TSPDT

Key Production Country: USA
Key Genres: Drama, Revisionist Western, War Drama, Crime Thriller, Buddy Film, Action
Key Collaborators: Christopher Walken (Leading Actor), Vilmos Zsigmond (Cinematographer), Jeff Bridges (Leading Character Actor), Geoffrey Lewis (Leading Character Actor), David Mansfield (Composer), Tambi Larsen (Production Designer), Mickey Rourke (Character Actor)

"Erratic as his achievement has been, Michael Cimino is, with Martin Scorsese, one of the two most important filmmakers to have emerged in the Hollywood cinema of the 1970s. His reputation must rest, so far, essentially on two enormously ambitious and controversial films, The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate… There is no other filmmaker of whom my own view is quite so completely at odds with the generally accepted one. Heaven’s Gate, above all, stands up magnificently to the test of time and repeated viewings; I have used it in film classes every year, and students greet it invariably as a revelation. Yet ‘‘accepted opinion,’’ once established, is notoriously difficult to erode." - Robin Wood (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 2000)

"Cimino directed eight films in his career. His first was 1974’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot his second was the 1978 Vietnam War masterpiece The Deer Hunter, which won five Academy Awards, including best picture and director; his third was 1980’s Heaven’s Gate, the film that became synonymous with showbiz disaster; and the rest were mostly footnotes, though some (like Year of the Dragon) have passionate fans." - Tim Gray (Variety, 2016)

"Breadth of vision or delusions of grandeur? This American director is a man of contradictions as evidenced by his first film Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which tired to convert itself halfway, from a laconic and likeable adventure into a violent and dislikable thriller. One would say that Cimino does not give enough consideration to the effect of a film as a whole were it not for the way he handled the complex structure of The Deer Hunter." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Illustrated Guide to Film Directors, 1999)

"In the aftermath of Heaven’s Gate, he had clearly exhausted his credit in Hollywood and lost his way. He directed only four more films, none of them well-received. Year of the Dragon (1985), co-written with Oliver Stone, was accused of perpetuating negative stereotypes about Asian-Americans. The Sicilian (1987), Desperate Hours (1990) and Sunchaser (1996) were largely ignored, though he wrote a novel, Big Jane (2001), which was highly regarded in France." - Ryan Gilbey (The Guardian, 2016)

"His most famous movie is the notorious Heaven's Gate (1980), a $44 million Western which has been blamed for the demise of that genre; the death of United Artists, the studio which backed it; and even the end of that brief era in Hollywood history when the filmmakers enjoyed creative freedom… Since Heaven's Gate, Cimino's work has been infrequent but invariably overblown. The unrealized projects have so much more poetry than the ones that got made: adaptations of Crime and Punishment, The Fountainhead and André Malraux's Man's Fate, a Dostoyevsky biopic, and a film about the Tour de France (The Yellow Jersey)." - Tom Charity (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007)

"Cimino was never an avid cinephile and never had a cinematographic background like the other Movie Brats of the time, having taken courses in art and architecture at university. He has no experience in television series, he has never been an assistant on set for any director. His cinematographic references come from the admiration for John Ford, Akira Kurosawa and Luchino Visconti, filtered by a passion for the classicism of the staging." - Giampiero Frasca (Senses of Cinema, 2023)

"I don't make movies intellectually, I don't make movies to make a point, I make movies to tell stories about people." - Michael Cimino