Dances with Wolves

Dances With Wolves is a 1990 American epic revisionist Western film directed and produced by Kevin Costner in his feature directorial debut. Starring Costner with an ensemble cast including Mary McDonnell, Graham Greene and Rodney Grant, the film is a film adaptation of the 1988 novel Dances With Wolves by Michael Blake (who also wrote the screenplay). It tells the story of Union army Lieutenant John J. Dunbar (Costner), who travels to the American frontier to find a military post and who meets a group of Lakota.

Costner purchased the rights of the novel, with an eye on directing it, after encouraging Blake in early 1986 to turn a Western screenplay into a novel to improve its chances of being produced. The film was initially produced with an initial budget of $15 million, but was finally produced with a $22 million one. The project was turned down by several studios due to the Western genre no longer being popular, as well as the length of the script. After the project languished at both Nelson Entertainment and Island Pictures, Costner and Jim Wilson sold the foreign rights in several countries and obtained enough money to go into pre-production. The two then made a deal with Orion Pictures. Much of the dialogue is spoken in Lakota with English subtitles. Filming occurred from July to November 1989 in South Dakota and Wyoming, and it was translated by Doris Leader Charge, of the Lakota Studies department at Sinte Gleska University.