The 77-year-old, who directed a total of eight films, will forever be remembered for 1978’s The Deer Hunter, which starred Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken. Both films were panned by critics and largely ignored by filmgoers.
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The movie also torpedoed Cimino’s career.
“Cimino may yet make the film he absolutely wants to make”, Champlin wrote. He variously listed the year of his birth as 1939, 1943 and 1952. The emerging career of Cimino was dented by 1980 movie “The Heaven’s Gate” which was a critical and financial disaster.
Oscar winning director Michael Cimino has died. “Critics were set up to hate ‘Heaven’s Gate.’ The picture didn’t work with the public”.
Mr Weissmann said Cimino left behind no survivors. The Deer Hunter is one of the great American films. Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, called it “one of the most emotionally shattering films ever made”. The film, which went through multiple cuts, ballooned way over budget and was a box office disaster which was blamed for the collapse of movie studio United Artists. He initially picked up work directing television commercials.
Cimino will also be remembered for the budget-busting flop “Heaven’s Gate” released not long after his grim tale of the Vietnam war. In recent years, criticism of the film has softened, with some even considering it the director’s misunderstood masterpiece.
“Nobody lives without making mistakes”, Cimino told Vanity Fair in 2010. You can’t look back.
British director Edgar Wright wrote on Twitter, “I can not believe Michael Cimino has passed away too. Everybody has bumps, but as Count Basie said, ‘It’s not how you handle the hills, it’s how you handle the valleys'”.
Cimino was born in New York City and passed away today at the age of 77. His father was a music publisher, his mother a costume designer.
He went into advertising directly after college and became a top Madison Avenue commercial director; shooting commercials for many familiar household brands including Pepsi, Eastman Kodak, and United Airlines. He appeared at Cannes again in 2007 for his final film venture, a three-minute contribution to the multi-director anthology “Chacun son gout”. The other Oscars it won were Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Walken), Best Film Editing, and Best Sound.
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. He underwent radical plastic surgery which so altered his appearance that many speculated he was undergoing a sex change operation.
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He wrote a 2001 novel, “Big Jane” and two years later collaborated with Francesca Pollock on the book “Conversations en miroir”.
