LAST MANN STANDING

I think I saw it as a kid in the basement of a church, which must have been in the late Forties. It’s funny, this thing had just always been on my mind. So that’s where it came from. It’s always been there.

So is your film an adaptation of Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel The Last Of The Mohicans: A Narrative Of 1757 or a remake of George B. Seitz’s 1936 film adaptation?

I used a lot of different sources. The novel’s not any good. A really great document was the screenplay for the 1936 movie by Philip Dunne. I made sure it got a screen credit in my film. It was a very good screenplay. The film itself doesn’t live up to the screenplay. That in a way became the spine in advance for what I did.

BY 1992, HEAT auteur Michael Mann had made a name for himself with a series of visually stylish contemporary crime thrillers steeped in the legacy of Michelangelo Antonioni, Stanley Kubrick and Jean-Pierre Melville. Thief, Manhunter and L.A. Takedown traded the emotion drenched tropes of the genre with a cold, procedural reality punctuated by shocking moments of visceral brutality. Not only that, he had changed the face, and the pastel-shaded sartorial stylings, of the TV buddy cop series as executive producer on Miami Vice And then he turned his attention to the period drama – albeit an action-packed period drama. Not that he was a stranger to historical storytelling. Mann’s expressionistic 1983 adaptation of F. Paul Wilson’s novel The Keep, his self-proclaimed “World War II fairy tale,” had already seen him travel back to war torn Romania, but with The Last Of The Mohicans, the director found a story perfectly suited to his widescreen cinematic vision. Mohicans was also an introduction to Daniel Day-Lewis, then an arthouse darling after bravura performances in films like Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot and Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, to blockbuster land.

With the release of both the theatrical and director’s cut of Mohicans on Blu-ray, Empire spoke to Mann about his epic tale of a romance caught in the crossfire of one of the most savage military conflicts in US history.

What inspired you to make The Last Of The Mohicans?

In 1990 I had just finished doing Miami Vice and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. I had been thinking back to when I was three or four and my memories of the original The Last Of The Mohicans movie.

What were the challenges working on a production of that scale shot in remote locations? It was a challenge and that’s the thrill. It was a huge production. We built a replica of Fort William Henry! The fort was real on three or four sides. All the interiors were real interiors. It was a real fort! Compared with looking at a green screen and seeing a piece of tape and telling the actor, “See that piece of tape? That’s not a piece of tape, it’s Fort William Henry!” [Laughs] I’d rather build the real thing!

How was working with Daniel Day-Lewis?

He was great. We became lifelong friends. He had the same ambitions that I had to just get it right. He thought I was just crazy for wanting him to do it. I remember walking in London in the middle of the night talking about this. It wasn’t the complexity of the character he was questioning, it was the physicality. But then he started training. For about eight months. Then when he came over to the States to learn survival skills, he could do everything that Hawkeye does, which is to say he could do everything that Daniel Boone was able to do.

Do you recall a favourite memory filming in the mountains of North Carolina?

I have many. All of it! There’s not just one favourite part, but directorial vanity achieved an apex with one crane shot that was insane. We started on a French cannon firing, then a Steadicam walked onto a crane that lifted up and you saw the whole of the battlefield and everything was happening all at once. I was able to call on a radio and tell which gun or cannon to fire or which group should attack the fort. It was one of those things, after several takes, I already had the shot but it was so exciting I did a few more takes anyway [Laughs].

DAVID MICHAEL BROWN THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS ULTIMATE EDITION AND DEFINITIVE DIRECTOR’S CUT ARE OUT NOW ON BLU-RAY.