Ruthless Michael Cimino took a downbeat, three-hour film about an unpopular war – and made a masterpiece. By Charles Elton
The genius who shot The Deer Hunter
Michael Cimino and Robert De Niro in Thailand, which doubled for Vietnam
PICTURELUX / THE HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE / ALAMY
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n 8th December 1978, the day the Vietnam epic The Deer Hunter opened in Los Angeles, Michael Cimino, its director, sneaked into a screening – the first time he would be able to gauge the reaction from a paying audience. He was nervous, as were most people connected with the film, particularly its distributor, Universal, who had fought constantly with Cimino and grimly watched the budget soar. The Deer Hunter wasn’t a feelgood film: it was a downbeat three-hour movie about an unpopular war, which had ended only three years before and was still the subject of enormous controversy. However, as the film ended, 16 The Oldie Spring 2022
something unexpected happened. Cimino went into the lobby and found that ‘It was filled with women who were weeping and wailing and I just broke down crying. There were ex-vets who literally crawled up the aisle out of their seats. It was just an astounding reaction.’ It was a triumph for Cimino, who, by aggressive manoeuvring and a willingness to destroy anyone who got in his way, had clung to his vision and ensured that the film was made exactly the way he wanted it to be, with no compromises whatsoever. Cimino (1939-2016) had been a successful director of commercials in New York before moving to Hollywood in 1971 to get into the movie business. In
1974, he had written and directed a Clint Eastwood thriller, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. It was a modest success but the least respectable kind of piece – a genre movie – worlds away from the cool, personal statements other young directors like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola were making. Since the Eastwood movie, Cimino’s career had languished, as he did rewrites on films such as the Bette Midler vehicle The Rose. In November 1976, he was called for a routine meeting at EMI, the British film company trying to break into the American market. They had sent him a script to see if he might be interested. It was a project they had been trying to get
