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Dances with Wolves (1990)

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• In the opening scene where two doctors are examining John Dunbar, the man on the table is Kevin Costner's stand-in. The two people playing the doctors are actually the film's producer, Jim Wilson on the left and director/star Costner on the right. The voices were dubbed by other actors.
  
  
• Graham Greene, who plays Kicking Bird, also plays Edgar Montrose in "The Red Green Show" (1991). In one episode of that series, Edgar mentions "Dances With Wolves", and says the "native guy" (Kicking Bird) should have gotten the Oscar.
  
  
• With the exception of the opening Civil War scenes (which were shot last), the film was shot in sequence because of the weather. They needed it to correspond with the time sequence in the film because of so much outdoor shooting. Most films are not shot in sequence.
  
  

• The feasting scene after the buffalo hunt, where Dunbar and Wind in His Hair become friends and exchange their gifts, was actually shot indoors inside a Quonset hut because it was so cold outside.
  
  
• Filmed during a drought, water had to be trucked into the Fort Sedgwick location to fill up the pond.
  
  
• Two Socks was played by two wolves. One was called Buck and the other was called Teddy, and both were kept on set at all times.
  
  
• Approximately 25% of the dialog is not in English.
  
  
• Many of the native Indians were visibly moved by the scene where the Sioux encounter a field full of dead, skinned buffalo.
  
  
• The buffalo herd comprised 2000 animals, the largest herd in America.
  
  
• Only one take a day could be made of the buffalo stampede as the animals would often run a distance of 10 miles. It would take the wranglers all day to round them up again.
  
  
• Fort Sedgwick actually had a floor that could be lowered several feet for doing low-angle shots.
  
  
• Paint was used to create the effect of a swathe of land flattened by buffalo.
  
  
• For the scene where Two Socks is being shot at by the soldiers, the wolf was actually hemmed into a small pen with puffs of smoke popping off around him. The animal was chained within the pen to prevent him escaping.
  
  
• Close to a million feet of film was shot in total.
  
  
• 9 cameras were utilized in the buffalo hunt.
  
  
• The man seen initially telling the wolf to go home when Dunbar is riding out to visit his friends is actually the trainer. He was bitten in the leg when the wolf chased him, so Costner had to run himself during the next shot. He kept throwing pieces of raw meat to keep the wolf from biting him.
  
  
• There were two wolves used. One had to have the milky white socks painted on him.
  
  
• The scene where we see Cisco jumping around in the corral just before the Sioux party steals him was a 'stolen' shot. The horse was just letting off steam, and they caught part of it and slipped it in because it looked so good and fit the scene.
  
  
• Graham Greene's character, Kicking Bird, is supposed to be the adoptive father of Stands With A Fist, played by Mary McDonnell; however, in real life, McDonnell is actually 2 months older than Greene.
  
  
• During the scene where the buffalo is charging at the young Indian, the buffalo is actually charging at a pile of its favorite treat: Oreo cookies.
  
  
• Viggo Mortensen was originally cast to play John Dunbar.
  
  
• The buffalo hunt and several other sequences were filmed on the 55,000-acre Triple U Ranch owned by Roy Houck, who had served as South Dakota's lieutenant governor in the 1950s; he gave the filmmakers considerable assistance in managing the logistics of the sequence.
  
  
• Two of the domesticated buffalo used in the production were borrowed from singer Neil Young.
  
  
• Because of budgetary overruns and general industry reluctance to invest in a Western, Kevin Costner was forced to dig deep into his own pockets to make up the film's $18 million budget. As it then went on to gross over $100 million, he himself earned an estimated $40 million from his original investment.
  
  
• To add realism to the movie, a language coach was brought in to teach Lakota to cast members who did not know how to speak it. Because of the difficulty in learning the language, the "gendered speech" aspects of the language were omitted from the lessons. When native speakers of Lakota saw the finished film, they found it amusing to hear Lakota warriors talking like women.
  
  
• To prevent any possible animal cruelty Kevin Costner's Tig Productions spent $250,000 on animatronic buffalo to be used in the climactic buffalo hunt.
  
  
• Michael Blake wrote a spec screenplay in the early 1980s. When Kevin Costner came across the project in 1986, he suggested to Blake that he should turn it into a novel, thereby increasing his chances of getting it made into a film. Blake did so and, after many rejections, found a publisher in 1988. Costner immediately snapped up the movie rights with an eye to directing it himself.
  
  
• The highest grossing Western of all time, with a domestic take of $184 million. It achieved this figure without ever reaching #1 on the box-office charts.
  
  
• Filmed in South Dakota, which is mainly wide-open rolling hills. The cornfield at the beginning of the film had to be specially grown, and the few trees that were on the chosen location had to have their leaves painted different shades of red and brown to signify fall.
  
  
• Pope John Paul II once mentioned that John Barry's score was one of his favorite pieces of music.
  
  
• Kevin Costner originally considered casting Marlon Brando in the role later played by Maury Chaykin.
  
  
• That is Rodney A. Grant's real long, flowing hair. He does not wear a wig in the film.
  
  
• As a joke, most of the cast and crew assigned each other Indian names. Editor Neil Travis was "Over the Hill" and the script supervisor was "Sand In Her Teeth" because she used to smile a lot.
  
  
• Those are actual dead deer that Kevin Costner pulls out of the river. To look authentic the carcasses had to be heavy, so animals killed on the highways were collected for the scene.
  
  
• Robert Pastorelli wore a slightly raised breastplate for the scene in which his character Timmons is hit by arrows.
  
  
• Cinematographer Dean Semler's daughter was a horse wrangler on the film. She broke both of her wrists when the horse she was riding was suddenly spooked and threw her.
  
  
• The studio wanted the final cut to be 2 hours 20 minutes. They had to settle for Kevin Costner's cut of 3 hours.
  
  
• This is the last movie that editor Neil Travis cut using physical film. He has since moved on to digital editing, using Montage and Avid.
  
  
• Graham Greene's first reaction when he learned that most of the film was going to be in Lakota was, "I don't speak that".
  
  
• Kevin Costner's spreading out of his arms while doing his suicide run at the start of the film was a completely spontaneous gesture that took his stunt coordinator by surprise.
  
  
• John Barry agreed to score the film immediately after reading the script.
  
  
• Dean Semler first had an inkling about how important his Oscar win was to his native Australia when he was on a night flight to Sydney and the stewardess asked him if he had it with him and if he would mind showing it to the passengers.
  
  
• Kevin Costner's daughter Annie Costner, playing Stands With A Fist as a child, is seen running away from the Pawnee party that killed her family in the dream sequence. She looks back over each shoulder as she runs because Costner told her to look over her right shoulder and she didn't know her right from her left - she was only 6 years old at the time.
  
  
• Director Kevin Reynolds received "special thanks" in the credits due to his helping Kevin Costner direct the famous buffalo hunt scene.
  
  
• Michael Blake initially intended the story to be a screenplay, but after working with Kevin Costner and producer Jim Wilson on an earlier film, he was convinced by them to write it as a novel first - both to ensure the story would be told completely without having to work within the bounds of a standard-length script, and also because they believed the story would be more easily sold as a novel than as a screenplay.
  
  
• The film ran over budget, forcing Kevin Costner to make up the overages personally. That caused rumors that the film would be another out-of-control, disappointing western like Heaven's Gate (1980). In fact, some studio people were referring to it as "Kevin's Gate". It went on to win the first Best Picture Oscar for a western since Cimarron (1931), over 50 years before it.
  
  
• The very last scene shot in the film was the one where Kevin Costner rides in to tell them the buffalo had arrived, one of the few out-of-sequence shots in the film. While the cameras were on him, riding only in pants and a shirt, the cast and crew were in heavy coats because of the freezing weather.
  
  
• Lt. John Dunbar carries two guns in the film--a Henry 1860 rifle made specially by Uberti and a Colt 1851 Navy cap-and-ball revolver.
  
  
• The liver that Wind In His Hair proffers to Dunbar after the buffalo hunt are actually made of cranberry Jell-o.
  
  
• Just as Timmons bids farewell to Lieutenant Dunbar at Fort Sedgwick, he commands the two lead horses (of four horses in total) to a start with a "Jake n' Jim!" Jake Eberts and Jim Wilson are the names of the film's Executive Producer and Producer, respectively.
  
  
• The helmet that Ten Bears is holding when he talks about the "men who came during the time of his grandfather's grandfather" is a typical helmet worn by the Conquistadors -- Spanish soldiers and explorers who conquered large parts of both Americas between the 15th and 19th centuries.
  
  

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