Jodhi May's mother, who plays Alice, used to supervise the set and restrict her daughter from filming sex scenes.
Daniel Day Lewis is notorious for going to extremes in preparation for the character. Take this film as an example. Before filming, he hunted and fished in the wilderness where the character might have lived, and lived nearby for several months.
Director Michael Mann had not read the original novel before or during the filming.
Jodhi May said that many of her scenes have been cut.
The original name of the actor Hawke in the novel was Natty Bumppo, but it was changed to Nathaniel Poe in order not to cause the audience to laugh.
The original length of the film was 3 hours, but Fox asked the director to cut it short, which also caused the film's release date to be postponed from the summer of 1992 to September. Director Michael Mann was very dissatisfied with this two-hour version, thinking that it was completed hastily under time constraints. Later, Fox agreed to re-edit him in the 1999 DVD version. Although this version was only a few minutes longer and did not change much, it was the director’s preferred version and the only DVD version released in the United States.
