Michael Cimino, the Academy Award victor who directed and produced The Deer Hunter before Heaven’s Gate famously derailed his promising career and hastened the demise of United Artists in the 1980s, died Saturday. He said had been living in Beverly Hills at the time of his death.
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Based on the success of The Deer Hunter, Cimino wrote and directed Heaven’s Gate, loosely based on the Wyoming Johnson County war of 1889-93.
Michael Cimino, the Oscar-winning director and producer of the 1970s classic “The Deer Hunter”, has died.
Cimino, short of stature (he was 5 foot 5 inches and nicknamed “The Ayatollah”), often hired Jeff Bridges and Christopher Walken in many of his movies, but also became as famous for the movies he quit or never got around to actually working on. Nominated for nine Oscars, it won five including Best Picture and Best Director.
In a statement Saturday De Niro said, “Our work together is something I will always remember”. The ensuing protests were so intense that De Niro refused to attend the Oscars.
A 2012 restoration and subsequent re-release of “Heaven’s Gate” allowed Cimino to see his masterwork undergo a critical re-evaluation. On its re-release in 2014, Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw saluted The Deer Hunter’s “combination of sulphurous anti-war imagery, disillusion and patriotic melancholy”.
He chose Heaven’s Gate, a film whose financial failure in 1980 would come to define him as much as The Deer Hunter’s success. Accused of having a giant ego and being fast and loose with other people’s money, Cimino oversaw the filming of the bloated production that lasted eleven months and ended up costing $35 million on a budget that was not to exceed $11 million.
Below is a timeline of some of Cimino’s career highlights.
Cimino’s career took a big hit and the director went on to make only four more films – and couldn’t create another film as successful as his first. 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.
In the tradition of Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” (1972), Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” (1973), and Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” (1974), “The Deer Hunter” cloaked a mood of existential uncertainty beneath layers of violence.
“Nobody lives without making mistakes”, Cimino said.
FILE – In this October 28, 2008 file photo, director Michael Cimino arrives at the third edition of the Rome Film Festival, in Rome.
He added: “You can’t look back”.
British director Edgar Wright wrote on Twitter, “I can not believe Michael Cimino has passed away too”.
Eastwood, a lifelong friend, also defended him in Vanity Fair.
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“George Lucas made Howard The Duck and the guy who made Waterworld – those films didn’t destroy them”, he said. Critics were set up to hate Heavens Gate. The picture didn’t work with the public.
