Kevin Costner Recounts Awe-Inspiring Buffalo Incident Filming Dances With Wolves

Kevin Costner still has not forgotten what it was like to film the buffalo scenes in Dances with Wolves. Based on the 1988 book by Michael Blake, the movie follows Costner’s John Dunbar, a wounded Union officer who befriends members of the Sioux tribe. While Dances with Wolves is not based on a true story, it is still firmly tied to historical events. Costner was the star, director, and producer, heavily contributing to the movie’s $424 million box office take. It won multiple Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and remains the second highest-grossing Western in history.

While reflecting on his career in a video interview with GQ, Costner returned to thinking about one of the most stunning scenes in the hit movie: The buffalo hunt. Costner discussed how he struggled to find the buffalo at all, and he eventually needed to convince a rancher to let them chase an enormous herd of 3,500 buffalo. After six days, one buffalo even threatened to destroy a helicopter in its rage. Check out Costner’s full story below:

Well, I’ll tell you what was uncertain was,
were we gonna even be able to find the buffalo
? And we finally did in the middle of South Dakota, number one, I was so grateful that they even existed, and then number two, had to negotiate with the rancher, “Will you let me chase them?” He was the formerly 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 bitch, 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
. And on the sixth day, all the buffalo finally backed up. I was waiting to work that day, they’d all backed up the herd, and the helicopter came down low and faced off with this bull, just the way I’m looking at this camera, about 10 feet back more, and they were doing everything to make the buffalo run, and the buffalo wouldn’t run. And
this one bull finally charged the helicopter
, the helicopter lifted up, just missed him. Roy said, “They’re not gonna run anymore.” They were done. The bull finally said, “Six days is enough.” It was fast, it was scary, and it was, like you say, it was beautiful. That’s something I’ll never forget. But if you see me going like this, that means you have to go. I remember after the first time we chased them, it didn’t work very well. They told me the buffalo wouldn’t run downhill. You had to run them uphill, which sounded a little bit odd, but I said, “Okay,” to the experts. We ran them uphill the first time, people were coming. I could tell how uptight, and everybody was nervous. They went all over the place. So now all the writers met on our walk back to the camera, and I was realizing, “Gee, we didn’t get very much film on this, and we had 3,500 buffalo.”

The Chaos Of Filming The Buffalo Hunt In Dances With Wolves

Finding The Buffalo Alone Was A Challenge

To film the buffalo, Costner first needed to find a herd of buffalo, which was itself a challenge. After all, while they were extremely prevalent in the 1860s, the buffalo have been driven near extinction and are hardly capable of filling the plains the way that they used to. It was only by speaking with the former Lieutenant Governor of South Dakota that they managed to find a rancher with an adequate supply of buffalo. The Dances with Wolves cast then spent six days chasing buffalo uphill on trucks, horses, and in a helicopter.

The process of chasing the buffalo was another problem for the cast. The scene was so awe-inspiring that Costner later recalled that the Indigenous American actors struggled to remember to shoot their arrows while filming. He reflected that “maybe one guy got one arrow off” before spending the rest of the scene simply staring at the buffalo as they ran by. It took multiple shoots before they returned with empty quivers, which Costner considered a “rite of passage“.

The shoot only ended on the sixth day after a buffalo outright tried to destroy the helicopter. The herd refused to run, and the helicopter attempted to bait the herd into allowing a continued chase. Instead, a buffalo charged the pilot, who only just managed to escape a devastating crash. That event marked the end of filming for those particular scenes, prompting Costner to reflect that he will “never forget” that incident, nor the overall shoot. The buffalo scene in Dances with Wolves continues to inspire him even decades later.

Source: GQ