Nobody really knows anything about Michael Cimino. All we have are contradictions and fleeting glimpses. As a director, Cimino is an integral part of the story of “New Hollywood” in the 1970s. But as the former director of TV commercials for Maxwell House, Cimino has always stood apart from film school “movie brats” like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola. Cimino’s second movie, The Deer Hunter, won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1979. Cimino’s follow-up, Heaven’s Gate, is the most infamous critical and commercial flop in cinema history. There are accounts from half a dozen people who believed they were Cimino’s only real friend, each unknowingly siloed into a separate part of Cimino’s life. Cimino’s own account is inherently suspect, as Cimino was a known and inveterate liar. The Long Islander grew up middle-class but claimed to be basically a Vanderbilt and deliberately mispronounced their own name, going from Cimino with a soft c (Sim-ee-no) to Chi-meen-o right after leaving home. Cimino was “always knocking five or six years off, even when he was barely thirty,” George Parker, an adman who knew an early-career Cimino, said. “He also claimed he was just shy of six foot, when it was obvious he wore massively built-up shoes and was probably about five foot four.” 

Charles Elton’s biography Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision is both the definitive version of Cimino’s life and a version that recognizes—is thematically about—its own incompleteness and contradictions. It has a ghostly quality. Even when Elton can parse out the truth, something always remains unknowable. The motivations for Cimino’s lies, for one. Parts of the intensely private two-time Oscar winner’s life remain a black box. Late in the process of writing the book, Elton encounters Valerie Driscoll, a woman who runs a wig shop. Cimino was a client who became a close friend. Driscoll claims that Cimino was a trans woman named Nikki—although she doesn’t put it exactly that way. “I don’t know at what point he decided he was done with being a guy,” she tells Elton. “I just don’t know. Michael became Nikki.” She remembers “Nikki driving away one night in the Mercedes sports car and waving through the window” and thinking “she was the most beautiful woman I ever saw.” This apparently confirms a rumor Cimino denied when alive. Struggling to come to terms with their gender identity seems like a potential organizing principle for the lies, clarifying that Cimino had a need to build a Michael Cimino-with-a-hard-c from the ground up, a macho persona to wear as armor. But really, it’s just another fleeting glimpse, creating more uncertainties than it resolves. We don’t know Cimino’s gender, just like we don’t know their date of birth. 

In the gaps, a myth was created: Cimino as the folk devil of American cinema. After the success of The Deer Hunter—a Vietnam War movie that’s either a white supremacist fantasy or one of the greatest films ever made, depending on who you ask—they went mad with power on Heaven’s Gate. That movie went so massively over budget that it sunk United Artists—the studio that Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks founded in 1919—and killed New Hollywood stone dead. After a decade and change of often young directors being given creative control of their films, the corporate suits decided there wasn’t a business case for artistic freedom. In a later interview, Martin Scorcese described it as a “coup d’etat” by the executives in the filmmaking business. 

Usually, when an artist fights a corporate overlord, the story makes the artist the hero. But Cimino became a cautionary tale. (In the 1990s, the troubled production of the Kevin Costner film Waterworld earned the moniker “Kevin’s Gate” in sardonic tribute.) Even as the world has started to come around on Cimino, that narrative has lingered. The re-evaluation of Cimino has gotten far enough that Greta Gerwig could cite Heaven’s Gate as a key influence on her adaptation of Little Women, but it still “made everyone a bit nervous” that she kept referencing it. 

But when the encrusted layers of decades of misinformation and antagonism are scraped away, we’re still left with the work. Looked at up close, one at a time, Cimino’s films are mesmerizingly beautiful and frequently astonishing. There was nobody quite like Cimino. Money men ended the career of one of the great American artists, and they got away with it, too. 

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Cimino’s 1974 feature directorial debut, came after Cimino broke into Hollywood as a screenwriter with Silent Running and the Dirty Harry sequel Magnum Force. Compared to the three- and four-hour epics that would make Cimino famous, it’s a lean and efficient genre exercise: a comic crime caper on the road, clocking in at under two hours. That would make it easy to dismiss as a tentative, unambitious start, its creator gearing up for masterpieces to come—or worse, a cynical effort to break into directing by reverse-engineering a hit, a rote star vehicle for Clint Eastwood. (As Elton tells it, Cimino was deferential to Eastwood to a degree never to be replicated.) But when you sit down and watch Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, it’s something else entirely. I admittedly love 1970s Clint Eastwood star vehicles, but Thunderbolt and Lightfoot isn’t just an especially well-made or interesting example of the form. It’s transcendent. 

Eastwood plays a bank robber, nicknamed the Thunderbolt in the press, opposite Jeff Bridges as Lightfoot, a freewheeling drifter and small-time thief. Thunderbolt—dressed in preacher’s garb after hiding out as a clergyman—is fleeing an assassin when Lightfoot, flooring it in a stolen car, runs the assassin over. Thunderbolt grabs onto Lightfoot’s car by the open window and climbs in. It is one of the great meet-cutes of cinema history. They go on the run together, hopping from stolen car to stolen car. Members of Thunderbolt’s old gang chase after them, mistakenly believing they were double-crossed and that Thunderbolt stole their share of their last heist. The four men eventually come to an uneasy peace, agreeing to redo the same bank job again—with Lightfoot making up for the man he hit with his car. But, in signature Cimino style, the film has a leisurely pace and is full of apparently aimless lingering—on the wheat fields of Montana, on Eastwood’s rugged face—that adds up to something more. It has less fat on it than Cimino’s later epics, but it maintains a cultivated disinterest in the story that you might bill as the “premise.” Most heist movies are built around the major set pieces of the heist itself. More Midnight Cowboy than Ocean’s Eleven, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is about something much more commonplace and much more extraordinary: two people and the special connection between them. 

eastwood and bridges in "thunderbolt and lightfoot" (1974)

As Lightfoot, Bridges is sprightly, shaggy-haired, and sunshine-bright. His boyish good looks and smart mouth make the perfect foil for the still, steady but magnetic toughness of Eastwood. The chemistry between them is undeniable. “Cimino loads the script with hints that the men have feelings for each other they don’t quite understand,” Keith Phipps writes for The Dissolve, “and Bridges’ performance… runs with the notion.” When Thunderbolt attempts to part ways early in the film, Lightfoot, heart-bruised and wistful, says, “You sure don't know a good thing when you see it, do you?” Thunderbolt tries to gift him his watch—a token of his appreciation—and Lightfoot tells him, “I don't want your watch, man. I want your friendship. God damn it, I like you, that's all.” When Thunderbolt gets back in the car a few minutes later—having spotted another would-be assassin—Lightfoot practically glows with delight, flirtily teasing Thunderbolt, “Hey, we gotta stop meeting like this. People are going to talk… Where there's smoke, there's fire, you know?” 

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’s “homoeroticism is so manifest as to barely be subtext,” Christina Newland argues for Criterion, “although Jeff Bridges’s dreamy, irresponsible Lightfoot is forever chasing skirts, it’s pretty evident that he has a lovesick, puppyish infatuation” with Thunderbolt. “Bridges plucks at Eastwood’s shirt flirtatiously, nuzzles close to him, craves a physical affection that Eastwood brushes off throughout”—but though it’s true that Eastwood’s Thunderbolt is not as physically affectionate, it’s clear that he adores Lightfoot right back. There’s never a crack in his tough guy façade, but his love is so strong that it emanates out of him, no cracks necessary. One of the first things he says to Lightfoot is that his eyes are blue: it’s not a compliment in the strictest sense—just an observation—but in Eastwood’s gruff manner, it feels like one. If his warmth and protectiveness could seem big brotherly, the changes he makes to the heist plan to accommodate swapping in Lightfoot for their tech guy do not. Last time around, the tech guy monitored the frequencies of the alarm system. This time, in what Phipps nails as “a scheme seemingly borrowed from the Bugs Bunny playbook,” Thunderbolt gets Lightfoot to dress in drag to distract a security guard. The getaway plan involves Lightfoot staying in drag to pose as Thunderbolt’s date at a drive-in movie theatre, held in his big strong arms while they watch the show. They’re posing as a couple on a date, but this is a case where, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, you are what you pretend to be. Nobody really knows anything about Michael Cimino, but Thunderbolt and Lightfoot feels like one from the heart. 

Impressed by Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Cimino’s commercials, EMI Films producer Michael Deeley approached Cimino about The Man Who Came to Play, a script written by Louis A. Garfinkle and Quinn K. Redeker that EMI had bought the rights to. It was about playing Russian roulette in Las Vegas, with Elton calling it a “larky buddy movie” in the vein of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Cimino said yes—and turned it into The Deer Hunter. It was, to say the least, not a larky buddy movie about playing Russian roulette in Vegas.

The Deer Hunter is typically described as a film about the Vietnam War. True enough, but that’s a little like saying Kramer vs. Kramer is a film about working in advertising. Macho, stoic Mike (Robert De Niro), sweet, delicate Nick (Christopher Walken), and their friend Steven (John Savage) are steelworkers in a working-class, primarily Russian Orthodox town in Pennsylvania. The film opens on the day of Steven’s wedding, shortly before the three men are due to ship out to Vietnam. In the script, the wedding scene is ten pages—about ten or 15 minutes of screentime. In the final film, this opening swells to the length of a feature presentation. It’s not that a lot of new material is added; it just stretches. “68 minutes might sound like a ludicrously excessive amount of screen time for a prologue,” Sean Burns writes at Crooked Marquee. “[Y]et we need to dwell on the day to day details. We need to be able to feel the fabric of these lives before it’s so cruelly ripped away.”

The Deer Hunter is typically described as an epic. Also true enough, but it misses how small and intimate the film feels. An epic film can span decades, centuries even, or plot the rise and fall of whole civilizations. Not The Deer Hunter. The plot is made so subservient to the film’s other elements that you forget to expect one to develop. Instead, you have to submit to the wedding sequence’s slow, hypnotic rhythm, train yourself to see all that happens when nothing much is happening. The Robert Altman-esque sound design has a naturalistic array of overlapping conversations, music, and incidental sounds, making everything seem so much more real without ever devolving into an unintelligible din. We’re just hanging out with the fellas. Mike, Nick, and Steven, as well as their friends Stan (John Cazale, in his final role), Axel (Chuck Aspegren, a non-professional actor who was foreman of a steel mill that Cimino and De Niro visited during pre-production), and Nick’s girlfriend Linda (Meryl Streep): we see these friends drinking, dancing, giddy, and aimless and so much younger than they will ever be again. 

The Vietnam scenes are, by contrast, less than forty minutes of the film’s 184. As the gang arrive back at the bar, happy and drunk and singing, spraying beers on each other, one of them starts playing Chopin on the piano. Their rambunctiousness, their exuberance, their youth drains out of them. The camera is still trained on their faces when we hear the helicopters. Smash cut to Vietnam. 

The scenes in Pennsylvania are slow and deliberate, full of long, wide shots of crowds. The scenes in Vietnam are loud and fast and full of close-ups. Once you’re accommodated to the pace of the first hour or so, the Vietnam scenes feel hallucinatory. It is here that we get to the film’s most famous sequence: Mike, Nick, and Steven are captured and put in a POW camp, where the guards force them to play Russian roulette for their entertainment. Many have pointed out the illogic of this, but for me, a strictly rationalist interpretation of this part of the film misses the point. It operates in the key of a fevered nightmare, distilling war to its essence—violence inflicted arbitrarily, disfiguring both body and mind. In a more elegant manner than Apocalypse Now Redux manages with its added scenes, The Deer Hunter connects this violence back to colonization by having a French man run a Russian roulette ring with Vietnamese competitors in Saigon. 

The Deer Hunter was controversial on release and remains so to this day. To its naysayers, the film’s portrayal of the Vietnam War is a disgusting act of historical revisionism akin to genocide denial. In reality, the U.S., having committed untold war crimes, was the aggressor in Vietnam, and in The Deer Hunter, American soldiers are the victims. In the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum called it a “disgusting account of what the evil Vietnamese did to poor, innocent Americans.” The controversy was buoyed by revelation of Cimino’s own lies: the director claimed to have joined up after the Tet offensive and served in a Green Beret unit, but the actual extent of their military service was enlisting in the army reserve while at Yale before the war even began. It is an easy jump in logic to go from Cimino being a liar to The Deer Hunter being a lie—if you don’t take the time to wonder what it could even mean to call a fictional work of art a “lie.” 

The Deer Hunter is not a good source of education on the Vietnam War. But it’s not like it sets out to be one and fails. It’s easy to place the film within a grand official narrative of the Vietnam War as some kind of noble mistake, but looked at up close, The Deer Hunter is full of beautiful things outside of any grand narrative. I’ve never seen Russian-American culture represented with such vibrancy, let alone at a historical moment where “Russian” and “American” were presented as mutually exclusive. In the protagonists’ Pennsylvania town, there’s no contradiction: banners in English and Russian decorate the boys’ going away party. Distinctly Russian Orthodox imagery sits happily alongside classic Americana. It’s only outside their small town that a tension emerges. “Chevotarevich, is that a Russian name?” an army doctor asks Nick.

“No,” he says, withdrawn. “It’s an American name.” He sounds subdued, yet his answer remains defiant, pleading, and true. 

The main characters’ identities as Russian Americans have been curiously overlooked by most commentators. But Vietnam was in many ways a proxy war between Cold War superpowers, and The Deer Hunter plants its roots in a form of national and cultural identity that defies that dichotomy. Because the character Mike and the director Michael share a name, critics, including Pauline Kael, saw the De Niro character as Cimino’s idealized self-insert. (Knowing that Cimino used the female name Nikki, Christopher Walken’s Nick—with his fragile soul and fine-boned, angelic look—prompts a similar idea.) But Cimino was Italian American: the Russian Orthodox milieu is not a reflection of self. It’s a way to look at how American identity is formed in immigrant communities. While the characters earnestly believe in America—as a nation, as an ideal—the film gives the audience the time and space to see further. The whole film is nothing but time, and space, and seeing. We look and look and look until we are saturated with the sensory experience of a few small lives. Nobody really knows anything about Michael Cimino, but The Deer Hunter is not the product of meat-headed American chauvinism that its haters wish it was. 

The Deer Hunter was controversial, but it was also a critical and commercial success. Cimino won Best Director and Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The next day, they flew to Montana to begin filming Heaven’s Gate. 

Loosely based on the Johnson County War of 1889 to 1893, Heaven’s Gate takes one of the classic narratives of the Western—wealthy cattle barons versus small homesteaders—and paints it on the biggest canvas imaginable. As New Yorker film critic Richard Brody puts it, “Cimino made a film that’s both conventional and boldly original—a Western that entirely fits the norms and expectations of the genre while taking a radical approach to image-making and storytelling.” Running close to four hours, the central plot concerns the wealthy ranchers of Wyoming drawing up a list of 125 recent settlers and hiring mercenaries to kill them. Those on the death list are supposedly “thieves and anarchists,” but their real crime is being poor, and for the most part, being recent immigrants from Europe. I think a lot of modern audiences, raised since the Western’s precipitous decline in popularity, have a preconceived idea of the genre as inherently right-wing, sexist, and racist, but as Edward Buscombe writes in his brilliant book on John Ford’s Stagecoach, “it is at least as plausible to see Westerns as fundamentally anti-establishment, against the rich and powerful and in favor of the poor and weak. Besides the triumphalism of conquest and empire-building, there is another tradition in the Western… [that] teems with corrupt sheriffs, arrogant and tyrannical landowners, grasping and cheating bankers, sadistic and blinkered martinets.” Heaven’s Gate, emphatically part of this tradition, uses the Western as a framework to depict quite literal class warfare. 

It’s a devastating film to watch at any time, but it’s particularly harrowing to watch during Donald Trump’s second term. The criminalization of immigrants in the pursuit of ever greater self-enrichment of the few acquires a new urgency when state agencies are kidnapping immigrants and deporting them to concentration camps. Two of the film’s most indelible scenes capture the breadth of the immigrant experience, both taking place in the titular “Heaven’s Gate,” which is, of all things, a roller-skating rink. In one scene, the community plays music and dances and skates at a proto-roller disco that is easily mocked as anachronistic but is actually one of the most historically accurate things in the movie. (Roller skating was really big in the 1880s!) When the young fiddle player (David Mansfield) descends from the stage to skate around (while playing uninterrupted), it is majestic. It feels like what cinema was made to capture. I can’t imagine how much you would need to harden your heart not to crack a smile. The whole sequence is an ecstatic celebration of immigrant cultures that is unmistakably American—an assertion that “immigrant cultures” and “American” not only aren’t mutually exclusive but are different words for the same thing. Later, in this same hall, the community will hear the death list read aloud. They will beg Kris Kristofferson to stop reading, to continue reading—to escape this knowledge like that will protect them, to seize this knowledge like that will protect them. Either way, it ends in intense, heart-wrenching slaughter. 

skating scene from "Heaven’s Gate" (1980)

Kristofferson plays Jim Averill, a Harvard graduate who arrives in Johnson County, Wyoming, to serve as marshal. “Every new citizen who takes up land here, the big fellas black ball ’em,” an Irish immigrant tells him when he arrives. “Citizen steals to keep his family from starving, and they thread them off or kill ’em.” Averill’s sympathy is all with the homesteaders, not least because his lover, sex worker Ellie (Isabelle Huppert), is on the death list. Men that he went to university with are on the other side—not getting their own hands dirty, but dictating from behind closed doors. He tries to enlist the help of the army, but the big ranchers have the backing of no less than the U.S. president. If The Deer Hunter is a small story that swells with its rapt attention to details, Heaven’s Gate manages to tell a story about dozens or hundreds of people with that same keen and lingering eye. "I wanted you to feel what it was like to walk down a street in that period: to follow those noisy wagons, to cross all that activity, what you felt, what you heard,” Cimino told Cahiers du Cinéma. “People made so much dust. […] when hundreds of wagons go around, they raise dust. And very often, we took the time to record the background sound. In the store, for example, we recorded numerous conversations, with the intention of inserting them into the soundtrack later.” Even more so than The Deer Hunter, it’s a film that creates a wall of sound, both atmospheric and intelligible: “This isn't general background noise; you hear people, in a corner, argue over the price of a knife…” Cimino places actors with significant roles in the background of shots where you would typically only use extras, creating the sense of the whole town being lived in and interconnected. Characters come to the fore and fade away but do not disappear. The American West is sometimes imagined as a vast, empty place, but in Heaven’s Gate, it is full and overflowing. As Brody notes, “There is something almost pointillistic [or] proto-digital about the enormous amount of specific and distinctive visual information in Cimino’s over-packed compositions.” Every frame is, as they say, a painting. 

It’s a masterpiece. And it’s hard to oversell how harshly it was received. Roger Ebert called it one of the ugliest films he’d ever seen, as well as “the most scandalous [of] cinematic waste.” Before it was screened, it had already become infamous for going so far over time and over budget. Cimino was asked on NBC if it was “obscene” to spend $35 million on a movie when that much money could make such a difference to poor American families. (That’s about $132 million adjusted for inflation, or less than half of what Disney’s soulless live-action remake of Snow White cost.) Everyone seemed to delight in seeing Cimino fall. “The reviews […] belong less to the history of cinema than to the sociology of the mob,” Brody writes. “Egged on by reports of the movie’s inflated budget and protracted shooting schedule that resulted in part from Cimino’s extremely meticulous approach to design and direction, critics closed their eyes, minds, and hearts and instead reviewed the gossip.” Its failure was blamed for bankrupting United Artists. But UA didn’t actually go bankrupt; rather, it was sold to a conglomerate for a hefty sum. Still, the reviews saw the film through the lens of its inflated budget; its failure to make the money back was proof the negative reviews were right. For decades it could be called the worst film ever made, a claim that went virtually uncontested. Nobody really knows anything about Michael Cimino, but Heaven’s Gate is the work of a true artist. 

Cimino would never make another film of that cost and scale again, although—unlike Elaine May after Ishtar—they did make other movies. The best of these is 1985’s The Year of the Dragon, which by rights would have been the film that rescued their career. If you hated Heaven’s Gate, then Year of the Dragon should seem like redemption. It’s a taut crime thriller that feels like the missing link between Jean-Pierre Melville and John Woo. It has the beauty of Cimino’s best work—the backlighting in the final shootout is gorgeous—but without their supposed indulgence. But it, too, was a failure, solidifying Cimino’s downward trajectory. Mickey Rourke plays a New York police captain and Vietnam veteran who takes on the Triad, the Chinese mafia. Unable to shoot the film in Chinatown, Cimino built an extremely detailed set instead. Cimino and production designer Wolf Kroeger “took plaster casts of the actual pavements so their set would have the right chipped curbs,” Elton writes, quoting Cimino, “People think cities are all horizontals and verticals. Lampposts and signs are often at an angle. Most studio builds are pool table flat. New York is a rocky little island.” 

Elton describes Rourke as “too young for the role” and having “a curious time-warp quality” in his film noirish trilby hat. But Rourke being unstuck in time is part of what the film’s about. In one of cinema’s most fascinating riffs on the archetypal unrelenting cop who goes too far and thumbs his nose at the system, the police captain’s war on the Triad is a misguided attempt, born of a toxic mix of unresolved trauma and anti-Asian racism, to relitigate Vietnam, to win this time. Asian-American organizations protested the film prior to its release, pointing to its use of racial slurs and the potential harm it could do to Chinatown’s economy. As with gay activists protesting Cruising a few years earlier, I think this is an understandable wariness that veers into unwarranted hostility. 

Whether it slips into racism or not, Year of the Dragon clearly sets out to be an anti-racist film—didactically so, if anything. Rourke’s character is paired with a rookie Chinese-American cop played by Dennis Dun, and he makes clear the systemic role anti-Asian racism has played in American society. Sometimes it feels like Cimino was trying to include every fact they found out researching Chinese people’s experience in the U.S. In Year of the Dragon, Cimino goes to great lengths to remind the audience that the West is littered with the bones of anonymous Chinese men who built the railroads, and they were still excluded from citizenship until 1943. “I know the story, Captain. Most people don't. Because no one remembers in this country,” the rookie cop says. “No one remembers anything.” 

After Year of the Dragon, Cimino directed an adaptation of The Sicilian, Mario Puzo’s 1984 sequel to The Godfather, from which all references to The Godfather had to be removed for copyright reasons.  It sounds like a born disaster, but in Cimino’s cut, it’s close to brilliance. The film is full of haunting images—a single drop of blood on a clean white shoe—and, like Heaven’s Gate, makes impassioned human drama from the distribution of land ownership. Christopher Lambert is badly miscast in the lead role, unable to muster sufficient charisma to carry off the character of Salvatore Giuliano—a kind of blessed outlaw, a gangster-saint beloved of Sicily’s peasantry. John Turturro gives a wonderful performance as his right-hand man, but despite the conviction in Turturro’s delivery when he tells Lambert that he loves him, you have to wonder why. Though all this hardly matters: Cimino’s cut surfaced in France, but for the U.S. release, the studio cut it to pieces to get it under two hours. 

Cimino’s final directorial efforts—The Desperate Hours and The Sunchaser—have their moments, but they’re largely anonymous work-for-hire stuff. We know Cimino never stopped writing screenplays. We know Cimino never stopped trying to get an adaptation of The Fountainhead off the ground. We know that Cimino largely disappeared from public life. We know that Cimino became virtually unrecognizable after extensive plastic surgery. We know that Cimino lived to see people start to recognize Heaven’s Gate as one of the greatest films of all time.  We know that it was too little, too late: Cimino had been a much easier figure of blame than the corporate consolidation that did more to change Hollywood filmmaking than one little western ever could. We know that, despite it all, Cimino gifted us a handful of the most extraordinary works of art in the history of the movie business.

But then again, nobody really knows anything about Michael Cimino.