– Michael Cimino, Oscar-winning director of “Deer Hunter” and “Heaven’s Gate”, has died at the age of 77, TheWrap said.
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Mr Eric Weissmann, a friend and former lawyer of Cimino’s, confirmed the death.
Cimino followed it up with the 1978 film which made his name, the Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep-starring Vietnam War epic The Deer Hunter.
Director Michael Cimino (left) talks with actor Robert De Niro (center wearing beret) during a break while filming The Deer Hunter on location in Bangkok.
After Deer Hunter, he had a license to do what he wanted and his next project drove United Artists out of business. The film – which flopped and tarnished Cimino’s reputation in the process – is blamed by many for helping to bring down the studio.
His gritty 1978 film about the Vietnam War and its effects on American society garnered him a Best Director Academy Award, and as one of the film’s producers a Best Picture Oscar too.
The Deer Hunter, just the second feature directed by Cimino, seemed to exemplify a decade’s worth of groundbreaking motion pictures by writers and directors who were given wide latitude to fulfil their visions by mainstream studios.
“Heaven’s Gate”, based on a screenplay that Cimino himself wrote, was about migrant homesteaders, rich cattle ranchers, mercenaries and USA marshals in the state of Wyoming in the 1890s. “He was an important and masterful film maker”.
Largely shot on location in a purpose-built Montana frontier town, the film came in more than three times over budget and over five hours long, chiefly because Cimino insisted on painstaking accuracy in every detail.
But instead he spent more than $40 million and took more than a year to film the movie, the Times reported. It stopped showing in theaters after only two weeks and is considered the biggest box office bomb ever. Heaven’s Gate. Michael Cimino.
“In the days of the studios, they trained their actors to ride horses, to do fencing, to do boxing, to do all sorts of things, but we had to take the place of a studio”, Cimino recalled to THR past year.
In the years since, “Heaven’s Gate” has been viewed much more favorably, and a 2012 restoration of the director’s full, uncut version bolstered a critical re-evaluation of the film.
“Nobody lives without making mistakes”, Cimino told Vanity Fair in 2010.
Cimino in his earlier career was an advertising executive who moved into film with the Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges crime caper, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, in 1974.
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In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter past year (15), Cimino described the audience reaction to The Deer Hunter when he attended a screening on the movie.
