Director William Friedkin was among those tweeting their respects after Variety, citing a tweet from the director of the Cannes Film Festival, reported that the Oscar-winning director of “The Deer Hunter” and “Heaven’s Gate” has died at the age of 77.
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Michael Cimino, who won two Oscars for directing and producing and seminal 1978 film The Deer Hunter, has passed away. BBC News reports that no cause of death has been confirmed.
Raised in Long Island, New York by his music publisher father and costume designer mother, he went to Michigan State and Yale and graduated with an MFA in painting, but ended up finding a career in directing commercials for the likes of United Airlines, Pepsi and more.
Robert De Niro, who starred in the film that won Michael the Best Director Academy Award, was among those to pay tribute to the director.
That chance arrived with The Deer Hunter, an unsparing look at the Vietnam war as experienced by the working class kids of a small Pennsylvania town. He released “Year of the Dragon” in 1985, and had new projects every few years.
“Say what you will about Michael Cimino but when he was ‘on, ‘ he had more power, fierce intelligence and real vision, than most anyone else”, said filmmaker Guillermo del Toro on Twitter.
But Mr. Cimino was criticized for playing fast and loose with factual details, both in the film and in his personal biography. In recent years he had made a number of appearances at film festivals, receiving a career honour at Venice in 2012.
The director’s first film was the well-received 1974 flick “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot”, but it was his follow-up, “The Deer Hunter”, that brought him acclaim and awards. The book Final Cut, written by former UA executive Steven Bach, chronicled the entire affair and the ramifications that faced the industry in light of Heaven’s Gate; reportedly Cimino himself decried the book “a work of fiction”.
Cimino followed that up with Heaven’s Gate, a western set in Wyoming starring Kris Kristofferson, Walken, Isabelle Huppert, and Jeff Bridges. “I took an ad out in the trades and tried to explain why I neglected to thank certain people and to make up for the shortfall of my dumb-ass acceptance speech”, Cimino told the Hollywood Reporter in 2015 about the Oscars ceremony. “Everybody who didn’t get to do a film blamed ‘Heaven’s Gate, ‘ saying all the money went to ‘Heaven’s Gate'”.
Nearly from the beginning, “Heaven’s Gate” was the subject of criticism and speculation.
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United Artists, which had a history of giving film makers a lot of creative leeway, did so with Cimino on the basis of his big success with “The Deer Hunter”.
