And he was so committed to these perform.

I need a lot of stage work, you know what I'm, but he would disappear into the roles. That's right. He's hard to recognize as himself, for sure, especially across the early roles. Exactly. This is candidly, and I love Harrison Ford. But Harrison Ford brings Harrison Ford to the movie. Yeah, it's like George Clooney.

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

It's hard. Hard. Really hard. I know. 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 Day Lewis is like, no, it's actually the opposite. He's said that the reason he does this is because he wants to be so immersed in the character, 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. Yeah, I think it's a person, you know, the famous example in contrast,

Edie Falco has said, with the soprano, she could show up to set, get in hair and makeup, they would hand her a script. 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. I mean, she's ridiculously talented. And James Gandalfini had to live in Tony Soprano. Yeah. And, you know, there was a darkness to that. I think it does it. It takes a toll on you when you're doing that. Yeah. Yeah. So a little bit about Daniel Day Lewis. 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 Balkin, who headed up Ealing Studios. And his father became the UK poet laureate when Lewis was 11 years old. But when he was young, his father insisted that he attended a working class Southeast London school with some rough and tumble kids. So he got a taste of a different life, although he would later attend some prep schools. 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. When things go well for me, I often think about that. 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 as acting. Do you know what it was,

Chris? 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. So there's the same person, because that's what Ford did, you know, before. He was a carpenter. He was a carpenter, yeah. But did he love it as much as Daniel Day Lewis loved it? I don't know. Because Daniel Day Lewis wants to be the best at everything he does. 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 Theatre School and the rest is history. So as you said, he broke out in the UK in the mid-80s with a room with the view and my beautiful laundrette, which, like, I don't know how big an impact those made in the U.S. Oh, I don't think they made a big impact at all in the U.S.

From a studio perspective. No. Critically, I'm sure they did well. 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. 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. 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... It's coming back. To his credit, he said, I shouldn't have said anything. thing. I shouldn't have announced it. That was silly. Oh, I love him. He's great. 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. 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. So he's like, it's a sign. Now, Michael, which foot is? Is this?

this exactly? It's definitely your left foot. Okay. Yeah. So he eventually agreed, particularly because of the physicality required, and he really liked the opening L. Kunt sequence. He was very into that. Now, there's another person that Michael Mann pursued for a lead role in the film right

away. I noticed I said person and not actor, because prior to this film, this person had never acted before. Chris, do you have any guesses as to who it is? Could you tell me which role? It is one of the leads. Had Eric Schweig never acted before? No, he had, but you're very close.

It was Russell Means? Yes, it was Russell Means, who plays Chingachuk. Very good. Yeah, Uncas and Nathaniel's father. Now, Means was a very well-known Oglala Lakota activist. He was not an actor at all. 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, both for Native rights and also civil rights. He was present at a lot of protests, including the occupation of Alcatraz. 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. And researching it, I was like, they never taught me about this in school. I should probably look into this a little bit more. Oh. So Means was an early political hero to Michael Mann, and Mann felt like the qualities that he naturally embodied made him perfect for Chingachuk, despite

literally zero acting experience. 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 can act. I mean, it is a major character who has the final showdown

with your antagonists, you know, in the end. I think it's actually really impressive, the performance that he turns in. It feels very natural and beautiful. Yeah. 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. 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? Dances with Wolves? That's right. And Russell means hated it. Oh, interesting. He hated it.

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. So he said, despite his. good intentions, actor-director Kevin Costner utilized almost every known stereotype except the drunken Indian. 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. 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. 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, 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. And at three hours long, it's not boring at all.

It made me cry a couple times. However, I completely understand what Russell means is saying here. What do you remember about Dances with Wolves? 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, 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 I also, I agree, I think it's an incredible accomplishment.

I think that movie for what it was made for. I mean, a movie I believe 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. 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. And that includes the Native Americans.

That includes the women. That includes the white antagonists. It includes everybody. 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, you know, dances with wolves feels similar to that to me.

I agree. As wonderful as those native actors are, and they are, Graham Green is particularly wonderful in this, and I think Rodney Grant is too. They don't have a lot of complexity. They don't have a lot of development. They have almost none. 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 1990s. So I guess it's fine for them to have hair sprayed, wind-swept mullets. I don't know. But, yeah, it's an interesting movie that I think we should cover and we should talk about in more detail because, you know, Russell Means is right. At the same time, it's a good movie. It's really well made.

It's very entertaining. but I completely understand why he would think this is so much better. And I do prefer this movie. 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.

He said, what am I doing in the movies? I have been asked whether my decision to act in the last of the Mohicans means that I've abandoned my role as an activist. 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. 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. So let's talk a little bit about Magua, who is played by West Studi.

I think he is one of the most underrated actors ever. I think this performance is unbelievable. I think he deserved a supporting actor nomination for this, which he did not get. he's so scary. And at the same time, when he explains why, you're like, yeah, I get it. I get it. The whole, you know, justified villain trope, this plays really well. It's very well done. Yeah. It does not feel like it's being shoehorned in at all. So Studi is Cherokee. 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.

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. So his first feature film role was in 1989, but he broke out as the leader of the Pawnee Warriors in what film, Chris? Dances with Wolves. Dances with Wolves.

That's right. That's right. He is technically the villain. Dances with Wolves. Even though I don't even think he has a name in that movie. movie, there's one line that hints that 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. 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. You said it earlier, but Native Americans are different people. There is a tendency to paint them all very similarly, and I think that dances with wolves is guilty of that, particularly in the case of West Studi's character. Yeah, it's like the British and the French. They're from the same continent, and yet they're warring, and they're very different culturally. Exactly. Same thing. So Michael Mann also pursued Madeline Stowe for Cora.

She'd broken out a few years earlier in the stakeout opposite Richard Dreyfus and had actually starred with the Wolf Danceman himself, Kevin Costner, in Revenge. That's right. And then Ed Harris in China Moon. She did the two jakes. The Chinat Sound. And the two Jakes, that's right. Yep, 1990. Yeah.

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. 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. 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 dynamic. like this is a very complex character. She headshots a motherfucker with a musket. She sure does. She sure does.

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 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. Maybe you should trust me and your father. and David was like, she's not being decisive.

That's right. And it's just like the quiet frustration that she has during that of having to continue to be like, sure, Duncan, yes, okay. Yeah, Stephen Wattington, very good performance. He's so good in this. He's so good in this. He makes a character that's pretty unsufferable, not only redeemable, but... A hero.

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

No, I think he is one of my favorite performances in this movie, to be honest. It's a really good performance. And it like absolutely breaks my heart when, spoiler alert, he sacrifices himself at the very end. Yeah. So they round out the rest of the cast with, as we just mentioned, Stephen Waddington as Major Duncan Hayward. Jody 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 Onciss, who we did mention in our one battle after another episode. He's also in that as the bounty hunter. I really,

love him. 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 Shweig, one of the reasons he may have been cast was his height. Despite what the execs originally thought about Daniel Day Lewis, he is not short. He's six foot two, and actually a pretty big dude. So they needed Uncas to match him in size, and Eric Schwig is almost the exact same size as him. Russell Means is also very tall. I think he was six two as well. So they needed the family. No, they must be because there's the scene where they're putting Day Lewis and shackles and he stands up and he's shirtless and all of those native actors are around him. Day Lewis doesn't look big compared to those guys. And so you're like, wow, this must be a pretty

big cast. Yeah, I think they cast for his height. And Stephen Waddington also seems pretty big. Oh, he's a huge dude. Yeah, yeah. So Schwig and Day Lewis were sent to a month of training at an anti-terrorist camp that absolutely whipped their butts into shape. They were shooting firearms, running five to eight miles a day, lifting weights for several hours, downing protein shakes. and Schwig was like, this was the best time I had in the whole process, and it was downhill from here. Yeah. So do you know where this movie was shot? It's obviously set in upstate New York.

It is not shot there. Is it shot in the United States? Yes. Vermont? It's North Carolina, where a lot was shot. Yes. Oh, cool. I will tell you, as someone who grew up in this area, it looks like North Carolina.

I don't know. I'm from the West Coast. I have no conception of anything east of Denver. It's very beautiful. there were a couple of big reasons why they did this. 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. 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. 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. I was going to say, a match made in hell. Yes. 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. He looks great in this. He spent a month in the North Carolina Woods, sometimes joined by Michael Mann, but essentially just living out in the wild to understand the skills that Native Americans would have needed at the time. 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. 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?

I'll give you a hint. It's in the opening sequence. Either load or fire the musket? That's right. Handling loading and firing a 12-pound flintlock rifle while running. Yeah. 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. 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 both. Oh, he's just nailing bolt guns akimbo. grabbing muskets, blasting mofos down. At that point, I'm fine with it. It's fine, yeah.

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

They're probably like, at least we don't have to, like, carry him inside, like when he was doing my left butt. At least he's carrying his own 12-pound musket, yeah. Yeah. He also trained with Colonel David Webster, a special forces soldier who taught survival skills to downed pilots. And interestingly, they use the same methods that colonial settlers would have acquired from Native Americans.

To do that, makes sense. 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. Great. Okay. Cool. 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. 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. 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. This is an interesting conversation because Michael Mann was like, but I saw them in a museum, and this is historically accurate. And Russell Means was like, that is a museum built by white people. Like, I'm telling you, this is not quite right.

And it's also just too small. Also, people were smaller back then. Yes. For a whole host of reason. They're not six foot two size, ex-weig, and Daniel Day-Lewis. They were not getting protein shakes every day. No, no, they were not. Although neither was Daniel Day-Lewis at this point, as we will learn.

That's fair, yeah. I believe they did make Russell Means as 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 small. You can see a lot of man thigh. I'm not complaining about that, but I understand his point. 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.

We had to wear them out to see how they looked after 60 miles. And they're doing that. This movie, like the African Queen, does a really good job in making everything seem lived in. Yes. But at a massive scale. Yeah, down to every extra. I think it really looks dirty and 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.

And I do think that sometimes, even when the costuming is really, really excellent, it is let down by the fact that, you know, it doesn't have that layer of grime or dirt on top of it. 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. It took 11 weeks to build. The chosen site near Lake James and North Carolina was so remote that a road had to be built just to access it. It cost $6 million. And after filming, it was dismantled and the land was reseated. This really tested everyone in the crew who was like, Michael, they already have this. But, Because he built it, he can blow it up. 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. 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. Other sources say he was fired because he could not handle man's man-paws getting into every single detail of his work. He was replaced by Elsa Zamberelli, who took over as a costume designer and received on-screen credit. 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. And The Last Emperor has some pretty big scenes as well. And it's gorgeous. Yeah.

So it's not as if he has been only costuming a dozen players. No, no, no. He's just not used to Michael Mann. Mm-hmm. All the wigs were human hair wigs. They were handmade. 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. And fun fact, the moccasins that the actors are wearing are actually mounted on hidden running shoes for the leads so that they're able to maneuver.

I was wondering because they do run at basically full speed through those woods. You would hurt yourself, yeah. Yeah, that would be brutal. Yeah. A hairstylist named Vera Mitchell also walked off set, and there was some drama around. Russell Means and Eric Schwig's beautiful hair. According to Schwig, there was an early dispute about whether or not Unkis and Chingachuk should shave their heads. But Russell Means was basically like, go fuck yourself. I'm not doing that. 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. So they let that one slide. All right, June of 1991, principal photography began near Asheville, North Carolina, and the Blue Ridge Mountains. 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. 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. 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. It didn't seem just to me, but they were spirited and they gave their all. Eric Schwig said the problem started with the producers. 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, 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. There's a lot of night photography in this movie. I mean, it's almost all night. There's like a 45-minute strike. in the middle of the movie that's just one night, basically.

And there's, like, one thing that's shot on a soundstage, and I believe it's when they're in the caves behind the waterfall. Everything else is outside in natural light. 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've got to shoot day-for-night. It's just too difficult to light. It's too hard on the crew. Oh, it's dangerous, too, to be doing. doing some of that in darkness, yeah. Michael Mann is pushing what you could do on film, and I think you would perfect it in heat in terms of night shooting. 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. Now your face is like, how are they possibly getting away with that? Yeah, I don't understand how 20th Century Fox, Michael Mann and DGA director, I am certain. Oh, yeah. do you not understand how they could do that?

Well, part of the appeal was North Carolina. It had less restrictive laws around that. Oh, right. New York would force you to do a union shoot for sure. That's right. 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. Oh, yeah. Chris, can you explain what that means? 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? We will buy the negative, meaning your shot and completed film. There are some stipulations. It has to be between, you know, these running times, and it has to be finished, you know, blah, blah, blah,

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. And therefore, technically, the movie is not financed by the studio. The movie is financed by, again, that bank or, you know, whatever entity is going to give you the money to make your movie. Right. So they're arguing that this means it's technically a lower budget and therefore a non-union crew. Ayatzi was not buying this. And within one week of filming, they successfully organized and unionized the crew.

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, and so they all stuck together. The good news is, as a result, 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. I think it ended up being a good thing. It certainly was not their intention from the beginning. No. Yeah. At the end, they're like, and we flipped all these people to the union and we're the good guys. Yeah, yeah. He's like, no. Shortly after this, Native American actors also,

went on strike demanding better pay and better lodging conditions because they were terrible. 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. It also was not air conditioned and it was 30 miles outside of town. And as you pointed out, these shoots are night shoots. 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 Schwig, they had something like four. 400 people assigned to one bathroom. That may be hyperbole, but also, maybe not.

Even if it's 40 people assigned to a bathroom. Yeah. It's still not enough. No, it's bad. Daniel Day Lewis, Eric Schweig, and Russell Means all joined the picket line with these actors. And apparently the strike was over in about four hours. And thankfully, they got better pay. 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 he had no idea what his ADs were doing. And he has to rely on those people to do those things. I mean, I think you should be paying a little bit of attention to this, but yes. 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. 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. 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. Sadly, Russell Means also experienced racism on set at the hands of the 80s and some other crew members. He was frequently called Chief and Redskin. 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. 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. If you do, then say, Indians over here, white guys over there, and the Jews behind the camera. Thanks, Russell. So he asked that they at least, bare minimum, distinguished between the French Allied and English allied Native extras rather than lumping them

all together. That's a pretty fair request. Yeah, just do us the script does. That's right. So about five weeks into the shoot, in August of 1991, Michael Mann also fired his original DP, Doug Milsum and replaced him with his long-term collaborator Dante Spanote. 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, I need self-confident people with strong egos around me. Spinotie had been off doing another film, was finally available, and Michael Mann just said, come on over, and this decision would maybe come back around later to haunt them.

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. 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. 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. Each scene was taking. making at least 20 takes. There was a closing sequence that they later had to cut that required

upwards of 60 takes. And according to IMDB, we couldn't confirm this anywhere else, but it is a very funny story. 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. And someone's like, it's the sun, Michael. And he's like, excuses are for losers. Turn out. So while everyone is getting exhausted, Daniel Day Lewis stayed pretty strong. And he stayed method, including according to man refusing to eat anything he didn't shoot himself. 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. In fact, Chris, he and Madeline Stowe

lightened the mood by playing jokes on each other and their car rides home at night. And this started with some light, high-speed food fights. But because Daniel Day-Lewis doesn't do anything halfway, he escalated this to a car crash. Great. Yeah. Just snipped her brakes, made sure she, like, you know. 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. Very, very consistent with what Hawkeye would do. This is definitely... Very much.

Definitely him staying in character. Hawkeye noted prankster in this movie. A little bit of a sense of humor. He's got some funny lines in this. Uh-huh. 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. It's entertaining.

I think she was happy to see sort of a sense of humor coming out of him. 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 Lito sending you gross things on set. So Roger Burnbaum 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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, this is not, 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. That was the only thing. He did not listen to that one. 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.

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. 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. So Arthur Schmidt and Dove Heineg were credited as editors, but of course Michael Mann was heavily. heavily involved. No, 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, 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 edits a mess. They were also concerned about it getting lost next to Big Summer Blockbusters, 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 end. edit. Good old fix it in 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. I'm sure. We hear that all the time. So this is my actual major complaint about this movie. It's too short? It's too, it's weirdly short. I agree. 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 lines. Yep. I mean, Eric Schweig and Alice is the big one. That's the main one. It was cut almost entirely. And you get like, I think you get just enough magua. I think we could have used maybe a little bit more. Love him. I agree. Again, I'm not talking, I don't think this is a three hour movie necessarily. At least two and a half. Two 20, two 20. Like, it's under two right now. It's really short.

Yeah. Think about adding 20 minutes and you're just getting the, you know, the uncas. Alice storyline, for example. I mean, yeah, I really noticed it when we were watching. I just felt, oh, wow, we're really, we're careening towards the end now. This is it. 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. 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. But I think this is also really interesting because Dances with Wolves is three hours long. 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. 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. But I do think that Dances with Wolves was a true independent film. Yeah.

If that had been made by a studio, it would not have been the same thing at all. I mean, well, not yet. Kostner eventually would make movies with studios that he would refuse to cut down and then they would fly, you know, in Waterworld and the Postman. But, yes, I do think... Horizon.

Yeah. Although that's independent, but yes. 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. Whereas, again, and especially if you have a producer that's not 100% confident. They're not. In that three-hour cut, exactly. 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. 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. 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. It's still beautiful.

I mean, it's like very affecting. It feels more like she's doing it to flee Magua. 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. Which, like, I think in reality it's both. 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. And also, I mean, I could have done with more interactions between Onkis and Shengachuk and Nathaniel. It's such an interesting dynamic. And when you watch it, you don't actually get a ton. You get just barely enough. I wanted more of him saying, referring to DDL as my white son, which is, I don't know why it's made me laugh every time. 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. 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. 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 MIDI series.

There's just a lot to explore here. Yeah. 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. 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. Well, let's talk about the music a little bit. So the score actually suffered a bit in post as well. I think the end result is great. 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. Oh, interesting. But it really didn't work. So I was going to say, yeah. Yeah, 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. 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 Gael written by Scottish folk musician Dougie McLean. I was wondering. It was out prior to this movie. Yeah. It reminds me, 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. And so, yeah, that's interesting. Man, that song does humans work in this movie. 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's like, it's, you know, orchestrated very differently. It's orchestrated beautifully in the film, much more epic and grand, but that whole thing is pulled from. The whole melody. Yeah, from something else. So that did, I believe, render it ineligible for, the Oscars because it was not original. That would make sense.

So the last of the Mohicans was released on September 25th, 1992. It grossed about $11 million opening weekend. 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. So 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. 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 Day Lewis could pull in audiences,

to which I say, have you seen his hair? It's beautiful. It's long. It's waving. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. The audience wants more about American Indians. So it did win the Academy Award for Best Sound, awarded to Chris Jenkins, Doug Hemphill, and Mark Smith, and Simon Kay. 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? Means publicly theorized that this may have pissed off the Academy and that Mike

Michael Mann may have paid for it with no Oscars. I don't know, especially because I looked up what the best picture nominees were that year, is pretty stacked. It's unforgiven, a few good men, Howard's End, The Crying Game, and Sent Up a Woman, Unforgiven One. I think this deserves to be in there. I would have put it in over Sent of a Woman, and I love Martin Brest. I agree. Out of those, I think that's the weakest of those movies. I don't know, though. I mean, no disrespect to our cinema.

photographer friends, but, you know, we've covered movies and cinematographers get let go, you know, all the time. I agree with you. I'm not sure if I buy that. You know, and it's not like man was some junior director usurping, you know, a veteran in this industry. He's been working for a long time. So, I don't know. That doesn't... It is a bit strange that it's completely shut out of all of the other categories because I... It's pretty amazing. But that could be 20th century Fox decided not to push for it. I mean, as we know, it's who campaign. and how effectively do they campaign and how much money, you know, what was it Cota recently?

They spent more money on marketing it for the Oscars to, you know, success than they did on actually making the film. Well, that makes sense. It was an independent film picked up at Sundance, but yeah. 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. My point is just it could have been that 20th Century Fox decided, you know what, this movie's a little, it's a little, 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. Let's keep our gunpowder dry. It'd also be interesting to look at if 20th Century Fox had any other films. Ah, that's a good point. That were nominated for Oscars that year that they were going for. 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, more of a matinee fantasy than it wants to admit. but it's probably more entertaining as a result. 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 that have breathing sense into their material, but the results are still riveting. So, Chris, how did Last the Mohicans fare in the eye of historians? Does it win the Braveheart Award for complete historical disregard? No.

I think most people agree that for the early 9th, 90s, it's pretty damn good. There's some very small nitpicks. The relationship between Cora and Hawkeye would have been extremely unlikely nigh on impossible. And also, the whole idea that there was one living member of the Mohicans at that time is just simply not true. There were somewhere around 1,200 Mohicans living in Jesuit villages in Massachusetts and with Moravians in Pennsylvania. This is an issue with this source material, though, and Michael Mann justified it by saying he felt Chingachuk represented the last to live a true. traditional Mohican life, and that's what they were saying. By the way, thousands of Mohicans still

alive today across the Hudson River Valley, Wisconsin, and more. As we mentioned, Russell Means took issue both during production and after with that scene in the Huron village where Hawkeye enters. 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. As far as villains go, I don't want to diminish those concerns, but I think he's pretty complex. 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. So that wraps up the coverage of our first Michael Mann film. Chris, what went right? Well, many, many things,

but I will give mine. You know what? I'm not going to give 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. I think West Studio is fantastic. West Studio also in heat. Yes. Michael Mann brings him along for that, although a smaller role. I will give my what went right to the costume team. 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. Elsa Zampelli. James Atchison and Elsa Zampelli. I don't think we give this department enough love on this show. show and the costumes in this movie are fantastic and they had to dress so many people. 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. And so I'd imagine on a show where it sounds like the producers and the A.Ds were not doing a good job of taking care of the cast. No. I wouldn't be so. 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. They look dirty. It looks great. I appreciate that attention to detail. They are dirty. They're living in a Boy Scout camp. All right. Well, I think I am going to give it to Michael Mann, but not just Michael Mann.

I'll 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. 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. 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 this place and this time. 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. 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. And then you still have the British Empire coming in on top of that. 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. And it sort of 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. 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. For him to take on this role, having never acted before, I think he gives such a beautiful performance that scream he lets out at the end when he realizes that Uncas's fallen is one of the most haunting moments in this entire movie. 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. So I will give it to Russell Means, Eric Schwig, West Studie, and so many other fantastic Native actors in this as well. Well, that wraps up our coverage of the Last of the Mohicans. 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. It's a good crew, but did they treat that crew well? I don't know. That's a big question. So we'll find out. Guys, if you're enjoying this podcast, there are a few easy ways to support us. Number one, give us a rating and review on whatever platform you're listening on. Number two, tell a family member or friend, hey, check a few.

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