The production of The Deer Hunter (1978) is as legendary and intense as the film itself. Director Michael Cimino’s obsession with authenticity pushed the cast and crew to their physical and emotional breaking points, creating a set atmosphere that often blurred the lines between acting and reality.
Robert De Niro worked for several months at a real steel mill in Ohio under an assumed name to prepare for his role. The opening scenes were filmed inside a functioning U.S. Steel mill in Cleveland, where actors stood on the furnace floor amidst molten metal and temperatures reaching 180°F. Cimino cast actual steelworkers as extras. One worker, Chuck Aspegren, was hired on the spot for a major supporting role after impressing filmmakers during a mill tour.
To heighten the tension during the famous Russian-roulette scene, De Niro requested a live round in the gun during the scene where he subjects John Cazale’s character to the game. The round was checked obsessively before each take to ensure it was not in the active chamber. The slapping in the prisoner-of-war sequences was real to elicit genuine reactions from the actors. In one instance, Cimino secretly instructed Christopher Walken to spit in De Niro’s face during their final encounter; De Niro’s shocked and furious reaction was authentic.
John Cazale was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer just before filming began. The studio initially wanted to fire Cazale because he was uninsurable. Robert De Niro paid the insurance bond out of his own pocket to keep him in the film. Because of his health, Cimino rearranged the entire production schedule to film all of Cazale’s scenes first. Meryl Streep took the role of Linda primarily to be with Cazale during his final months. He died in March 1978, shortly after filming concluded and before the movie’s release.
During the bridge escape sequence in Thailand, the helicopter’s skids got caught in the rope bridge as it rose. De Niro and John Savage were left dangling 60 feet above the river; they eventually dropped into the water to avoid being crushed. While filming the log scene on the River Kwai, the three lead actors nearly drowned when they were trapped behind a tree trunk in choppy water. A camera and filmed footage were lost in the river during the rescue attempt. The cast dealt with real rats, mosquitoes, and venomous snakes on set in Thailand. A Thai banded krait (a highly venomous snake) once crawled up Savage’s leg during filming.
Originally scripted to be much shorter, the wedding sequence took five days to film and grew to 51 minutes of screen time. Cimino used real liquor for the reception, leading the extras to become genuinely intoxicated during the long takes. Due to Cimino’s perfectionism and filming entirely on location (using eight towns across four states to represent one Pennsylvania town), the budget doubled from $7 million to $15 million. Cimino’s first cut was over three and a half hours long. He famously fired the film’s editor, Peter Zinner, for attempting to trim the wedding sequence. Paradoxically, Zinner went on to win the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for the movie.
The Deer Hunter has been included on lists of the best films ever made, including being named the 53rd-greatest American film of all time by the American Film Institute in 2007 in their 10th Anniversary Edition of the AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list. It was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1996, as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
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