[9] 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.

He was described in the 1959 Red Cedar Log yearbook as having tastes that included blondes, Thelonious Monk, Chico Hamilton, Mort Sahl, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and "drinking, preferably vodka.

[25][26] Within eighteen months of directing TV ads, he was hired by Madison Pollack O'Hare to work on special assignments involving "graphic design concepts and unusual approaches to live film".

[37] With the success of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Cimino landed a deal at United Artists to write and direct The Fountainhead, based on Ayn Rand's sprawling novel about an architect who refuses to compromise, which he had loved for years.

[60] Taking its cue from more than the novel, Cimino's modern-day adaptation was largely modeled off of architect Jørn Utzon's troubled building of the Sydney Opera House, as well as the construction of the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York.

[69] The film that came closest to production was an original for Paramount, titled Head of the Dragon, that was set in a "mythical South American country" and revolved around a polo-playing WASP who springs a Mafia killer from jail in order to assassinate a rebel leader.

[70] A month later, in October 1976, Cimino took what he thought would be another routine meeting at a production studio, where he gave a 1-hour pitch (with no script), verbally, to EMI executives for his ambitious Vietnam War drama The Deer Hunter.

Derived from some of Cimino's personal experiences,[66][72] The Deer Hunter tells the story of three blue-collar steelworkers, portrayed by Robert De Niro, John Savage and Christopher Walken, who during the Vietnam War volunteer to serve together.

"[66] Despite its grim subject matter, The Deer Hunter performed well when it opened in December 1978, but quickly aroused controversy, particular for the film's depiction of Russian roulette, which the characters were forced to play when captured by the Viet Cong.

[80] The day after the Academy Awards, Cimino flew up to Kalispell, Montana to begin shooting his Western epic Heaven's Gate, where it had been in pre-production for several months; finding locations, casting five hundred extras and building complicated sets.

[81] An ambitious take on the American Western genre, the film follows a Harvard graduate who becomes a federal marshal investigating a Government-sanctioned plot to steal land from European settlers in Casper, Wyoming.

The origins of the project dated back to a script Cimino had written earlier in the '70s titled The Johnson County War, based on a rare bit of history he stumbled across when researching the development of barbed wire and its use in the American West.

"[20] In the 219-minute version that was shown, sound-editing problems in critical scenes made the plot hard for audiences to follow, and Cimino and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond tinted the film "with a kind of yellow glow" that was supposed to give an antique look,[94] removed in the 2012 restoration.

[100] As a result, UA executive Steven Bach wrote an entire book devoted to the topic, Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists.

[107] Following Heaven's Gate, Joann Carelli quickly landed him a picture deal at CBS Theatrical Films to direct Nitty Gritty, described by The New York Times as "a black comedy about news reporting".

[102][110] In early September 1982, Cimino approached short story writer Raymond Carver and his wife Tess Gallagher (both fans of Heaven's Gate[111]) to rework a screenplay based on the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky, in hopes that he would direct it.

Cimino's proposed reimagination of the film, "a John Steinbeck inspired musical-comedy"[116] set during the Great Depression, was to have followed a rich girl from Houston who falls in love with a dancer from a shanty town.

[133] By then, Colin Welland and Carl Foreman were brought aboard as scriptwriters, as well as Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth (who had made the 1976 bicycle-racing documentary A Sunday in Hell), as Hoffman's research adviser.

[132] After working on a script about the role of Chinese immigrants in the construction of the first transcontinental railroad in the American West,[135][136] Cimino finally accepted Dino De Laurentiis' offer to adapt Robert Daley's novel Year of the Dragon into a feature film, due to similarities in subject matter.

[109] David Puttnam of Columbia Pictures reportedly gave Cimino the green light to begin shooting,[149] however due to the corporate meddling of Coca-Cola who wanted to go for something decidedly more mainstream, he would be forced to compromise his vision for the film.

"[109][160] After poor previews however, De Laurentiis apparently edited out several scenes, including an intense, eight-minute confrontation between Lindsay Crouse and Kelly Lynch in "a huge, empty football field" because test audiences "read lesbian overtones" into their relationship.

[172] A spiritual road odyssey, the film stars Woody Harrelson as a Los Angeles doctor who is held at gunpoint by a teenage convict dying of abdominal cancer (played by Jon Seda), and forced to drive into Navajo Country in search of a sacred mountain lake with healing powers.

Set in 1951, and 173 pages in length, the story follows a "dynamite-looking, six-foot blonde who wears blue jeans, a Miss Universe of muscle," who travels by motorcycle across America and ends up fighting in the Korean War alongside a brigade of women.

Based on French author André Malraux's 1933 novel, the film, as described by Cimino, was to have depicted "the deep, emotional bonds that develop between several Europeans living in Shanghai during the tragic turmoil that characterized the onset of China's Communist regime."

[198] Other projects Cimino worked on with Maraval later in his life include a feature adaptation of the Tennessee Williams short story "One Arm"[199] as well as a film about the history of America from the point of view of the Native Americans.

"[211]His work has been lauded by such filmmakers as Stanley Kubrick,[56] Agnès Varda,[212] Martin Scorsese,[213] Francis Ford Coppola,[23] Miloš Forman,[214] Spike Lee,[215] Olivier Assayas,[216] Greta Gerwig,[217] Steven Soderbergh,[218] Brett Ratner,[219] David Gordon Green,[220] James Gray[221][222] and Quentin Tarantino.

However, following the disastrous reception of Heaven's Gate in New York and Hollywood, a spokesman with Stigwood claimed that Cimino had never been involved with Evita at any capacity and that they "planned to seek a retraction from Time magazine," which had listed him as the film's director.

When I'm asked about my influences, instead of rolling out 20 filmmakers, I say Frank Lloyd Wright, [Edgar] Degas... [Gustav] Mahler... Cimino has shown great admiration for Luchino Visconti, John Ford and Akira Kurosawa, dubbing them "The Holy Trinity of movies.

"[63][53] He once named his literary influences as Vladimir Nabokov, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Gore Vidal, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, the classics of Islamic literature, Frank Norris and Steven Pinker.

[56][3] Frequent collaborators of Cimino's included actors Mickey Rourke, Christopher Walken, Jeff Bridges, Clint Eastwood, Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Bauer and Caroline Kava, writers Deric Washburn, Oliver Stone, Thomas McGrath, Rodney Patrick Vaccaro and Raymond Carver, producers Joann Carelli, Dino De Laurentiis and Barry Spikings, cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond, Alex Thomson and Doug Milsome, composer David Mansfield, and assistant director Brian W.