'Heaven's Gate' to 'Sunchaser': Cimino's next life

By Scott Foundas
Film Editor

It is inevitable in discussing the career of Michael Cimino to happen upon "Heaven's Gate," the film he made immediately following "The Deer Hunter" and the one for which he is alternately the most remembered. It is a film more rumored than known and, as everyone says, it is something of a mess. But as very few say, it is also one of the major studies of the American West and the immigrant experience that few filmmakers would have the gall to undertake. "Heaven's Gate" has been mocked for its reliance on a "footnote" of history as the basis for its story, but it is actually rather astonishing how Cimino fashions his microcosmic telling of the history of our country around a seemingly minor cattle war in late 19th-century Wyoming.
For a director newly enshrined in the greater graces of Hollywood, with two big hits now and a couple of Oscars to his credit, "Heaven's Gate" was unquestionably the riskiest choice Cimino could have landed on for his next project. The film was mercilessly savaged by critics in its day (who were, perhaps, awaiting their opportunity to do so) and has become synonymous with failure and disaster of the highest possible stakes. These are roughly the events detailed in Steven Bach's incisive novel "Final Cut: Dreams and Disasters in the Making of `Heaven's Gate,'" though no bearer of that text should ever lose sight of the fact that Bach was himself the United Artists executive who oversaw Cimino's quixotic vision, and therefore not history's most objective journalistic chronicler.
"Heaven's Gate" was never widely seen, and the brief Phyrric victory that would come upon the occasion of the film's European release hardly compensates for the fact that the film is not really known anymore outside of the infamous legend it has created for itself. Yet, consider these virtues: the genuinely epic scope at a time when the very word is thrown around far too loosely; the unwavering commitment to the love story amid all the noise and chaos; the elegant compositions and the ravaging beauty of Vilmos Zsigmond's photography; the early resignation and despair of John Hurt; Cimino's unwaveringly harsh criticism of the wealthy landowners; the ensemble playing of Chris Walken, Isabelle Huppert, Richard Masur, Mickey Rourke and Jeff Bridges; and the complex motivations of Kris Kristofferson's only wholly believable screen performance until "Lone Star." That the film has been accused of being one of the worst films ever made is as confounding as it is ludicrous.
Nearly four hours in its complete version, "Heaven's Gate" never quite feels intimate enough, but Cimino has always seemed more inclined to the grand gesture when forced to choose, and in sheer terms of spectacle little since the days of D. W. Griffith can match the largeness of "Heaven's Gate." There is more to say, but that could go on forever. One final note, however, does seem pertinent. In 1990, while Kevin Costner toiled away, over budget and behind schedule on his own revisionist Western, "Dances with Wolves," the media began to rumor whether or not Costner's opus would indeed turn out to be "Kevin's Gate." The final irony (or calamity) is that it is "Heaven's Gate" that endures as the darker, more honest and uncompromised vision of the American West.
"As for the experience of it all," Cimino told me, "you have to recall that, first of all, I was incredibly young. You make your first movie and you're lying about your age -- you're 18 years old. You make your second movie, you're 21 or 22 and you get an Oscar. You think, `Oh gosh, now I'm just going to go and make the best movie I can make.' And you don't realize that people are getting pissed off, because you're some kid who comes out of nowhere, makes his first and second movies, and now they're going to nail you to the wall.
"There was no transition, because the day (of the Oscars) I was fitting wardrobe at Western Costume on Kristofferson. Somebody said, `Michael, you better go home, get dressed and get down to the Dorothy Chandler.' I said, `What are you talking about?' I was working that day and I had to go to Montana the next day to start shooting. I ran home, threw on the tux, ran Downtown, got the two things. I didn't even have time to think about it. I was shooting the next day!
"So, I never had time to enjoy winning, I never had time to think about it, I never even had time to think about how to use it, because I was in the middle of this humongous enterprise. So, when the whole thing happened, I didn't know what to think about it, because I still hadn't gotten over the other thing. Here you are -- you're a kid and it's all too much too soon -- and you're thinking, `Why are all these people so upset? What are they so pissed off about?' The only thing I can think of now is that, of all the films made from then until now, it keeps getting shown. You can't name one other movie made that year by that company that's still being shown and still being talked about. The more it gets shown, the more people seem to like it."
Much like James Cameron's "Titanic" (the only movie which rivals its physical grandeur), "Heaven's Gate" was notoriously behind schedule and over budget almost from the very beginning of production. Originally conceived at a $7.5-million budget, it would cost more than $40 million and become the most expensive movie (and costliest flop) ever made at the time (a delicate irony, given the fact that the average cost of studio pictures only 15 years later is nearly twice that). Still, I wondered whether Cimino foresaw the expense and expanse of the film, or whether the snowballing costs and delays surprised him as much as the studio.
"Every movie I've made has been ahead of schedule. `Thunderbolt and Lightfoot' was three days ahead of schedule, `Year of the Dragon' was eight days ahead of schedule, `Sunchaser' was three days ahead -- every movie I've made. There's no director in the business who can say that every movie he's made but one has been ahead of schedule. I'm the only one, ironically.
"I think what happened was that we began making this thing, and I was just trying so hard to make the very, very best movie I could make that I was just super na•ve. I thought that was what really counted. We were getting these beautiful things on film, and I even had another company that was willing to buy it from UA in the middle of production, when it was beginning to go a little over.
"It was very hard. I didn't realize, going in, how difficult it is in America now to do a full-blown period movie, because you have to virtually make everything. Saddle makers don't exist anymore, people don't make top hats anymore, down to the smallest things, even in London. You just can't find the things, and I didn't know that going in. I didn't think it was going to be such a struggle on the smallest level.
"I was very upset and I found that the company that made `Deer Hunter' was willing to buy it. UA didn't want to sell it! They loved what they were seeing, so they encouraged it. It wasn't like they said, `Can we stop making the movie?' They just said they wanted to have control over it. They never said, `We're going to shut it down.' So I was killing myself to get them the best movie that I could.
"Again, I was terribly young. To be in your early 20s and you've got the whole world watching you -- Walter Cronkite is on the news interrupting the invasion of Vietnam by China for the latest bulletin on you -- that's pretty heavy stuff. It was just sheer love of the work and the medium. There's still some terribly na•ve part of me which believes good intentions and hard work -- giving everything you've got -- counts for something, and I didn't realize that it doesn't!"
The rejection of "Heaven's Gate" was devastating for Cimino's career, sending it into a downward spiral from which it has never fully recovered. The next three pictures he would make all lacked a full sense of his personality, and Cimino largely seemed afraid and unable to mount the pictures he truly wanted to make. That is not to completely discount these subsequent films, though, as the New York thriller "Year of the Dragon" (made in 1985 and Cimino's first film since "Heaven's Gate") is particularly close to the old Cimino in its breathless action, its attention to detail and the central performance of Mickey Rourke as the good cop becoming blinded by his own racism.
"Year of the Dragon" is hindered by a weak female lead (has Cimino ever known what to do with the women in his films?) and a certain lack of an overall sense of purpose, but it is a major piece of entertainment, unfairly berated for its allegedly offensive stereotypes.
Two years later, "The Sicilian" proved the one of Cimino's films that entirely fails to take hold. Steeped in melodrama, a lot of the movie's problems can be traced back to Mario Puzo's source novel. But Coppola managed to make sense out of "The Godfather," starting with a barely more coherent original concept (and without Christopher Lambert). Epic without any reason to be, "The Sicilian" is guilty of everything that people have wrongfully accused of "Heaven's Gate."
Cimino then waited five more years to remake William Wyler's "Desperate Hours," and while the wait may hardly have proved wholly worthwhile, there are real ideas at work in the film. The end product is hopelessly muddled, but so much of what is wrong with "Desperate Hours" is made up for by the sequence in which David Morse kills himself in the desert. That escape from the film's suburban claustrophobia to a wide dust-blown landscape is one of Cimino's best scenes, sadly too short-lived.
Yet, it should be noted that not one of these movies (with the possible exception of "Year of the Dragon") made it to theaters in the same form as Cimino originally intended. While "Heaven's Gate" may rival only Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America" for the title of history's most unjustly cut film, "The Sicilian" lost more than 30 minutes (and most of Barbara Sukowa's graceful performance) by virtue of studio interference.
"The ending (of `The Sicilian') was put in the beginning, the beginning was put in the ending. The whole middle section of `Desperate Hours' was taken out -- the thing that made the movie work, the scene between the two women. There's this giant ellipse in the middle of the movie and you don't know what the second half of the movie is all about."
In 1996, Cimino emerged from a nearly decade-long hiatus to direct the road movie "Sunchaser," starring Woody Harrelson and produced by Warner Brothers. That spring, the film was the only film from a major American studio to be accepted into competition at the Cannes Film Festival and, by all accounts, the response was enthusiastic. In the fall, Cimino seemed poised for the domestic release of "Sunchaser" and the potential success of one of his most commercial movies. Then, the film was unceremoniously opened in a handful of theaters across the country and promptly shipped, more or less, directly to video. The curse that seems to have followed Cimino from "Heaven's Gate" on had struck again.
"One guy. It wasn't Warner Brothers. It was New Regency, who supplies movies to the studio. It happened that the executive at New Regency who was the guardian of the project left the company, this new guy came in and said, `We don't want to make this movie.' All the deals had been signed, so he did everything he could to stop the movie from being made, and he couldn't. So, he did the next best thing. He cut $10 million out of the budget and I still came in three days ahead of schedule.
"We went to Cannes and, for 10 minutes after that, this guy was my best friend. Then, we came back to the States, where New Regency controlled the advertising. Slowly, they pulled out every dollar from the advertising, and it was like watching a lake freeze. The movie got dumped into a couple of mini-malls and disappeared. Now, I get calls from all over -- people saying they love the movie. That was very painful, because that movie works."
"Sunchaser" was little-seen, but it is a real comeback for Cimino in that it recaptures the majesty of his western vistas and innovatively juxtaposes them against a jittery story of urban paranoia and the search for self-redemption. It is by no means an easy film to watch, for Cimino so often seems to be antagonistic with his audience, as though he is daring them to maintain their interest in seemingly unlikable characters and a heightened in-your-face aesthetic. I have seen the film, in part or in whole, three times, and I still can't say for sure whether I "like" it.
But there's an undeniable power to Cimino's story of a slick, self-absorbed UCLA oncological surgeon (Harrelson) kidnapped by a young felon (John Seda) in search of a mystical cure for his terminal cancer. Harrelson and Seda have remarkable chemistry together, and Harrelson is impressively inward and reserved in his best performance. Cimino's style for the first half of the picture is so hyped-up, with so much shaky camera movement and jarring jump-cutting, that you wonder whether or not he is attempting to inspire his audience's mass exit. Then, the picture settles down into desert scenes worthy of Ford, and you realize that somehow the film's early instability is the very basis for the tense emotional involvement you now feel for Cimino's characters.
"The great motto of American architecture is `form follows function.' If you think about it, when was the last time you saw a movie which begins, virtually, in the gutter, in the streets of the ghetto -- and a kidnapping to boot, which is always a rather frenetic enterprise -- and ends up in the majesty of the great open spaces in the West? The two things are not accidental. The way the urban stuff is handled -- the formal stuff -- starts to change as you move into this bigger space. I think that there is an evolution that takes place -- the camerawork, the editing, everything.
"The whole first half is cut very sharply and is characteristic of urban life. Then, as you move out, as Woody's inner self starts to evolve and as he becomes more accepting of what this kid is talking about, the film kind of calms down. If I had to describe it, I'd say that you go from someone hyperventilating to really breathing deeply, properly. Suddenly, you are in another world and this character has gone on a great spiritual journey.
"I think all good films are, in some way, a journey. In order to do that, the audience has to believe in the characters. If they believe the characters, then you can take them anywhere. That is the reason in `The Deer Hunter' so much time is spent with the characters, because you're going to take them into a holocaust and back, so you better get to know them real well."
Cimino has remarked in the past that the ramifications of "Heaven's Gate" kept him from ever making the movies he truly wanted to make, and in the long years in between the films he has made, there have been many projects aborted or canceled with little notice and at the last possible minute. Still, Cimino is greatly enamored of the films he has made, and the inner balance he has managed to maintain through the years is admirable. Now, as he stands on the verge of directing a new film -- a drama called "The Dreaming Place" for Trimark Pictures -- Cimino radiates all the unharnassed charisma and enthusiasm of a first-year film student. If he is a monster, then he is one of the gentle and misunderstood variety.
And so, after talking for nearly two-and-a-half hours, the eternal dreamer Cimino seemed to have come full circle in our discussion of his life and work. As we parted, I thanked him for his generous time and asked him, finally, to reflect on the remarkable roller-coaster ride that has been his career and to look to the future and what he believes it may have in store for him.
"That streak of idealism still won't die in me, " he responded. "If I was smart and I was savvy about Hollywood at that time, I would not have made that movie. I would have made another movie. I would have consolidated my success in a way and I would have built an empire, but I didn't. So now, all these years later, I'm kind of back where I began. In other words, I'm having to essentially start all over again, by writing scripts. Except, I can do it better now. I'm faster now. I'm better at the game now.
"I've never stopped working and thank God for the writing, actually. If I was sitting around for eight years waiting to make a movie, I wouldn't be doing it anymore, as you said. So, it's really the writing, oddly enough, which I never intended to do, that has enabled me to get through these periods and make them productive.
"So, in some way it has been a blessing. Often, it has been very difficult and very painful, especially when people that you've helped a lot won't help you back when you need it. I've got to make my own help happen, but what it's done is -- because I have to work so hard now -- it's kept me like (I'm) still 18, like when I made my first movie. I'm still back there, back where it's fun, and the struggle itself has reinvigorated me in some weird way. I meet guys that I know that I started out with and they look these old tired guys. They don't even recognize me. It's very strange, because it's harder than ever, but it's the very struggle that's the thing that's giving me new energy.
"Maybe, in some way, if it all happened for a reason and that reason was to make me stronger at this point in my life, so that instead of thinking about retiring, I'm just beginning, then maybe it was worthwhile. It wasn't pretty and I wouldn't want to relive it, but I'm just now beginning to appreciate the upside of it."