10 Ingenious Ways Film Directors Beat The Studio

If all else fails, just flat-out lie to the studio and hope for the best. That was the bold strategy employed by the late, great Michael Cimino while shooting his Oscar-winning opus The Deer Hunter.

The film is famous - or some might say, infamous - for its lengthy wedding sequence before the central characters head off to war, totalling a stonking 51 minutes in length.

Hilariously, though, Cimino initially claimed to producers that the scene would only take up a mere 21 minutes of screen time, so one can imagine their surprise when it was a whole half-hour longer, extending the runtime out to 184 bladder-busting minutes.

Producer Michael Deeley later said of Cimino's sneaky trick, "the plan was to be advanced by stealth rather than straight dealing." He wasn't wrong.

Cimino even went as far as to fire editor Peter Zinner from the movie when he found him cutting the wedding scene down, and though Cimino insisted he more-or-less cut the movie himself, Zinner still won a Best Film Editing Oscar for his work.

Ultimately the outcome was a happy one for all involved, as The Deer Hunter won four of its nine Oscars - for Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Christopher Walken), and Film Editing - and performed well at the box office.

Yet the film's unlikely success nevertheless led to Cimino's career-ending, hubris-filled, studio-destroying follow-up, the grandiose 1980 flop Heaven's Gate.