What was a street-wise Chicagoan, whose childhood experiences in the wild were largely limited to Humboldt Park, doing in the wilderness refighting the French and Indian War?
Making ”The Last of the Mohicans,” one of the most improbable movie projects ever to come out of Hollywood-that`s what.
Writer-producer-director Michael Mann, best known for tough, heavy-on-atmospherics crime thrillers such as ”Thief,” ”Manhunter” and
television`s ”Miami Vice” and ”Crime Story,” is tapping the same vein of interest in 19th Century America mined so successfully by Kevin Costner`s
”Dances with Wolves” and Clint Eastwood`s ”Unforgiven.”
”Mohicans,” which opens Friday, is based on the most enduringly popular of James Fenimore Cooper`s ”Leatherstocking Tales,” a series of pioneer novels, and borrows heavily from a much-admired 1936 Randolph Scott film of the same name that still turns up on late-night television.
Mann, a 1961 graduate of Amundsen High School, draws his inspiration for the project all the way from the `40s when, as a youngster, he saw the film in the basement of a Spaulding Avenue church. The result is epic in scope, a thrill-a-second frontier action-adventure that strives to be historical authentic.
To play the Indian-raised frontiersman Hawkeye, fiction`s first
”authentic American,” Mann`s first and only choice was Daniel Day-Lewis, a slender, shy, soft-spoken, classically educated Englishman of Irish and Lithuanian-Jewish parentage. The Oscar-winning, intensely cerebral actor is best known for his portrayals of a cynical, seductive, philosophical physician in ”The Incredible Lightness of Being” and a nearly paraplegic, raging Irish writer in ”My Left Foot.”
As the strong-willed upperclass Englishwoman Cora Munro, the daughter of a British army colonel caught up in the frontier mayhem of the mid-18th Century French and Indian War, Mann chose Madeleine Stowe, who previously starred as neurotic female victims in such highly contemporary films as
”Closet Land” and ”Unlawful Entry.”
In the key role of Mohican Chief Chingachgook, Hawkeye`s adoptive Indian father, Mann cast a non-actor, American Indian Movement activist Russell Means.
Shot entirely in the wild, this was also a horrifically challenging movie to make in purely physical terms. The cast spent some four months in the rugged mountains of western North Carolina.
Before that, Day-Lewis and other male principals underwent eight months of physical training for the rigors of their roles, plus training in a survivalist camp and exhaustive instruction from the half-dozen ”reenacter” historical scholars Mann hired for the project.
Neither Mann nor Day-Lewis was satisfied until their 1992 Hawkeye was able to load and fire a heavy, clumsy, muzzle-loading frontier rifle on the run-and the running in that hard country was almost always up and down hills. Given all this, plus Hollywood`s economic troubles and Mann`s reputation for fanatical, ”my way,” perfectionism, the money men at Twentieth Century Fox never squirmed when he outlined his ambitious proposal.
”I walked in and sat down and told them I had this idea of doing `The Last of the Mohicans.` I told them I wanted it to be as edgy and immediate and electric as if I was doing a thriller in the streets of Chicago. That was the idea. The last thing in the world I wanted was that it would be a mannered, period, costume drama. I thought it would take a half hour to make the presentation, but they got it immediately and away we went.”
Rather than a hindrance, Mann saw his Chicago background and expertise with street thrillers as essential to the success of the film.
”Chicago had everything to do with it,” he says. ”This isn`t a Hollywood version of the French and Indian War. If you like, you can say it`s the Chicago idea of the French and Indian War.”
Mann says he approached the 1757 story the way he would have handled a movie about Chicago`s St. Valentine`s Day Massacre-making the natural wildness, harsh frontier life and brutal combat of 1757 America as real on the screen as he has made the night streets of Chicago and Miami.
When he decided in 1989 to start work on ”Mohicans,” the first thing the University of Wisconsin English lit major did was ”crack the books.”
Cooper`s novel and both movie versions are based on an actual historical event. In the summer of 1757, British forces under Lieutenant Colonel Monro were besieged at Fort William Henry in upstate New York by French and Indian forces under Gen. Louis Montcalm. The fort fell, but Montcalm generously allowed the British forces to return to the colonial settlements on the seacoast.
Montcalm`s Indian allies, notably the charismatic and ambitious Chief Pontiac, would not accept these merciful terms, however, and laid an ambush for the largely defenseless retreating British column, killing hundreds, among them women and children.
Mann`s exhaustive research included diaries and other first-person accounts by survivors of the ambush, as well as works by such noted historians as Francis Parkman and Allan Eckert and the archival resources of the Smithsonian Institution. He`s extremely proud of an article praising the accuracy of his ”Mohicans” that appeared in Muzzleloader magazine.
”What you thought would be hard turned out to be easy,” Mann says.
”What you thought would be easy, turned out to be hard.”
Building an actual hilltop fort and staging the battle scenes and special effects was ”easy.”
”We had napthalene explosions eight feet above the heads of the actors, and no one got hurt,” he says.
One of the most compelling aspects of the film is the unsettling realism of the combat. It`s achieved, not with a lot of splashing blood as in a Sam Peckinpah western, but through the sound and movement of weapons.
The ”hard” part, Mann says, was replicating all the weapons and artifacts in detail. The porcupine quill knife sheaths had to be woven in the particular pattern of the individual tribes. ”They each took four weeks to make, and I needed 1,200 of them.”
He apologized that the ”Killdeer” long rifle used by Hawkeye in the film was a design that actually was not developed until 15 years after the 1757 battle.
As Mann, Means and others complained, Cooper`s original novel-credited with creating the mythic stereotype of the primitive ”noble savage”-was ponderously written, poorly researched and racist. Mark Twain made a lot of money ridiculing Cooper`s books on the lecture circuit a half-century later.
”Cooper had a horror of miscegenation,” Mann says.
The director ”pretty much” threw away Cooper`s original story line and came up with a plot line of his own. Instead of a sexless hero slavishly devoted to British authority, Mann`s Hawkeye is fiercely independent and has a passionate love affair with the well-bred Cora.
In the book, Hawkeye`s adoptive Mohican brother Uncas loves Cora, whom Cooper had made an illegitimate mulatto daughter of the colonel to avoid any hint of a romance between an Indian and a white woman. In Mann`s film, Uncas` love interest is the fair-haired younger sister Alice, and Cora is fully white, a self-possessed product of London`s Grosvenor Square who takes to the frontier as fearlessly as she does to the half-naked Hawkeye.
Much of the story is driven by the bloody-mindedness of the ostensible villain, Huron warrior Magua (Pontiac). He was played stereotypically in the 1936 film by Bruce Cabot, but in Mann`s movie is portrayed by American Indian actor Wes Studi as a complex, brooding almost Shakespearean character seeking revenge for the slaughter of his own wife and children by the British.
Means and Studi both say they were attracted to the script because the Indian characters were not savages, as in westerns like ”Stagecoach”;
victims, as in Costner`s ”Dances with Wolves,” or anthopological curiosities, as in the controversial recent film ”The Black Robe.” Instead, they`re very complicated, individual human beings. . .
”I`d like to think of this as a breakthrough,” Studi says. ”People
(Indian actors) have begun to put work into it and study and make a real career of (acting). You have to begin to believe you can actually be this thing. You say, `Why not? I can do that.` Acting has been so far removed from most of our lives, it`s hard to give it up as a dream and begin to do it. Now I`d like to play Iago.”
For Madeleine Stowe, playing Cora was an experience she will not soon forget.
”I loved being completely submerged in that world,” she says. ”It was incredibly difficult for me to leave. We were so wrapped up in it that Daniel and Michael and I couldn`t imagine not being in it anymore.”
She, like Day-Lewis, confessed to being stunned by the realism of the violence, but Mann had the last word on that.
”This was happening in the middle of a war,” he says. ”It was a nasty, brutal war and people were fighting and dying. In a way, don`t forget, this was the first total war. This was war waged against the civilian populations, which neither the French nor the English would have done in Europe. But they didn`t hesitate to do it against the colonial population. It didn`t happen again until the 20th Century.”
