Heaven's Gate (film) - Production

Production

In 1971, Michael Cimino submitted the original script for Heaven's Gate, then called The Johnson County War, to United Artists executives; the project was shelved when it failed to attract big name talent. In 1979, on the eve of winning two Academy Awards (Best Director and Best Picture) for The Deer Hunter, Cimino convinced UA to resurrect the project with Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, and Christopher Walken as the leads. The film began shooting on April 16, 1979, in Glacier National Park, east of Kalispell, Montana, with the majority of the town scenes filmed in the Two Medicine area, north of the village of East Glacier Park. The film had a projected December 14 release date, and a budget of $11.6 million.

The project promptly fell behind schedule. According to legend, by day six of filming it was already five days behind schedule. As an example of his fanatical attention to detail, a street built to Cimino's precise specifications had to be torn down and rebuilt because it reportedly "didn't look right." The street in question needed to be six feet wider; the set construction boss said it would be cheaper to tear down one side and move it back six feet, but Cimino insisted that both sides be dismantled and moved back three feet, then reassembled. Cimino's reported numerous retakes of one of the wealthy landowners showing his contempt for the immigrants by baring his rump towards them was another example of his excessiveness, supposedly doing up to 15 shots. As one witness recounted, "How many ways can a guy drop his pants? You'd think three or four takes would be enough, but Michael--jerk that he was--wouldn't quit until he was satisfied." An entire tree was cut down, moved in pieces, and relocated to the courtyard where the Harvard 1870 graduation scene was shot. According one actor, his character was to "walk past a cock fight"; when he came to the shooting-location, the cockfight-scene was been filmed for two weeks. Cimino shot more than 1.3 million feet (nearly 220 hours) of footage, costing approximately $200,000 per day. (Cimino had expressed his wish to surpass Francis Ford Coppola's mark of shooting one million feet of footage for Apocalypse Now.) Despite going over budget, Cimino was not financially penalized because he had a contract with United Artists to the effect that all money spent "to complete and deliver the picture in time for a Christmas 1979 release shall not be treated as overbudget expenditures." In the book "The Hollywood Hall of Shame," it is alleged that drug use on the set may have contributed to the excessive demands of the shoot. According to an unnamed production insider, "People wonder how a movie like Heaven's Gate could cost forty million dollars. I'll tell you. Twenty million for the actual film, and another twenty million, you can bet, for all that cocaine for the cast and crew." Cimino's obsessive behavior soon earned him the nickname "The Ayatollah." The film finished shooting in March 1980, having cost nearly $30 million. Production fell behind schedule as rumors spread of Cimino demanding up to 50 takes of individual scenes and delaying filming until a cloud that he liked rolled into the frame. As a result of the numerous delays, several of the musicians that were originally brought to Montana for three weeks ended up stranded there for six months; the experience, as the Associated Press put it, "was both stunningly boring and a raucous good time, full of jam sessions, strange adventures and curiously little actual shooting." The jam sessions served as the beginning of numerous musical collaborations between Bridges and Kristofferson; they would later reunite for the 2009 film Crazy Heart and for Bridges's eponymous album in 2011.

As production staggered forward, United Artists seriously considered firing Cimino and replacing him with another director. It is heavily implied in the book Final Cut that Norman Jewison was asked if he would take over, but he rejected the job.

During post-production, Cimino changed the lock to the studio's editing room, prohibiting studio executives from seeing the film until he completed the editing. Working with Oscar-winning editor William Reynolds, Cimino slaved over his project. Reynolds complained how much of his work would later be undone by the director, convinced that his Western epic would be a masterpiece. According to an anonymous studio insider, "The level of pretension in that editing room was only matched by the level of disaster later on." On June 26, 1980, Cimino previewed a work print for executives at United Artists that reportedly ran five hours and twenty-five minutes, which Cimino said was about 15 minutes longer than would the final cut.

United Artists refused to release the film at that length and contemplated firing Cimino. Cimino re-cut the film during the summer of 1980, finally editing it down to its original premiere length of 3 hours and 39 minutes (219 minutes), the cut that would run for one week at New York's Cinema 1 theater.