LAST OF THE MOHICANS

Production Notes

A Morgan Creek International Presentation of a Michael Mann Film, "The Last Of The Mohicans" is directed by Michael Mann, who produced with Hunt Lowry. The executive producer is James G. Robinson. The screenplay is by Michael Mann and Christopher Crowe, based on the novel by James Fenimore Cooper. The film stars Jodhi May, with Steven Waddington, Eric Schweig, Russell Means, Wes Studi and Maurice Roeves.

The film's director of photography is dante Spinotti; the production designer is Wolf Kroeger. Dov Hoenig, A.C.E., and Arthur Schmidt are the film editors. The music is by Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman.

Most Americans first came into contact with Cooper's novel as schoolchildren, but Michael Mann's memory of "The Last Of The Mohicans" begins with the 1936 screen adaptation. "After I started on 'Mohicans', I realised that 'The Last Of The Mohicans' is probably the first film I saw as a child", Mann says. "It was a black and white print and I must have been three or four--it's the first sense memory I have of a motion picture". Starring Randolph Scott as Hawkeye, this earlier film was based on a screenplay by Philip Dunne.

Foremost in the writer-director's intentions was the desire to make the 18th Century world and his characters dynamic, immediate and actively realistic.

While parts of James Fenimore Cooper's 1825 novel are very powerful, much of the book is not factual, especially in it's portrayal of Native American people.

Where Mann did find the novel was most accurate was in relating the events surrounding the siege and eventual fall of the British Fort William Henry to the french, and the portrayal of characters such as Tamenund. the director also drew from the historian Parkmont, the diaries of Compte de Bougainville and the work of Simon Shama and Howard Zinn.

The main influence of the 1936 film was Dunne's portrayal of Hawkeye as a strong individual, a man over whom no other had domain. Those political attitudes as well as those of courtship and materialism would have come from his Mohican childhood. Born to Scots-Irish parents, Nathaniel (Hawkeye) was raised by Chingachgook from age two. The Hawkeye we meet in Michael Mann's "The Last Of The Mohicans", then, is a synthesis of two cultures.

Telling the love story of Hawkeye and Cora Munro, two people who meet across cultural and class barriers, presented new challenges. Not only has the subtext of many of the characters been filled in after considerable research, but several of the relationships andassociations have been changed. Cooper only hinted at an engagement of sorts between Heyward and Alice. Also, in Cooper's novel Uncas is drawn to Cora, and, given Cooper's attitudes, a mixed racial background was a requisite, so Cora is a dark-haired mulatto. Mann took the liberty of creating an overt romance between Hawkeye and Cora, which occurs during the collapse of manners and custom under the pressure of war. Heyward becomes the unrequited suitor, having betrayed his finer qualities out of blind obedience to British interests.

Another challenge in bringing "The Last Of The Mohicans" to the screen was finding the proper physical setting for the story. "Finding the woodlands that the events took place in proved virtually impossible. They don't exist anymore", remarks Michael Mann. "The land that James Fenimore Cooper wrote about was ancient forest with 400 to 500-year-old trees, a high canopy and little or no brush. The shocking state of affairs is that we found only two small pockets of old growth forest in North Carolina and one in Pennsylvania that approximated this continent in 1757."

The second act of "The Last Of The Mohicans" is the battle for Fort William Henry between the French and the British, each side aided by it's numerous Native American allies. The actual building of the fort proved to be one of the most daunting aspects of the film. Travelling there several times, Mann and production designer Wolf Kroeger were able to get a picture of the fort's strategic positioning to command the topography around it. Historical societies provided illustrations, drawings and plans showing details that would eventually be helpful to the designers; specifics regarding the type of timber that was used to fortify the structure and the kind of joints and nails that existed within the structure were also available.

While Kroeger accompanied Mann on numerous scouts of different lakes all over the east coast region to search for the site, art director Richard Holland was hard at work on researching and building a 1-to-20 scale model of what fort William Henry would look like. After numerous helicopter scouts and trekking through mountains and valleys, Mann chose the site at Lake James, in North Carolina's Burke and McDowell counties.

It was very hard to visualise where it should be cleared, where the fort ought to be sited, the French batteries place, etc. Kroeger and Holland commissioned local surveyors to do a topographical model of the site. The surveyors marked various points of the forest so that when Mann and Kroeger were walking within it, they could look at the model and see exactly where they were. The total size of the region was 38 acres. once the land was graded, the foundation of the fort was laid in concrete. A costly venture, this proved well worth the effort when the rainy season came. At times there were storms so fierce that all that could be seen, after the land had washed away, was the concrete foundation that the company had recently laid.

The building of Fort William Henry was broken down into three phases: the grading of the land, the concrete foundation, and the building of the fort's wooden structure. Almost all of the timber that was needed to build the fort came from local sources. Every log that was large enough from the clearing of the land for construction was recycled back into the fort; those that were too small were eventually used in building the trenches, dressing the set or making baskets. Practically everything that was cut down was used in one way or another.

Approximately 130 carpenters were needed when the "cladding" of the fort began - fortifying the structure with logs, nails and hinges. Local blacksmiths were also secured to manufacture authentic hardware that would correctly replicate the period. Groups of set dressers were brought in to make baskets and manufacture the multiplexity of detail needed to make a historical reality believable. Everyone was required to attend a safety meeting once a week. As a result, no accidents occurred during the entire process.

From bastion to bastion, the Fort William Henry structure at Lake James measured 400 feet by 300 feet. The total clearing that was required reached over 25 acres. From the grading of the land to the final detail of dressing the set, the entire project took only eleven weeks - far less time than anyone had imagined, especially with weather conditions offering a range from pounding rainstorms to temperatures over 100 degrees.

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