The Roger Ebert Experience is proud to select, in the best picture category, the epic western Dances with Wolves.
At almost 4 hours, it seems long, but I remember it going by very quickly the first time I saw it. Terrific cast, wonderful story and great acting. Rodney A Grant is probably my favourite character in the movie. Lots of people get down on Costner for whatever reason, but he's had some terrific films.
Dances with Wolves is a
1990 epic film which tells the story of a United States Lieutenant who travels to the American Frontier to find a military post. He eventually befriends a local Sioux tribe.
[1] Developed by director/star
Kevin Costner over 5 years, the film (released
November 9,
1990) has high production values
[1] and won 7
Academy Awards (1990) and the
Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Drama.
[2] Much of the dialogue is in the
Lakota language with
English subtitles, unusual for a film at the time of its release. It was shot in
South Dakota and
Wyoming.
In 2007,
Dances with Wolves was selected for preservation in the United States
National Film Registry by the
Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
[3]
Originally written as a
spec script by
Michael Blake, it went unsold in the mid-
1980s. It was
Kevin Costner who, in early
1986 (when he was relatively unknown), encouraged Blake to turn the screenplay into a novel, to improve its chances of being adapted into a film. The novel manuscript of
Dances with Wolves was rejected by numerous publishers but finally published in paperback in
1988. As a novel, the rights were purchased by Costner, with an eye to his directing it.
[4] Actual filming lasted from
July 18 to
November 23,
1989. Most of the movie was filmed on location in
South Dakota, but a few scenes were filmed in
Wyoming. Filming locations included the
Badlands National Park, the
Black Hills, the Sage Creek Wilderness Area, and the
Belle Fourche River area. The buffalo hunt scenes were filmed at the
Triple U Buffalo Ranch near
Pierre, South Dakota, as were the fort Sedgwick scenes, the set being constructed on the property.
[5]
Because of budget overruns and production delays, and the general perception, after the fiasco of
Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, then considered one of the most mismanaged
Westerns in
film history, Costner's project was
satirically dubbed "Kevin's Gate" by Hollywood critics and skeptics during the months prior to its release.
[6]
The language spoken in the film is a fairly accurate, although simplified[
citation needed], version of the actual
Lakota language. Lakota Sioux language instructor Doris Leader Charge (1931--2001) was the on-set Lakota dialogue coach and also portrayed Pretty Shield, wife of Chief Ten Bears, portrayed by
Floyd Red Crow Westerman.
[7]
According to the "Making Of"
documentary on the Special Edition
Dances With Wolves DVD, not all of the buffalo were computer animated and/or puppets. In fact, Costner and crew employed the largest domestically owned buffalo ranch, with two of the domesticated
buffalo being borrowed from
Neil Young, and used the herd for the hunting scene. The hunt chase was filmed live and Costner did his own stunts for the shots. The only computer animation and puppetry special effects that were used were for the shots of the buffalo falling.
Despite portraying the adopted daughter of
Graham Greene's character Kicking Bird, Mary McDonnell, then 37, was actually two months older than Greene, and less than two years younger than
Tantoo Cardinal, the actress playing her adoptive mother. In addition, McDonnell was extremely nervous about shooting her
sex scene with
Kevin Costner, requesting it be toned down to a
more modest version than what was scripted.
[8]