Long before Kevin Costner had even considered stepping into the director’s shoes, he and the film’s writer, Michael Blake, were just friends. “You know, I had a friend… a real pain in the ass friend,” Costner recalled, explaining how his attempts to help Blake in the film industry tended to backfire. “I would get him interviews, and the people would give me a really bad report. Like he was rude!”
“He started bemoaning that it was Hollywood, that Hollywood doesn’t know what they’re doing,” Costner continued, humorously retelling how the frustration caused by Blake’s cynicism was too much for him to bear. “‘They don’t know about scripts; they don’t know what good scripts are.’ And I put him up against the wall and said, ‘Stop it! Fucking stop it! If you fucking hate scripts so much, quit writing them.’”
The actor/director explained further how Blake eventually came to live with him, having nowhere else to stay. During this visit, he began working on a new story idea, and Costner’s opinion on it was clearly very important to him. “Every night he’d say, ‘Can I read to you what I wrote?’ and I’d go ‘No.’” Despite Costner’s initial refusal, Blake wasn’t deterred. “‘Did you read my script?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you read my story?’ ‘No.’”
Eventually, after Blake had outstayed his welcome and moved on to live with another friend, the director decided to give the manuscript a chance. “So finally, I picked it up and I read it. And it was Dances With Wolves.” Explaining the immediate impact the story had on him, Costner detailed how quickly things were set in motion: “And I read it all through the night, and I called him up, and I said ‘Michael, I’m gonna make this into a movie…’”
The movie itself followed the journey of John J. Dunbar, a Union Army Lieutenant whose failed suicide attempt is mistaken for bravery and grants him a post to wherever in the US he desires. Choosing the frontier, wishing to see it before it vanishes forever, Dunbar is sent to Kansas, where he ultimately falls in with a tribe of Native Americans, the Lakota. Attracted to their way of life, Dunbar renounces the American way of life and becomes an honourary tribe member.
Two years after that fated phone call, Costner had directed and starred in the film, working off a screenplay Blake had adapted from his novel of the same name. It won Costner the ‘Best Director’ award, as well as winning Best Cinematography for its presentation of stunning western landscapes.
Perhaps most important, however, was the praise that Blake received for his screenplay. After all his setbacks as a down-and-out writer, without even a home to call his own, Blake’s commitment to his story paid off. As Costner proudly adds, “We made the movie. And Michael won the Academy Award.”
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