The infamously wayward director reined in by Clint Eastwood: “Give the kid another try”
The ‘New Hollywood’ movement was a pivotal era in American cinema, but the period eventually ate itself when the studios realised the next generation of auteurs were being given too much freedom. However, it could have theoretically carried on at least a little longer if everyone had taken their cues from Clint Eastwood.
It was a transformative stretch for the medium and one that opened the door for the likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Mike Nichols, and Sidney Lumet to waltz and through all legends responsible for some of the greatest movies ever made.
Bending to the whims of the wunderkinds only had a finite shelf life, with one film, in particular, turning out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. After winning ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ for The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino was given free rein to do whatever he wanted for his next project, which led him to Heaven’s Gate.
The end result was a box office catastrophe that lost a fortune, came close to shuttering an entire studio, and effectively ended ‘New Hollywood’ in one fell swoop when the top-level executives decided that the risk of going so vastly over budget and behind schedule wasn’t worth any potential rewards, leading to a more homogenised era of boardroom-approved blockbusters.
Cimino had previously spent more than agreed on The Deer Hunter, but nobody batted an eyelid because it was a critical and commercial goldmine. A perfectionist and a headstrong personality, he already had a reputation for being a prickly customer who ventured into bullishly difficult territory when he didn’t get his own way.
Still, he was obviously gifted enough that those minor sins could be forgiven until Heaven’s Gate annihilated what was once one of the most promising careers in the industry. Had the suits taken notice of how Cimino deferred to Eastwood on his debut, maybe he’d have been easier to rein in.
As Jeff Bridges recalled, even though Cimino was the man behind the camera on his feature-length debut Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Eastwood was the leading man and one of the producers, not to mention an A-list megastar, revered figure, and accomplished filmmaker.
Cimino became notorious for shooting countless takes and capturing reams of footage, most of which would never end up in the final cut. And yet, he wouldn’t even contemplate doing so on his 1974 crime caper unless Eastwood gave him the OK.
“Clint likes doing very few takes. One, maybe two at most, whereas Michael likes to do a lot but couldn’t since Clint was the producer,” Bridges told Alex Simon. “So there was one scene where I wasn’t happy with the way it was going, and we’d already done a couple of takes. So I went to Michael and said I wanted to do it again.”
Remarkably, based entirely on Cimino’s fondness for footage, he “got really nervous” at the suggestion. “I don’t know, man, I’m gonna have to ask the boss,” Bridges recalled him saying, with ‘the boss’, of course, being Eastwood. The director pleaded his case, and the star gave him that thousand-yard stare and agreed, “Give the kid another try.”
Cimino would take the reins on another six features, all of which suffered from either budgetary, scheduling, or post-production problems. That didn’t happen on Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, with the rest of Hollywood missing a trick by not taking a leaf out of Eastwood’s books and pumping the brakes on the auteur’s excessive tendencies.
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