screenshots / The Last of the Mohicans / 1992 Morgan Creek Productions

Directed by Michael Mann, the film (based on the the 1826 novel of the same name by James Fenimore Cooper) is set during the French and Indian War in 1757 upstate New York.

Starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Nathaniel "Hawkeye" Poe, Russell Means as Chingachgook, Eric Schweig as Uncas, and Wes Studi as Magua.

This was the first film role for Oglala/Lakota Sioux actor Russell Means whose later credits included Buffalo Girls (1995), The Pathfinder (1996) and The Song of Hiawatha (1997).

Canadian Inuvialuk actor Eric Schweig would later be cast in The Broken Chain (1993), Squanto: A Warrior's Tale (1994), The Scarlet Letter (1995) and Into the West (2005).

Cherokee actor Wes Studi previously was cast as a Pawnee in Dances with Wolves (1990), and later portrayed Geronimo in 1993's Geronimo: An American Legend, and appeared as Opechancanough in The New World (2005).

Other actors in the cast include Dennis Banks (War Party), Jeff S. Anderson (Tecumseh: The Last Warrior) and Gregory Zaragoza (The War That Made America).

This was also the first film for actor Scott Means (the son of Russell Means), who is cast in the role of an Abenaki warrior.

Knives and tomahawks used in the film were made and designed by Daniel Winkler, who is an American custom knifemaker based in Blowing Rock, North Carolina.

Filmed mostly on location in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, including Chimney Rock State Park in Rutherford County and on the grounds of the Biltmore Estate in Asheville.

Dennis Banks passed in 2017 at the age of 80.