The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate director Michael Cimino dies

Oscar victor Michael Cimino, the director of classics The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate, has died.

As Hollywood continues to mourn director Michael Cimino, who died Saturday at the age of 77, several members of the film community have shared their condolences for the Oscar-winning director of films like The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate.

Friends called the police when they couldn’t reach him and he was found dead on Saturday.

The cause of Cimino’s death was not immediately known. The film closed after just two weeks, with a total box office take of $1.3 million. Christopher Walken also won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

When the movie was released, the Russian roulette scenes sparked major controversy for taking liberties with the Vietcong’s actual treatment of USA soldiers during the war.

Although the reputations of Mr. Cimino and of “Heaven’s Gate” would improve to varying degrees, the saga surrounding the film ensured that Hollywood’s auteur period was effectively over.

For all the foul pre-release publicity it remains surprising that so few U.S. critics recognised Heaven’s Gate as one of the great films on the immigrant experience. In closing, here is a lengthy Hollywood Reporter interview with Cimino that touches on comparisons between American Sniper and The Deer Hunter, war, the nuttiness of Quentin Tarantino, and more.

Gilles Jacob, a former president of the Cannes festival, praised Cimino on Twitter: “He was my friend”.

The Los Angeles County coroner’s website reported Cimino died Thursday at his residence. A sometime novelist and thwarted architect who often expressed regret about his detour into the “insane” world of movie-making, Cimino built his Oscar-winning career on grand-scale myth-making, often about himself. 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. I don’t believe in defeat. Subsequently, the words “Heaven’s Gate” became filmmaking shorthand for an outof-control, overbudget production. “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. The other movies Cimino directed were his debut as a director, the heist film Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), starring Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges; Year of the Dragon (1985), a movie starring Mickey Rourke; The Sicilian (1987); Desperate Hours (1990), also starring Rourke; and Sunchaser (1996), which starred Woody Harrelson, according to the Los Angeles Times.