“We started chasing them for six days”: Kevin Costner Will Never Forget the Best Cinematic Moment of His Life That Made Him Beat Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola for Best Director

SUMMARY

• Kevin Costner earned his Oscar for Best Director with his directorial debut Dances with Wolves.
• The actor also starred in the film and was up against stalwart directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
• Costner revealed that one of the toughest scenes to film in his career was from the Oscar-winning film and that he would never forget it.

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Kevin Costner is now known for his role in the neo-Western Yellowstone. However, the legendary actor has had a rollercoaster of a career since the ‘80s and the ‘90s. From his iconic role in the sports drama Field of Dreams to his disastrous magnum opus Waterworld, Costner has seen it all.

However, his biggest success came with his directorial debut Dances with Wolves, which was not only a commercial success but also earned him an Oscar for Best Director and Best Picture. The actor recounted one particular scene that was extremely difficult to achieve and took them six days and a huge favor from a former governor to execute.

Kevin Costner Won An Oscar For His Directorial Debut

Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves | Credits: Orion Pictures

The year was 1991 and Kevin Costner’s directorial debut Dances with Wolves had twelve nominations. It was nominated in many of the big categories like Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Actress, and more. For Costner, his competition was Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather Part III and Martin Scorsese for Goodfellas.

While Coppola had already won his previous installments of The Godfather films, Scorsese’s Goodfellas is still considered to be one of the best gangster films of all time. Starring Ray Liotta and Robert DeNiro in lead roles, the film was based on the real story of the Mafia in New York and was one of the career-defining films for Scorsese.

A still from Goodfellas | Credits: Warner Bros.

Others in the category were Stephen Frears for The Grifters and Barbet Schroeder for Reversal of Fortune. At the 63rd Academy Awards, Costner’s Dances with Wolves won seven awards including Best Picture and Best Director. Costner said to GQ later about the process of choosing the film,

Well, I asked three pretty prominent directors to maybe think about directing it, and all of them had something that they would do differently, something that they didn’t agree with in the script….I said, ‘Oh my goodness, I think I actually need to direct this,’ not because I think I can make it better, but I think it’ll be more what it looks like on paper.

The film became only the second Western to be awarded Bes Picture and was credited with restarting interest in the genre. Films like Unforgiven and No Country for Old Men were the only two other Westerns to win the coveted award.

Kevin Costner Described The Challenging Buffalo Scene In Dances with Wolves

A still from Dances with Wolves | Credits: Orion Pictures

Kevin Costner’s epic Western directorial debut Dances with Wolves followed the story of a Union leader John Dunbar who is posted to the American Frontier and befriends the local Sioux tribe. The film shows him blending in with the tribespeople and understanding their culture while realizing the threat they face from his kind.

One scene where he becomes one with the tribe is the buffalo hunt sequence. The epic sequence reportedly took six days to film and had over 3,500 bulls in attendance. Costner described the arduous process of filming the scene to GQ,

I was so grateful that [the buffalos] even existed, and then number two, had to negotiate with the rancher, ‘Will you let me chase them?’ He was the former lieutenant governor of the state, so he was a pretty evolved guy, but he said, ‘You wanna chase my buffalo?‘

And I was young, and he finally said, ‘Okay, we’ll chase them, we’ll chase them,’ and that son of a b*tch, I love him forever. He’s like 80 years old, he got in his truck, he got five other trucks, he got a helicopter, and we started chasing them for six days.

The actor mentioned that while they couldn’t get a lot of shots on the first day, he figured out what to do with the actors and then they got an incredible sequence done. He also said that the buffalos were done after six days and actually charged at the helicopter to express their anger.

Dances with Wolves is currently available to stream on Fubo TV.

Written by Nishanth A

Articles Published: 1301

Nishanth A is a Media, English and Psychology graduate from Bangalore. He is an avid DC fanboy and loves the films of Christopher Nolan. He has published over 1,000 articles on FandomWire. When he's not fixating on the entire filmography of a director, he tries to write and direct films.