Graham greene dances with wolves12/31/2023 Some little known buffalo facts: 3500 were used in the production, with two of the tamed ones belonging to rocker Neil Young. Reynolds, who gave Costner one of his first breaks with Fandango (1985) would direct him again in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), as well as the disastrous Waterworld (1995). I think they can." Despite his independent streak, Costner still knew when to ask for help: friend and director Kevin Reynolds helped him film the difficult buffalo hunt scene. Somebody else might have made it shorter, because they don't think people can sit with this movie. I wanted to see it in the Native American language. Somebody else might not have done subtitles. They go in for the completion of something they want to see. People don't go into directing for power. Costner defended his atypical decisions with passion: "You've got to want to do it because you believe in your story. A tremendous amount of time and resources were allocated to the learning and delivery of the Lakota Sioux dialect, making Dances the first major feature film to use authentic Indian language onscreen with subtitles. This was done in order to ensure weather realism from scene to scene, since so much of the action takes place outdoors. In a marked departure from a typical shoot, almost every scene (save the opening Civil War ones) were filmed in sequence. As it turns out, I think he's done some of his best acting work in this movie."Īs a first-time director, Costner impressed many not only with the ambitiousness of the epic project but his ability to handily pull it off: the project spanned a five-month shoot schedule on location in South Dakota with over 700 cast members and extras with temperatures ranging from a boiling 115 in the height of the summer months down to 20 degrees as the chilliness of Autumn set in. Blake explained, "I said, 'Kev, I don't know if anyone is going to really believe in you after seeing your other movies.' And he said, 'Don't worry about it.' One thing I've learned about Kevin is that you do not bet against him, no matter what he's going to do. Costner soon agreed, deeming the book, "the clearest idea of a movie I'd ever read." Although Blake always saw Costner in the director's chair, he had another actor in mind when writing the story: Viggo Mortensen, most recently of The Lord of the Rings trilogy fame. Blake obliged, producing a tome which thoroughly engaged Wilson and helped him visualize the story. According to Blake from a 1990 Rolling Stone article, Costner was instantly attracted to the project but strongly urged the writer to write the story as a novel first versus a script. Their continued friendship with Blake provided for an evening the writer spent at the Costner house several years later in which he first described the idea for Dances with Wolves in preparation for developing it as a screenplay. In subsequent years, Wilson and Costner would create a production company and make seven films together, including Dances with Wilson in the producer's seat. The film's greatest contribution was the initial collaboration between Costner, the film's director, Jim Wilson, and the scriptwriter Michael Blake. The roots of Dances with Wolves were seeded 8 years earlier, with Costner's first screen credit, a largely forgettable offering titled Stacy's Knights (1983). The film was nominated for twelve Academy Awards and won seven, including Best Picture and Best Director for Costner, beating out the critics' darling Goodfellas (1990) and its director, Martin Scorsese. Despite all the ominous signs, Dances with Wolves opened to enthusiastic audiences, eventually grossing over 400 million in worldwide box office receipts. The critics were kind but ultimately panned the offering as an exercise in self-indulgence: one remarked that Costner's Indian name would have been more accurate as "Obsesses with People Silhouetted Against Horizons." Concerns grew as budgets began to overflow and the shooting schedule continued to be extended industry insiders tagged the project as "Kevin's Gate", referring to the infamous production catastrophe of Heaven's Gate (1980) ten years before. Accordingly, he was unable to secure any funding for the project through typical US channels, ultimately getting aid from a British investor and paying the rest out of his own pocket. The film was a hard sell: Westerns were not in vogue at the time, not to mention that Costner was insistent on keeping the running time at a potentially-lethal three hours as well as relying on the heavy use of subtitles. Leading man Kevin Costner made his directorial debut in 1990 with Dances with Wolves, the fictional tale of a despondent white man who regains his sense of purpose with a tribe of American Indians against the backdrop of the western frontier.
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