10 Directors Who Sabotaged Their Own Movies
3. Michael Cimino - Heaven's Gate
Hot off the Best Picture and Best Director-winning The Deer Hunter, director Michael Cimino was effectively given carte blanche to helm his self-penned 1980 epic western Heaven's Gate.
And in perhaps the textbook example of directorial hubris run amok, Cimino's meticulous, dictatorial directing style caused the film to run massively over-schedule and over-budget.
He had a specifically built street torn down and re-made because it "didn't look right" and shot over 220 hours of footage, costing the studio $200,000 per day in production fees.
With Cimino's preference for dozens of takes and production slowing to a crawl, United Artists considered firing him, while reports suggest Cimino changed the locks to the editing suite to prevent executives from viewing any footage.
Cimino's first rough cut was 5 hours and 25 minutes long, and after the studio naturally balked at such a length, he cut it down by almost two hours. But following its disastrous premiere, the film was pulled from release for further re-editing.
The $44 million film grossed just $3.5 million, was panned by critics, and in addition to killing Cimino's reputation overnight, also effectively put United Artists out of business (until MGM later revived them).
On a broader level, Heaven's Gate's failure also resulted in a downturn in auteur-driven films and also in western productions.
The amount of collateral damage caused by Cimino's ego run amok is almost unthinkably catastrophic, even if his film has been re-evaluated in a positive light by some critics in recent years.