Twelve Monkeys

"It's one thing to get lost in your own madness, but to become lost in somebody else's madness is weirder." – Terry Gilliam

How do you know when someone is crazy? This is a question that filmmaker Terry Gilliam tries to answer in many of his films, for he is obsessed by the notion of insanity – what makes someone insane and how do others view this person. Is someone really crazy or do they simply have a different view of the world than the rest of society? In the past, Gilliam's films have presented characters that tend to blur the boundary between sanity and madness, but perhaps his most complex treatment of this subject is Twelve Monkeys (1995). It is with this project that the filmmaker combines his long standing obsession of breathtaking visuals with his knack for working closely with actors. This combination has resulted in more mature films for Gilliam who is normally associated with stylish overkill: films that tend to let the visuals overwhelm the story and characters. And make no mistake, Twelve Monkeys contains some of the most stunning images you are ever going to see but never at the expense of the story or its characters and herein lies one of the reasons why Gilliam remains one of the most interesting people working in film today.

Twelve Monkeys is a film that constantly plays with, distorts, and more often than not, manipulates time. The film begins in the year 2035. A deadly virus has wiped out almost all of humanity, leaving the survivors to take refuge deep underground. Only the occasional foray up to the surface in protective gear by a select group of "volunteers" offers any clues as to what went wrong. James Cole (Bruce Willis) is one such volunteer who is particularly good at retrieving information. As a result, he soon finds himself being sent back in time to find out how the virus originated and who was responsible. Unfortunately, he goes back too far, arriving in 1990 and is promptly thrown into a rather nightmarish mental hospital in Baltimore where he meets Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), a fellow inmate with a loopy sense of reality that feeds all sorts of paranoid delusions of grandeur. Cole also encounters Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) a beautiful doctor who feels sympathy for him and his plight.

As Cole travels back and forth in time he begins to realize that one of the most important clues to the source of the deadly virus may lie in the rather enigmatic underground organization known only as The Army of the 12 Monkeys. Soon, Railly and Goines begin to play integral roles in Cole's search as he consistently crosses paths with them. But is this all taking place in Cole's mind? Is he really humanity's only hope at averting a catastrophic disaster or is he just insane? From the first shot to the film's conclusion we are never quite sure of Cole's sanity or lack thereof. It is just one of many questions that the audience must think about not only during the film but long after it ends.

The seeds of Twelve Monkeys lie in an obscure French New Wave film called La Jetee (1962) made by Chris Marker. The film was composed entirely of black and white photographs and set in Paris after World War III. It was an apocalyptic vision in reaction to the threat of nuclear annihilation that became prominent in the 1950s and 1960s. Writers David and Janet Peoples were approached by producer Robert Kosberg to do an adaptation of La Jetee. The screenwriting couple wasn't that keen on the idea, however. "We couldn't see the point. It's a masterpiece and we didn't see that there was anyway to translate that masterpiece," David remarked in an interview. And he was no slouch to the art of screenwriting, having rewritten the screenplay for Blade Runner (1982) and penned the brilliant Clint Eastwood film, Unforgiven (1992).

Kosberg got the Peoples to watch La Jetee again and the couple began to see possibilities for a different, more detailed take on the material. "How would we react to people who showed up and said 'Oh I've just popped up from the future' and in turn how would that person deal with our reaction." With this in mind, David and Janet set out to write a challenging piece of fiction that not only manipulated our conventional views of time but that also dealt with the notion of madness. Janet explained in an interview, "We were very interested in asking questions like 'Is this man mad? And how about the prophets of the past, were they mad? Were they true prophets? Were they coming from another time? What are all the different possibilities?'" The film's script argues that certain people who are classified insane by society at large may not really be crazy at all but are in actuality presenting ideas that are way ahead of our time. And perhaps the blame for this misunderstanding should be leveled at the psychiatric profession which, as one character in the film observes, has become the new religion of a society that has deserted traditional faith for modern technology.

After showing the finished screenplay to Marker and getting his blessings, the Peoples were faced with the daunting task of finding someone who would not only click with the material but also have the visual flair that the story needed. The couple figured that the only director to handle such tricky subject matter was somebody like Ridley Scott or Terry Gilliam. The theme of madness that plays such a prominent role in the script fit right in with Gilliam's preoccupations and so he seemed the natural choice to direct. As luck would have it the filmmaker was between projects and looking for work after several years of seeing potential projects fall through for various reasons.

Gilliam was also eager to take a lot of Hollywood money (a $30 million budget) and create a strange art film that would fly in the face of the traditional mainstream movie. "The idea that someone's writing a script like this in Hollywood and getting the studio to pay for it was pretty extraordinary. So I thought let's continue to see how much money we can get the studio to spend." Gilliam's battles with Hollywood studios are the stuff of legend – most notably his struggle with Universal over the release of Brazil (1984). They wanted to revoke the director's final cut privileges to insert a happier ending instead of Gilliam's decidedly downbeat ending. Gilliam's vision prevailed in the end, but the ordeal left him understandably wary of further studio involvement. He had reconciled somewhat with Hollywood by making The Fisher King (1991) which turned out to be a surprise commercial and critical success.

Architecture plays an important role in Terry Gilliam's films and Twelve Monkeys is no different. "I've always used architecture as if it was a character." To this end, Gilliam found all sorts of intriguing architecture to populate his film. This included the transformation of an 1820's prison into a 1990's mental hospital where the film's protagonist, James Cole first meets the Jeffrey Goines. The director found that the structure was designed like a wheel with spokes and hub. And so Gilliam used one section where three spoke-like parts headed off into nowhere. "It seemed to me [that] this trifurcated room was right for multiple personalities." This feeling of madness is further amplified by the extensive use of skewed, off-kilter camera angles that are often shot at low angles to constantly distort and disorient the scene. "We started doing it and it got more and more fun to see how far we could push it because I wanted to create an atmosphere that you don't know whether this guy is crazy or whether he actually does come back from the future." The unusual camera angles not only mimic Cole's confused state but also reflect Jeffrey's manic, hyperactive worldview. By presenting the mindsets of these two characters in such a fashion, Gilliam is inviting us to see the world through their eyes and in the process offer a new, unique take on the world that we might not have been aware of before.

Gilliam was not just content to challenge mainstream audiences with unusual visuals and subject matter, but he also wanted to mess with people's perception of certain movie stars by casting box office names like Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis against type. "One of the reasons [for doing Twelve Monkeys] was taking Bruce and putting him into situations and asking of him things I don't think he's ever done before or that people haven't seen him do ... and with Brad Pitt it's the same thing. Brad is pretty laconic in some ways. Suddenly he's a blabbermouth, jabbering away at high speed. I love doing that, playing with the public's perception of that star; otherwise, it wouldn't be fun." As a result we get a very different Bruce Willis here than we have come to expect. Gone are the wisecracks and smart-aleck attitude and instead we see Willis impart a real wounded sensibility to the character of James Cole. The reluctant time traveler always seems to be flinching at every little thing, often appearing disoriented or distracted as he struggles to understand what is going on around him. Willis displays great skill in this role – perhaps the best of his career – as he creates a truly tragic figure that may or may not be losing his mind.

Brad Pitt's character, Jeffrey Goines, resides at the exact opposite end of the spectrum. Where Cole is a sad, brooding figure, Goines is a frenetic psychotic oscillating wildly between paranoid ravings and calm interludes where his madness is kept in check but still resides behind wild eyes. It's a daring performance for Pitt who lets it all hang out as he gladly chews up the scenery with his loony radical environmentalist cum revolutionary that all but steals every scene he's in. It's a performance that Pitt worked long and hard to achieve and it paid off in a Golden Globe Award that year for Best Supporting Actor and an Academy Award nomination in the same category.

Twelve Monkeys was well-received by critics at the time. Roger Ebert wrote, “the more you know about movies (especially the technical side), the more you're likely to admire it. But a comedy it's not. And as an entertainment, it appeals more to the mind than to the senses.” The Washington Post’s Desson Howe wrote, “In a movie in which time travel is used to rectify the past, it's too bad scriptwriters David and Janet Peoples didn't go through the time/space tunnel to work on that first draft again. But Willis and Pitts's performances, Gilliam's atmospherics and an exhilarating momentum easily outweigh such trifling flaws.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin praised Bruce Willis’ performance: “Mr. Willis holds the film together with his poignant, battered physicality, the suffering of a man fighting desperately for sanity and survival.” However, Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, “Intent on both dazzling and punishing the viewer, Gilliam gets lost in creepy spectacle and plenty of old film clips (notably Vertigo).”

It is easy to see what attracted Terry Gilliam to a project like Twelve Monkeys. In keeping with his past films, this one also played "with the same old things – time, reality, madness – so I was intrigued." Even though it was one of the few projects he did not originate himself, Gilliam quickly made the film his own. In fact, it is Twelve Monkeys' unique look that prevents any easy categorization. As Gilliam observed in an interview, "I'm determined to make it indefinable." It is this avoidance of any clear cut genre that makes the film a riddle waiting to be solved. The film is also structured somewhat like an onion. On the surface, the audience knows very little at the beginning, but gradually as it progresses and the layers are removed, more and more of the mystery is revealed. However, this is not readily apparent after an initial viewing. Only after subsequent screenings does the full impact and brilliance of what Gilliam and his cast and crew have created sink in. It is this great amount of care and detail that has clearly gone into this film that makes Twelve Monkeys worth watching.

SOURCES

Cullum, Paul. "Monkey Man." Film Threat. April 1996.

James, Nick. "Time and the Machine." Sight and Sound." April 1996.

Morgan, David. "Extremities." Sight and Sound. January 1996.

Thompson, Andrew O. "Wanna Buy A Monkey?" Sci-Fi Universe. February 1996.

Michael Mann Week: The Last of the Mohicans

Hollywood’s depiction of the American West being domesticated during the Classic period is rife with stereotypes. Native Americans in John Ford films, for example, were often portrayed in two ways: as noble savages or ferocious red devils. Until recently, they were often played by white actors with their language reduced to garbled, simple, child-like speak. Not until the 1990s has their authentic languages been used in films. Most films portrayed them as vicious instead of also victims (which is what they really were in many cases) to justify the narrative that usually involved their extermination.

Coming off a cinematic hiatus of six years since Manhunter (1986) was released, Michael Mann returned with a vengeance with his robust, muscular take on The Last of the Mohicans (1992). On the surface, it seemed like a radical departure for a filmmaker known for urban crime dramas like Thief (1981), Miami Vice, and Crime Story but thematically it fits right in with his no-nonsense protagonists who are the best at what they do and are faced with a decision between their profession and the ones they love.

The Last of the Mohicans is set in 1757 during the third year of the war between England and France. Dialogueless footage of three men running through a lush, green forest plays during the opening credits. Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis), Uncas (Eric Schweig) and Chingachook (Russell Means) are hunting a large elk which Hawkeye subsequently shoots and kills with deadly accuracy. This brief sequence establishes him as a man of action and an efficient hunter. Like other Mann protagonists Hawkeye is his own man, preferring to do things on his own terms and is fiercely loyal to his family and friends.

The three men stop by a settler’s cabin that night and learn that the French army with Native Indian support is encroaching on their land. Like his settler friends, Hawkeye does not seem interested in the conflict. It is not his fight. He reinforces this belief two scenes later when a British officer (Jared Harris) tries to recruit him. Hawkeye replies, “You do what you want with your own scalp and I’ll be tellin’ us what we ought to do with ours.” This scene is significant in that we see the dynamic between Hawkeye, Uncas and Chingachook. The latter is the father of the other two men and they are clearly close to each other by the way they act towards one another. This is evident in the opening scene when they worked as a team to hunt the elk and now in this social setting. This scene is also one of domestic bliss, something that is always treasured in a Mann film and one that is also fleeting. Mohicans is no different. Hawkeye and his friends laugh and talk over dinner with a warm, inviting fire in the background. It is an intimate setting, one of safety and familiarity. It will also be the last time they will all enjoy this kind of atmosphere.

Mann’s trademark color palette is muted in Mohicans with green being the only one with any prominence. He uses the green of the forest, that Cora (Madeleine Stowe) and Alice Munro (Jodhi May) travel through on the way to be reunited with their father, Colonel Munro (Maurice Roeves) at Fort William Henry, to foreshadow the impending danger of the Indian sneak attack that will decimate the complement of soldiers protecting them and bring them in contact with Hawkeye for the first time.

The ambush shows the foolishness of the British military tactics. They take their time to form a line giving the attacking Indians ample time to take cover and then counter-attack. In a matter of moments almost all of the British troops have been killed until Hawkeye and his crew arrives and swiftly deals with these marauders with same kind of deadly efficiency. Hawkeye and Magua (Wes Studi) meet face to face for the first time in this scene as Magua narrowly misses Hawkeye with his rifle and then disappears into the forest before he can get a good shot at him. This almost unnatural exit sets up Magua as an unstoppable force of nature, like Hawkeye but only on the opposite end of the moral spectrum. The ambush establishes the quick, brutal nature of combat in the film as Mann moves away from the overtly stylish action in Thief and Manhunter towards a more realistic depiction with truly harrowing scenes of men getting scalped, stabbed and slashed. Every subsequent film Mann would make after Mohicans would depict violence in a jarring, realistic nature.

The character of Magua is fleshed out and given a chance to explain the motivation for his ruthless hatred of the English: his village was burned down, his children killed, he was taken as a slave and his wife thought he was dead and remarried. He delivers a powerful monologue to his French co-conspirator, “In time, Magua became blood brother to the Mohawk, to become free but always in his heart he’s Huron. His heart will be whole again when the day the Gray Hair and all his seed are dead.” Wes Studi delivers this speech with scary intensity that is indicative of his incredible performance throughout the film. He portrays Magua as a ferociously driven man who believes in what he is doing as much as Hawkeye does. Like Daniel Day-Lewis, Studi’s performance is very physical and he commands the screen with his intense presence due in large to his piercing eyes.

Mann is clearly sympathetic to the settlers’ plight and their decision to protect their homes instead of helping defend Fort Henry against the French, which falls to them anyway. However, it is the love story between Cora and Hawkeye that lies at the heart of this film. Aside from a few meaningful, longing looks at each other, their sudden consummation is not believable because no foundation for it has been properly established. Cora is another, strong female Mann character, like Jesse in Thief. She stands up for Hawkeye to her father when he is caught for helping some militia men desert so that they can go defend their homes. She argues Hawkeye’s case and even speaks seditious ideas in front of him. Yet, she spends a lot of the film as a damsel in distress having to be rescued by Hawkeye on at least two occasions.

Mann only betrays the realistic battle scenes once with a stylistic indulgence. When Munro and his men are ambushed by Magua’s war party. Cora is attacked and about to have her throat slashed. Hawkeye spots her and runs towards her, killing several men along the way in slow motion for what seems to take forever and reaches her long after she surely would have been actually killed. However, he gets to her just in time and dispatches her attacker. Studi remembers that during the filming of this scene there being a lot of racial tension between the actors playing the British troops and the Indian actors which also added to the intensity of the scene.

One of the most striking aspects of Mohicans is Dante Spinotti’s stunning cinematography. Mann constantly punctuates scenes with picturesque shots of the countryside: early morning fog gently rolling off a mountain range, a raging waterfall and fields of tall grass. Browns and mostly greens dominate the color scheme of this film. For the look of Mohicans, the director started with 19th century landscape painters like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, chiaroscuro lighting, and 18th century portraits. It was Bierstadt's paintings that influenced the look of the film "in terms both of compositions and of what the place looked like," Mann has said. As he progressed, however, he realized that "objective reality outstripped me, and I brought it back to a more conservative palette. If you were an American Indian and grew up in the forest, so all you saw were brown and green."

Even more so than The Keep (1983), Mohicans feels the most un-Mann-like of any of his films. His usual iconography is subdued or non-existent. Mohicans tries to counter many of the Native American stereotypes in Hollywood films. Hawkeye is completely aligned with the Native Americans while falling in love with Cora, a white woman. Initially, the racial distinction is blurred as Hawkeye is not given priority at the beginning of the film. They are all equal for a little while. Of course, being the star, Hawkeye does become the central focus of the story. This is where Mann’s film stops being progressive and reverts back to the old stereotypes with good and bad Native Americans. While he does up the ante in terms of realistic battle scenes, his story is very middle of the road and one that typifies a big-budget Hollywood film.

Mann had long been fascinated by the period of history that Mohicans is set in but his interest in the project can be traced all the way back to his childhood. He saw the 1936 version starring Randolph Scott as Hawkeye when he was four or five-years-old at a church in his neighborhood that would show 16mm films in their basement. Mann remembered “the corollary tragedy of Uncas and Alice at the end, plus I remember the fearsomeness of Magua, and the uniqueness of the period.”

Mann first acquired the rights to Philip Dunne's 1936 screenplay of The Last of the Mohicans and wrote a story outline based on it, the Smithsonian’s 30-volume North American Indian Handbook, a diary by Bouganville, Montcalm’s aide, and Simon Schama’s essay The Many Deaths of General Wolfe in 1988. He walked into the offices of Joe Roth, then Chairman of 20th Century Fox, and Roger Birnbaum, then President of Worldwide Production, and pitched a realistic take on Mohicans. They liked the idea and green-lit the project. Marketing surveys for 20th Century Fox revealed that few moviegoers had read Cooper’s novel but were familiar with the title.

As always, Mann did a lot of research on this period of history. He realized how “revisionist James Fenimore Cooper was in 1826 when he was revising [the perception of American Indians] into noble savages [who had] their life, their culture, their territory, their commerce, who [did not] need more sophisticated folks (like Cooper and his family), to look after their interests and their land. So, it was eye-opening to do the research on the Mohicans and get to the true dimensionality of that society.” From there, Mann constructed the outer frame of the film and established “the scale of a geopolitical conflict – the ethnic and religious conflicts, the struggle of white imperialism on a grassroots level, the condition of the struggle for survival of the colonial population, and the struggle between the Euramerican and European powers and the American Indian population.” Mann studied the history of the American frontier, read diaries from the time period and consulted with historians. For the director, “the details make this movie ring true. Audiences today are more visually sophisticated. They know the real deal, and they know when they’ve been shortchanged.”

Mann was interested in developing the epic scale of the story and proceeded to juxtapose these elements with an intimate love story between Hawkeye and Cora Munro. It is this coupling that illustrates where Mann deviates from Cooper's book in specific areas. Cora was originally a mulatto and Colonel Munro wanted Heyward to marry Cora but he preferred Alice. Mann switched it so that Hawkeye and Cora fall in love and had sex. Originally, Hawkeye’s name was Natty Bumppo but Mann felt that it was “kind of a silly name” and changed it to Nathaniel Poe. He also based Major Heyward on Cooper himself.

Mann wanted acclaimed actor Daniel Day-Lewis to play Hawkeye, which the studio was less than thrilled about. Mann remembers, “The choice I got the weirdest reaction to was when I said Daniel Day-Lewis was going to be Hawkeye in Last of the Mohicans. Because American studios didn’t know him. They said, ‘You mean that skinny guy? That short, skinny guy in a wheelchair?’ Because all he had done was My Left Foot.” His co-star Madeleine Stowe remembers that prior to doing the film Day-Lewis had just played Hamlet at the National Theatre in London and ran from the stage crying, convinced that he was talking to the ghost of his own dead father. She felt a lot of uncertainty from him until he got into the physicality of his character, then he appeared to be very confident. According to Mann, physicality is one of the important ways Day-Lewis arrived at his character’s emotional state. Day-Lewis is good as a no-nonsense Mann protagonist but, at times, his alpha male bravado veers dangerously close to John Wayne territory. He certainly looks the part with his impressive lean, muscular physique – a radical change from his role in My Left Foot (1989) – and is more than up to the task for film’s demanding action sequences.

Stowe’s agent got her to read the script for Mohicans but the actress thought that, “it was a nice action picture, I didn’t feel any particular affinity for either Cora nor the story.” Her initial reluctance to the material was based on her dissatisfaction with action films. “I was fed up with them and I initially thought that the script was just another action film dressed up as a period piece.” Stowe’s agent kept after her and she read it two more times before meeting with Mann. They talked about the film and he told her his vision of it. A week later, Stowe met with Mann again and read with Day-Lewis and Steven Waddington. That day she found out that it was Day-Lewis who had suggested to Mann that she play Cora.

Casting director Bonnie Timmerman called Russell Means and asked him if he would be interested in trying out for a major role in a major film. However, the day they wanted him to audition, he was going to a political convention in Monterrey. They worked it out so that Means could do both. However, on the day he ended up missing the audition. He got another call from Mann who asked Means to audition for a role in the film. Means remembers that Mann “had been a documentary filmmaker during the 60's and 70's and he remembered the American Indian Movement, and Dennis Banks and myself as leaders.” After four auditions, Means was cast as Chingachook.

Mann brought in Colonel David Webster, who was in charge of the Many Hawks Special Operations Camp out of Fort Bragg in Columbus, Ohio, to train the cast for a month. In addition, Day-Lewis did an extraordinary amount of research and preparation for his role. Mann sent him on a six-month course of body building and weapons training at an anti-terrorist camp followed by several weeks in the wild learning how to survive with very little. He learned to track and skin animals, build canoes, fight with tomahawks, and fire and reload twelve pound flintlocks on the run. He spent five times a week for six months training to build up his stamina and upper body. Mann and Day-Lewis actually lived in the forests of North Carolina – Mann for a week, Day-Lewis for a month. The actor spent most of his time with experts on the lives and skills of American Indians.

Mohicans started with a budget of $24 million and a 250-member crew. Other articles reported that the budget was around $33 or $40 million. The principal photography was set for two-and-half months in the forests of North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains during the Spring of 1991. Mohicans would continue Mann's uncompromising approach to controlling every aspect of the production. He leveled hills, cleared 38 acres of trees and hired 130 carpenters to build Fort Henry. To achieve the authenticity of the period everything had to be built from scratch, including designing and manufacturing the breechcloths of six different Indian peoples and building French and English ordinance.

The grueling grind of the production took its toll. The Unit Production Manager and the Transportation Director were fired. All the original department heads, with the exception of the head of sound, quit. In perhaps the most startling move, cinematographer Douglas Milsome was fired and Mann brought in his favorite director of photography, Dante Spinotti. According to Means, this angered people in the film industry and Mohicans paid for it at the Academy Awards. The non-Union crew wanted to be a Union one and went on strike a day before principal photography was supposed to start. The studio ultimately gave into their demands.

While filming at Lake James, all the American Indian extras organized themselves and went on strike because their living conditions were awful and, according to Stowe, were not being well fed. There was one bathroom for 400 extras. Actors Eric Schweig, Means, and Day-Lewis joined the extras on the picket line. Military advisor Dale Dye organized the men playing the Red Coats in the film with the intention of breaking through the strike line. As they approached Means punched the first Red Coat and knocked him down. The rest of them scattered. Dye was able to get them reorganized and then the producers stepped in and asked Means to mediate between the two sides. In Means' opinion, the awful living conditions for the American Indian extras were the fault of the assistant directors. "Michael Mann was so focused on his art that he didn't realize what his A.D.s were doing ... and what his A.D.s did was effectively demoralize everyone."

When asked about the film’s production problems Mann said, “What I will tell you, however, is that this was a really difficult picture. You warn people ahead of time that this is going to be a tough picture to do, and people say, "That's fine, I can handle that," and sometimes they can't.” The filmmaker made no apologies for his exacting attention to detail. "Everything impacts on an audience. Everything. And you can either pay attention to it or let it go and let technicians do it. To me that's wasteful." Mohicans was originally slotted for a July release but was pushed back to September to avoid stiff competition and for a better position for Academy Award nominations.

The studio marketing department promoted Mohicans as a love story in a war zone, but Mann felt that it was about human struggle, “where life is short and passion is where you can find it; you are part of a people who are disappearing and the world is changing around you.” Means was not happy with how 20th Century Fox handled the film. He had two problems with the studio. Firstly, he claims that the studio forced Mann to cut down his original version that ran two hours down to 108 minutes removing “some very pertinent scenes in there, and dialogue, that would have shown the Indians in an even better light then it already does.” Secondly, Means said that the studio targeted the over 35 crowd, selling it as a love story. “As you know, it was kind of gory and there was a lot of action. So, if they'd have pitched it to 20/35 crowd, as their primary audience, it not only would have made another 50 million off of that ... 20th Century Fox shot themselves in the foot over that film ... A classic like that and they messed around with it. It just goes to point up in Hollywood they don't know anything about Indians nor the audience that they purport to know everything about.”

According to Stowe, the studio “had huge doubts” about the film during the editing and audience test screenings who were put off by the film’s violence. She felt that Mann was under a lot of pressure from the studio to change the film. The actress saw a cut in July of 1992 and felt that the studio was wearing Mann down so she called Joe Roth and “told him how beautiful the film was, and that I was fully ready to support it, that Michael’s work was wonderful and I imagined that Daniel would feel the same. he listened quietly and read between the lines.” Mann met with the studio again and successfully fought for his cut of Mohicans.

The Last of the Mohicans was released on September 25, 1992 in 1,491 theaters grossing $10.9 million on its opening weekend. It went on to make $75 million in North America, well over its $40 million budget. In his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert felt that Mann’s film was “not as authentic and uncompromised as it claims to be – more of a matinee fantasy than it wants to admit -- but it is probably more entertaining as a result.” Peter Travers, in his review for Rolling Stone, praised Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance: “The lithe Day-Lewis, more puckish than primitive despite the shoulder-length locks, is riveting. Luckily, he and the radiant Stowe can make the cornball credible – even a farewell scene at a waterfall where he vows to find her again, ‘no matter how long it takes, no matter how far.’” David Ansen also praised Day-Lewis’ performance in his review for Newsweek magazine: “This amazingly graceful actor builds his character out of body language ... He turns this 18th century action hero into a freshly imagined romantic icon ... Day-Lewis makes the most wildly heroic gesture seem natural.”

In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe wrote, “Whether there's a full-scale massacre of innocents, or a lover's kiss behind a raging waterfall, the movie is all expertly controlled sensation ... The battles are pyrotechnical displays of cannon fire and gleaming redcoats. Even the awesome landscape looks designed. Mann wasn't thinking story, he was thinking scheme. Keep the eyes and ears dazzled, he reasons, and the substance will follow.” Richard Schickel, in his review for Time magazine, wrote, “Above all Mann has seen to it that something spooky, suspenseful or just plain action packed happens every five minutes. In the process, he has eliminated the last traces of Cooper’s high-viscosity prose and sentiments.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B+” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “And Mann has created a great villain in Magua, the vengeful Huron. Wes Studi, who was in Dances With Wolves, has a glowering face, all scars and furrows, that seems to be imploding with rage. At the same time, he reveals that the furious Magua is actually a thoughtful, complex man; he sees what the Europeans are doing to his people, and he despises them for it.”

The success of Mohicans not only established Mann with box office clout in the eyes of Hollywood, it also proved to be a hit with audiences and critics. More importantly, it paved the way for his next and even greater film, Heat (1995), a pet project that had been gestating for years.