When dramatic license must be taken to tell a story in this medium, how historically accurate can you be?
COSTNER: We ran into that. You want to be accurate, and you should be, but when you make a movie, there are going to be leaps, and we had to make some. Sometimes you make them theatrically, and sometimes you make them because nobody really knows. You have to go, “Well, what did start it?,” and you touch on a few things that could have started the feud. There were times where we had to compress. I never like to stick my neck so far out on the line and say, “This is absolutely authentic,” but its whole bent is towards authenticity and the participants. Time was compressed over 20 or 30 years. It’s important to me to be accurate, but it can tie you in knots, to the point where you can’t tell your story. Its aim was true. I’m sure that people could find fault with a measure of certain details.
