Michael Cimino
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Seizure, Midnight Express and Platoon: An Excerpt from The Oliver Stone Experience
[Editor’s note: the following interview is an excerpt from Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Oliver Stone Experience, out September 13 from Abrams Books. This excerpt from Seitz’s book-spanning interview with the director covers Stone’s life and career from his first feature, Seizure, through the production of Midnight Express and his initial, frustrated efforts to get Platoon made.] I had a nightmare, and it became the basis of Seizure. It came to you all in a dream? Yeah, it did. It felt like a fever dream. A father ends up betraying his son, like a coward, and runs away and wakes up, and of course he thinks it’s all […]
by Matt Zoller Seitz on Aug 30, 2016 -
Watch: “Michael Cimino / Wide Shot”
Director Michael Cimino passed away in July at the age of 77. In this video, Jorge Luengo Ruiz explores the way that Cimino used the widescreen in his work.
by Marc Nemcik on Aug 9, 2016 -
“I Never Knew How to Make a Film”: Michael Cimino in 2005
“The Last of the Mavericks” – that was the very appropriate title that the Portuguese Cinematheque gave to its November 2005 series on Michael Cimino (during which this interview was conducted). And all you needed was to see the director himself walk into the lobby of Lisbon’s fusty, old-fashioned Tivoli hotel to realize how much a maverick he was. At that time, Cimino had not directed a feature film in a decade, and little did we know he would never come to direct another, despite the swirling constellation of rumors that always surrounded him. And yet, for someone who freely […]
by Jorge Mourinha on Jul 5, 2016 -
Watch: “The Unloved: The Lone Ranger & Heaven’s Gate“
“How do we define failure when it comes to motion pictures?” Simultaneously defending the more-or-less rehabilitated Heaven’s Gate and the not-so-much The Lone Ranger is a hard task, but presumably someone has to do it. In this video essay, Scout Tafoya gives a surprisingly plausible stab at arguing that both are underrated slabs of greatness with much in common, alternately grimly realistic and expensively glossy takes on the genocide of the Native Americans, presentational flip sides of the same coin.
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 5, 2015 -
Watch: Michael Cimino’s 1967 United Airlines Commercial
In his first interview in 13 years, The Deer Hunter/Heaven’s Gate director Michael Cimino sounds off on the greatness of American Sniper and why Clint Eastwood should be president, writing novels published in France he’s afraid to have published in the US, and much more. It’s a good time to revisit the start of Cimino’s career, when he was a Madison Avenue commercial director, and a very successful one at that. This 1967 ad was part of a $1.7-million United Airlines campaign and it’s very of the period — literally colorful, musically brassy, casually sexist. More background on the commercial here.
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 19, 2015 -
GREEN HEADS BACK TO THE ’70S
Director David Gordon Green will appear this coming Monday night at the IFC Center to host screenings of two of his favorite ’70s films: Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Sidney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson. It’s the debut of the theater’s “Monday Night with…” series at which various artists will, says the press release, “acknowledge the brilliance of a timeless classic, to spotlight an unsung gem, or to defend a guilty pleasure.” Green comments on his choices: “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Jeremiah Johnson serve as two examples in a period of American filmmaking when human nature often wrestled Mother Nature, and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 12, 2005
