Clint Eastwood: The Last Legend

Michael Cimino, God Bless America

A Special Day

To Each His Own Cinema

Realising The Deer Hunter

Clint Eastwood: The Man from Malpaso

Kris Kristofferson: His Life and Work

1979 ITV South Bank Show Interview With Michael Cimino

The Sunchaser

Desperate Hours

The Sicilian

Platoon

Year of the Dragon

Heaven's Gate

The Deer Hunter

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot

Magnum Force

Silent Running

Michael Antonio Cimino ( chim-EE-noh, Italian: [anˈtɔːnjo tʃiˈmiːno]; February 3, 1939 – July 2, 2016) was an American film director, screenwriter, producer and author. Notorious for his obsessive attention to detail and determination for perfection, Cimino achieved widespread fame with The Deer Hunter (1978), which won five Academy Awards at the 51st Academy Awards ceremony, including Best Picture and Best Director.
With a background in painting and architecture, Cimino began his career as a commercial director in New York before moving to Los Angeles in the early 1970s to take up screenwriting. After co-writing the scripts for both Silent Running (1972) and Magnum Force (1973), he wrote the preliminary script for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974). The latter became his directorial debut and one of the highest-grossing films of that year.
The accolades received for co-writing, directing, and producing The Deer Hunter led to Cimino receiving creative control of Heaven's Gate (1980). The film became a critical failure and a legendary box-office bomb, which lost production studio United Artists an estimated $37 million. Its failure was seen by many observers as the end of the New Hollywood era, with studios next shifting focus from director-driven films toward high-concept, crowd-pleasing blockbusters. More recently, however, Heaven's Gate has undergone a dramatic reappraisal, even being named by BBC Culture as one of the greatest American films of all time.
Cimino made only four subsequent films and grew infamous for the number of projects left unfinished due to his uncompromising artistry. In 2002, Cimino claimed he had written at least 50 scripts overall. Several of his ambitious "dream projects" included adaptations of the novels Conquering Horse, The Fountainhead and Man's Fate as well as biopics on crime boss Frank Costello and Irish rebel Michael Collins.

Michael Cimino