The Deer Hunter Film Notes
The Deer HunterTheatrical poster[1]
Directed by / Michael Cimino
Produced by / Barry Spikings
Michael Deeley
Michael Cimino
John Peverall
Screenplay by / Deric Washburn
Story by / Michael Cimino
Deric Washburn
Louis Garfinkle
Quinn K. Redeker
Starring / Robert De Niro
Christopher Walken
John Cazale
John Savage
Meryl Streep
See Full Cast
Music by / Stanley Myers
Cinematography / VilmosZsigmond
Editing by / Peter Zinner
Studio / EMI Films
Distributed by / Universal Pictures (US)
EMI Films (Worldwide Sales)
Release date(s) / December 8, 1978(1978-12-08)
Running time / 183 minutes[a 1]
Country / US, UK
Language / English
Budget / $15 million[2]
Box office / $48,979,328 (Domestic)[2]
The Deer Hunter is a 1978 drama film directed and co-written by Michael Ciminoabout a trio of Russian American steel worker friends and their infantry service in the Vietnam War. The film stars Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage, John Cazale, Meryl Streep and George Dzundza. The story takes place in Clairton, a small working class town on the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh and then in Vietnam, somewhere in the woodland and in Saigon, during the Vietnam War.
The film was based in part on a screenplay called "The Man Who Came To Play" by Louis Garfinkle and Quinn K. Redeker about Las Vegas and Russian Roulette. Producer Michael Deeley, who bought the script, hired writer/director Michael Cimino who, with Deric Washburn, rewrote the script, taking the Russian Roulette element and placing it in the Vietnam War. The film went over-budget and over-schedule and ended up costing $15 million.
The scenes of Russian roulette were highly controversial on release. The film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director and was named by the American Film Institute as the 53rd Greatest Movie of All Time on the 10th Anniversary Edition of the AFI's 100 Years…100 Movies list.
Plot
Critics and film historians have often noted how the film is divided into three equal thirds or acts. Likewise the plot synopsis is also divided into three acts, spanning the years of 1968-1975.[a 2]
Act I - In Clairton, a small working class town in western Pennsylvania, in late 1968, Russian American steel workers Michael (De Niro), Steven (Savage), and Nick (Walken), with the support of their friends Stanley (Cazale), John (Dzundza) and Axel (Chuck Aspegren, his only movie role; he was a steel worker from Gary, Indiana), prepare for two rites of passage: marriage and military service. The opening scenes set the character traits of the three main characters. Michael is the no-nonsense, serious but unassuming leader, Steven the loving, near-groom, pecked at by his mother for not wearing a scarf with his tuxedo and Nick is the quiet, introspective man who loves hunting because, "I like the trees...you know...the way the trees are..." The recurring theme of "one shot", which is how Michael prefers to take down a deer, is introduced. Before the trio ships out, Steven and his girlfriend Angela (who is pregnant by another man but loved by Steven nonetheless) marry in an Orthodox wedding. In the meantime, Michael contains his feelings for Nick's girlfriend Linda (Streep). At the wedding reception held at the local VFW bar, the guys get drunk, dance, sing and have a good time, but then notice a soldier in a US Army's Special Forces uniform. Michael buys him a drink and tries to start a conversation with him to find out what Vietnam is like, but he ignores Michael. After Michael explains that he, Steven and Nick are going to Vietnam, the Green Beret raises his glass and says "fuck it" to everyone's shock and amazement. Obviously disturbed and under mental anguish, the soldier again toasts them with "fuck it". After being restrained by the others from starting a fight, Michael goes back to the bar and in a mocking jest to the soldier, raises his glass and toasts him with "fuck it". The soldier then glances over at Michael and grins smugly. Later, during the Russian Orthodox traditional wedding toast to Steven and Angela, which is believed to be good luck for a couple who drink from conjoined goblets without spilling a drop, a drop of blood-red wine unknowingly spills on her wedding gown, foreshadowing the coming events. Near the end of the reception, Nick asks Linda to marry him, and she agrees. Later that night, after a drunk and naked Michael runs through the streets of town, Nick chases him down and begs Michael not to leave him "over there" if anything happens. The next day, Michael and the remaining friends go deer hunting one last time, and Michael again scores a deer with "one shot".
Act II - The film then jumps abruptly to a war-torn village, where U.S. helicopters attack a communist occupied Vietnamese village with napalm. A North Vietnamese soldier throws a stick grenade into a hiding place full of civilians. An unconscious Mike (now a staff sergeant in the Army Special Forces) wakes up to see the NVA soldier shoot a woman carrying a baby. In revenge Mike kills him. Meanwhile a unit of UH-1 "Huey" helicopters drops off several US infantrymen, Nick and Steven among them. Michael, Steven, and Nick unexpectedly find each other just before they are captured and held together in a riverside prisoner of war camp with other US Army and ARVN prisoners. For entertainment, the sadistic guards force their prisoners to play Russian roulette and gamble on the outcome. All three friends are forced to play. Steven aims the gun above his head, grazing himself with the bullet, and is punished by incarceration to an underwater cage, full of rats and the bodies of others who earlier faced the same fate. Michael and Nick end up playing against each other, and Michael convinces the guards to let them play with three bullets in the gun. After a tense match, they kill their captors and escape. Mike had earlier argued with Nick about whether Steven could be saved, but after killing their captors he rescues Steven. The three float downriver on a tree branch. An American helicopter accidentally finds them, but only Nick is able to climb aboard. The weakened Steven falls back into water and Mike plunges in the water to rescue him. Unluckily, Steven breaks both legs in the fall. Mike helps him to reach the river bank, and then carries him through the jungle to friendly lines. Approaching a caravan of locals escaping the war zone, he stops a South Vietnamese military truck and places the wounded Steven on it, asking the soldiers to take care of him. Nick, who is psychologically damaged apparently suffering amnesia, recuperates in a military hospital in Saigon with no knowledge on the status of his friends. At night, he aimlessly stumbles through the red-light district. At one point, he encounters JulienGrinda (Pierre Segui), a champagne-drinking friendly Frenchman outside a gambling den where men play Russian roulette for money. Grinda entices the reluctant Nick to participate, and leads him into the den. Mike is present in the den, watching the game, but the two friends do not notice each other at first. When Mike does see Nick, he is unable to get his attention. When Nick is introduced into the game he instead grabs the gun, fires it at the current contestant and then again at his own temple, causing the audience to riot in protest. Grinda hustles Nick outside to his car to escape the angry mob. Mike cannot catch up with Nick and Grinda as they speed away.
Act III - Back in the U.S., Mike returns home but maintains a low profile. He tells the cab driver to pass by the house where all his friends are assembled, as he is embarrassed by the fuss made over him by Linda and the others. Mike goes to a hotel and struggles with his feelings, as he thinks both Nick and Steven are dead or missing. He eventually visits Linda and grows close to her, but only because of the friend they both think they have lost. Mike is eventually told about Angela, whom he goes to visit at the home of Steven's mother. She is lethargic and barely responsive. She writes a phone number on a scrap of paper, which leads Mike to the local veterans' hospital where Steven has been for several months. Mike goes hunting with Axel, John and Stanley one more time, and after tracking a beautiful deer across the woods, takes his "one shot" but pulls the rifle up and fires into the air, unable to take another life. He then sits on a rock escarpment and yells out, "OK?", which echoes back at him from the opposing rock faces leading down to the river, signifying his fight with his mental demons over losing Steven and Nick. He also berates Stanley for carrying around a small revolver and waving it around, not realizing it is still loaded. He knows the horror of war and wants no part of it anymore. Steven has lost both his legs and is partially paralyzed. Mike visits Steven, who reveals that someone in Saigon has been mailing large amounts of cash to him, and Mike is convinced that it is Nick. Mike brings Steven home to Angela and then travels to Saigon just before its fall in 1975. He tracks down the Frenchman Grinda, who has made a lot of money from the Russian-roulette-playing American. He finds Nick in a crowded roulette club, but Nick appears to have no recollection of his friends or his home in Pennsylvania. Mike sees the needle tracks on his arm, a sign of drug abuse. He realizes that Nick thinks he (Michael) and Steven are dead, since he is the only one who made it back on the helicopter. Mike enters himself in a game of Russian roulette against Nick, hoping to jar Nick's memory and persuade him to come home, but Nick's mind is gone. In the last moment, after Mike's attempts to remind him of their trips hunting together, he finally breaks through, and Nick recognizes Mike and smiles. Nick then tells Mike, "one shot", raises the gun to his temple, and pulls the trigger. The bullet is in the gun's top chamber, and Nick kills himself. Horrified, Michael tries to revive him, but to no avail.
Epilogue - Back home in 1974, there is a funeral for Nick, whom Michael brings home, good to his promise. The film ends with the whole cast at their friend's bar, singing "God Bless America" and toasting in Nick's honor.
Pre-production
There has been considerable debate, controversy, and conflicting stories about how The Deer Hunter was initially developed and written.[5] Director and co-writer Michael Cimino, writer Deric Washburn, producers Barry Spikings and Michael Deeley all have different versions of how the film came to be.
Development
In 1968, the record company EMI formed a new company called EMI Films, headed by producers Barry Spikings and Michael Deeley.[5]Deeley purchased the first draft of a spec script called "The Man Who Came To Play", written by Louis Garfinkle and Quinn K. Redeker, for $19,000.[6] The spec script was about people who go to Las Vegas to play Russian Roulette.[5] "The screenplay had struck me as brilliant," wrote Deeley, "but it wasn't complete. The trick would be to find a way to turn a very clever piece of writing into a practical, realizable film."[7] When the movie was being planned during the mid-1970s, Vietnam was still a taboo subject with all major Hollywood studios.[6] According to producer Michael Deeley, the standard response was "no American would want to see a picture about Vietnam".[6]
After consulting various Hollywood agents, Deeley found writer-director Michael Cimino, represented by Stan Kamen at the William Morris Agency.[7]Deeley was impressed by Cimino's TV commercial work and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.[7][8]Cimino himself was confident that he could further develop the principal characters of The Man Who Came To Play without losing the essence of the original. After Cimino was hired, he was called into a meeting with Garfinkle and Redeker at the EMI office. According to Deeley, Cimino questioned the need for the Russian roulette element of the script and Redeker made such a passionate case for it that he ended up literally on his knees. Over the course further meetings, Cimino and Deeley discussed the work needed at the front of the script and Cimino believed he could develop the stories of the main characters in twenty minutes of film.[8]
Screenplay
Cimino worked for six weeks with Deric Washburn on the script.[9]Cimino and Washburn had previously collaborated with Stephen Bochco on the screenplay for Silent Running. According to producer Spikings, Cimino said he wanted to work again with Washburn.[5] According to producer Deeley, he only heard from office rumor that Washburn was contracted by Cimino to work on the script. "Whether Cimino hired Washburn as his sub-contractor or as a co-writer was constantly being obfuscated," wrote Deeley, "and there were some harsh words between them later on, or so I was told."[8] There are still questions, as to whether Washburn/Cimino's script was entirely fiction.
Cimino's claim
According to Cimino, he would call Washburn while on the road scouting for locations and feed him notes on dialogue and story. Upon reviewing Washburn's draft, Cimino said, "I came back, and read it and I just could not believe what I read. It was like it was written by some body who was... mentally deranged." Cimino confronted Washburn at the Sunset Marquis in LA about the draft and Washburn supposedly replied that he couldn't take the pressure and had to go home. Cimino then fired Washburn. Cimino would later claim to have written the entire screenplay himself.[9] Washburn's response to Cimino's comments were, "“It’s all nonsense. It’s lies. I didn’t have a single drink the entire time I was working on the script.”[5]
Washburn's claim
According to Washburn, he and Cimino spent three days together in L.A. at the Sunset Marquis, hammering out the plot. The script eventually went through several drafts, evolving into a story with three distinct acts. Washburn didn’t interview any vets to write The Deer Hunter and didn’t do any research. “I had a month, that was it,” he explains. “The clock was ticking. Write the fucking script! But all I had to do was watch TV. Those combat cameramen in Vietnam were out there in the field with the guys. I mean, they had stuff that you wouldn’t dream of seeing about Iraq.” When Washburn was finished, he says, Cimino and Joann Carelli, an associate producer on The Deer Hunter who would go on to produce two more of Cimino’s films, took him to dinner at a cheap restaurant off the Sunset Strip. He recalls, “We finished, and Joann looks at me across the table, and she says, ‘Well, Deric, it’s fuck-off time.’ I was fired. It was a classic case: you get a dummy, get him to write the goddamn thing, tell him to go fuck himself, put your name on the thing, and he’ll go away. I was so tired, I didn’t care. I’d been working 20 hours a day for a month. I got on the plane the next day, and I went back to Manhattan and my carpenter job.”[5]
Deeley's reaction to the revised script
Deeley felt the revised script, now called The Deer Hunter, broke fresh ground for the project. The protagonist in the Redeker/Garfinkle script, Merle, was an individual who sustained a bad injury in active service and had been damaged psychologically by his violent experiences, but was nevertheless a tough character with strong nerves and guts. Cimino and Washburn's revised script distilled the three aspects of Merle's personality and separated them out into three distinct characters. They became three old friends who had grown up in the same small industrial town and worked in the same steel mill, and in due course would be drafted together to Vietnam.[10] In the original script, the roles of Merle (later renamed Mike) and Nick were reversed in the last half of the film. Nick returns home to Linda, while Mike remains in Vietnam, sends money home to help Steven, and meets his tragic fate at the Russian roulette table.[11]
A Writers Guild arbitration process awarded Washburn sole "Screenplay By" credit.[5]Garfinkle and Redeker were given a shared "Story By" credit with Cimino and Washburn. Deeley felt the story credits for Garfinkle and Redeker "did them less than justice."[8]Cimino contested the results of the arbitration. ""In their Nazi wisdom," added Cimino, "[they] didn't give me the credit because I would be producer, director and writer."[12] All four writers, Cimino, Washburn, Garfinkle and Redeker received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay for this film.[13]