The director Steven Spielberg called the second coming of David Lean: “He’s gonna be hard to stop”
As the single most commercially successful director in cinema history, Steven Spielberg is uniquely qualified to gauge which filmmakers are destined for bigger and better things. However, when he made one particularly lofty prediction, it hardly came to fruition.
Spielberg’s style was developed as an amalgamation of John Ford, David Lean, and Akira Kurosawa, three undisputed titans of the industry who inspired and influenced generations to come. Of course, he wasn’t a ripoff merchant, but that trio has always been the most towering influence on his filmography.
The filmmaker emerged at a time when the ‘New Hollywood’ movement was in full swing and the industry was suddenly awash with countless auteurs who’d be remembered as all-time greats, a roster that included George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, John Carpenter, James Cameron, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, and countless more.
For a while, it looked as though Michael Cimino was destined to join them, only for one infamous disaster to derail his entire career. Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges’ cross-country crime caper Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was a stellar debut, one that recouped its budget six times over at the box office and earned the latter an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
As far as sophomore features go, they don’t come much better than The Deer Hunter. A stone-cold classic, it won five Oscars, including two for Cimino in the ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ categories. The filmic world was at his feet until, of course, Heaven’s Gate.
Enough has been written about Cimino’s folly to last a lifetime, but in a 1982 interview with Rolling Stone, Spielberg was adamant that he’d bounce back. “I think that the overall attack that was launched on the director is more interesting and worthy of analysis than the Heaven’s Gate cataclysm,” he said, calling it “one of the most carefully crafted movies of all time.”
“I wish Cimino had been left alone, because of all the news guys coming up, Michael’s got a chance to be David Lean,” he continued. “Michael has a showman inside that doesn’t know where he’s at yet. And once he gets himself a story that’s accessible to the masses, he’s gonna be hard to stop.”
Lean won two Oscars from 11 nominations, spent decades as one of the industry’s most venerated filmmakers, and helmed multiple timeless pictures like Brief Encounter, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago, to name just four. That’s not to say Cimino didn’t have the potential to emulate him, but it would also be fair to say he didn’t.
In fact, despite Spielberg’s hopes that he’d rebound eventually, he didn’t. It would be five years after Heaven’s Gate that Cimino returned to directing, and he never came close to replicating his initial success.
