Word: cimino
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Meryl Streep could obviously have made it to the screen on looks alone. Says Director Michael Cimino, who worked with her on The Deer Hunter: "The camera embraces her." Lucky camera. Many women would kill for her slender, fashion-model figure, for that ash-blond hair, oval face, porcelain skin and those high, exquisite cheekbones. Her eyes mirror intelligence; their pale blue sparkle demands a new adjective: merulean. Only a slight bump down the plane of her long, patrician nose redeems her profile from perfection...
Certainly Cimino and his company are working as well as spending. The director pores over the day's takes until after midnight and sleeps only three or four hours a night. "I have no private life," maintains Cimino, who is a bachelor. Says the film's cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond (who also shot The Deer Hunter), "Michael fell in love with this film...
...just about every actor, extra, grip and gaffer on Heaven's Gate. Cimino, a short (5 ft. 6 in.), shy, plump New Yorker, gets the most out of his cast and crew. A scene in which Kristofferson lashes out at a crowd with a bullwhip had to be shot 53 times. Says Walken, who won an Oscar for The Deer Hunter: "There are extraordinary moments with him. He takes you to places that make the whole event special...
...Cimino believes in the intensity of his method. He told TIME Correspondent James Willwerth on location: "You follow an obsession. It leads you somewhere. If you make an honest film, the audience will relate to the people who live and die in that film. Your obsession has nothing to do with it." More simply, he explains: "You make a movie with as much passion as you can bring to it-and people respond...
Heaven's Gate, like The Deer Hunter, is a morality play that does not aspire to strict factual accuracy. To Cimino the new film's historical period is "not terribly different from the late 1960s. It was a period of turmoil. There was a sense of guilt and responsibility in the country." This perhaps is Cimino's real obsession: to analyze the psyche of a society in conflict. He hopes soon to look at the 18th century, in a film about the Sioux culture. That movie, Cimino insists, will be told in subtitled Indian dialogue. No doubt...