Why Michael Cimino didn’t consider ‘The Deer Hunter’ to be a Vietnam War movie
Throughout the course of cinematic history, the Vietnam War has proven to be a generative event for the medium of film, with several masterpiece movies arriving with the infamous conflict at the core of their respective narratives. These movies include Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Oliver Stone’s Platoon.
Another is Michael Cimino’s 1978 drama The Deer Hunter, starring Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage, John Cazele and Meryl Streep. Cimino’s film tells of three steelworkers who struggle to readapt to American civilian life after returning from the horrors of the Vietnam War.
While the Vietnam War undoubtedly plays a significant impact on the narrative of The Deer Hunter and the trauma of its main character, particularly Robert De Niro’s, Cimino had been doubtful of actually classifying his movie as a “Vietnam film” as he did not want to make a “political statement” about the conflict.
In an interview with The New York Times, Cimino noted, “The war is really incidental to the development of the characters and their story. It’s a part of their lives and just that, nothing more.” Indeed, most of the action of The Deer Hunter takes place in a working-class Pennsylvania town, with only a handful of flashback scenes showing what went down when they fought in the war in Vietnam.
Cimino had rather wanted to make a film about “ordinary people” who undergo a series of crises, in this particular instance, crises of emotional trauma. Cimino explained, “The war is simply a means of testing their courage and willpower. But it could just as easily have been the Civil War.”
The director had no desire to put forth an argument of “whether the war should or should not have been,” but actually just wanted to address the lives of working-class American citizens “who journeyed from their homes to the heart of darkness and back” and examine the lengths they would go to in order to “survive”.
While the film had earned acclaim for its screenplay, cinematography and performances, some critics found issues with how Cimino had represented the United States’ position in Vietnam, with some pointing out a handful of historical inaccuracies in the Vietnam flashback segments. In that light, it’s hard to think of The Deer Hunter and not view it under the lens of it indeed being a Vietnam War movie.
Still, Cimino had been adamant that “the specific details of the war are unimportant” and that The Deer Hunter was, in fact, a “film of the heart, not a film of the intellect”. What was important were the questions that the movie raised, like “How do they go on without committing suicide, having seen and been through what they’ve seen and been through? And how do they go on with some sense of hope, with their spirits intact? And still believe in something?”
So, while many relate The Deer Hunter with the great movies of the Vietnam War, alongside Apocalypse Now and Platoon, the director himself had been avoidant of considering his own work in such a light. By contrast, he felt that his 1978 film had been more concerned with wider human truths and questions of the impact of trauma, even if, in that particular instance, the trauma had been caused by the horrific conflict of the mid-20th century.