‘Heaven’s Gate’: Steven Spielberg’s impassioned defence of an infamous box office flop
A Hollywood flop is something that Steven Spielberg hasn’t really been familiar with for the greater part of his illustrious career. According to the data that has been recorded by multiple sources, the Jaws director is the most commercially successful filmmaker in the entirety of cinema history, whose global box office total exceeds $10.5billion.
Spread across multiple genres and decades, Spielberg has repeatedly churned out record-breaking hits that have resonated with audiences all around the world. Be it the awe-inspiring sci-fi vision of Jurassic Park or the harrowing dramatic explorations in Schindler’s List, the American director is well aware of what it takes to score big at the box office.
However, he is also not one to dismiss flops for failing to achieve the kind of commercial impact that he’s used to experiencing. During a 1982 conversation with Rolling Stone about the state of the industry and examples of ambitious movies failing due to studio “supervision”, Spielberg cited Michael Cimino’s doomed 1980 epic Heaven’s Gate as the ultimate epitome.
Providing an extensive portrait of America in a way that was markedly different from other depictions in westerns, Heaven’s Gate was a monumental effort that infamously failed to recoup its $44million budget. While many criticised Cimino for his botched attempt at creating something truly grand, Spielberg defended his work and said that everything surrounding the project was to blame.
Spielberg said: “I don’t know of more than four executives in this town who know how to cut a movie and how to execute one. The people who are in charge today wouldn’t know how to save a Heaven’s Gate if, indeed, it needed saving. Now, I’m of the school that doesn’t think that Heaven’s Gate needed to be saved. I think that the overall attack that was launched on the director, Michael Cimino, is more interesting and worthy of analysis than the Heaven’s Gate cataclysm. Because Heaven’s Gate, which is a very, very flawed movie, is one of the most carefully crafted movies of all time.”
The filmmaker added: “I wish Cimino had been left alone because, of all the new guys coming up, Michael’s got a chance to be David Lean. Michael has a showman inside that doesn’t know where he’s at yet. Michael is maybe as technically skilled as Billy Friedkin, Francis Coppola, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese. And once he gets himself a story that’s accessible to the masses, he’s gonna be hard to stop.”
Although Cimino continued to direct movies, he failed to match the levels of the comparisons Spielberg named by quite a margin. Interestingly, it’s Heaven’s Gate that has become a central positive part of Cimino’s legacy because the extended versions in later cuts of the movie provided a more accurate representation of what he was trying to achieve, leading to a much deserved reappraisal of his dizzying opus.
