The one thing Robert De Niro would change about ‘The Deer Hunter’
By 1978, Robert De Niro had fully established himself as the premiere actor of his generation. After receiving his first real taste of fame in 1973’s Bang the Drum Slowly, a dominant run of collaborations with Martin Scorsese ensured that De Niro was more than just a passing movie star. But it wasn’t his performances in Mean Streets or Taxi Driver that secured De Niro his first Academy Award – it was his turn as a young Vita Corleone in The Godfather Part II that saw him take home Oscar gold.
From there, De Niro was able to choose the projects that interested him the most, regardless of their commercial viability. He took a role in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 and returned to Scorsese for the musical flop New York, New York, neither of which was financially successful. It wasn’t until 1978 that De Niro scored another critical and commercial hit when he starred in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter.
“I always felt that The Deer Hunter was going to be a good movie; otherwise, I wouldn’t have done it,” De Niro recalled to Playboy in 1989. “It had its flaws, but there was something very special about it.”
“It was in the wake of Apocalypse Now, so everybody who was going to Thailand was worrying about that,” De Niro recalled about shooting the Vietnam scenes on location. “They heard about the monsoons and the jungle and being forced to shut down the filming. Subconsciously, it affected people. I know it did me. I said, ‘I’m going to get stuck there.’ It was the rainy season, we were going to be there for three months—around Bangkok, the River Kwai—and we did have some pretty hairy moments in the shooting.”
Among the scariest moments was when De Niro was nearly crushed by a helicopter while shooting river scenes. He managed to make it out unscathed when it came time to film the movie’s most notorious scene: the game of Russian Roulette. De Niro gave the performance of a lifetime, but he had a disagreement with Cimino over the basic conceit of the game.
“The only thing that I felt was that the Russian-roulette stuff with the Viet Cong shouldn’t have been played for money,” De Niro claimed. “To play for money in Saigon is one thing, but out in the field, the stakes should have been something else. The money sort of cheapened their reason for being out there. They were fighting for what they believed was right. While we were shooting the scene, I said to Mike Cimino, ‘The money thing there is not right. It should be for their idea, what they believe in. And it would be stronger, more powerful, more accurate than money.'”
Check out the Russian Roulette scene from The Deer Hunter down below.
