All the energy I spent on Heaven’s Gate had one aim only: to bring late nineteenth century America to the screen, with the best images and the best sound possible, and to try to do it with the highest level of veracity. The period in which the film is set is the time when photography was becoming popular, so it is very well documented. Everything you see in the film can be found in a photograph of the period, from the details of the clothes to the way a skating rink looked. This determination to rediscover the truth involved the actors attending a kind of University of the West, before filming began. They took all kinds of lessons, like how to shoot with a pistol or rifle, how to ride a horse, drive a wagon, herd cattle and roller-skate (there were more fractures here than in the horse riding lessons). To the choreographer’s dismay, Kristofferson and Isabelle Huppert even took lessons in waltzing and according to him, Kristofferson had no sense of rhythm whatsoever. One thing that struck me in particular when looking at photographs from this period, was the mass of people, the real population explosion

that was taking place, especially as a result of the mass arrival of emigrants and the rapid birth of densely populated cities. This was something that I wanted to show in the movie at all costs. When you see in the same shot 2,000 people, 200 horses, 200 carts and a period locomotive, it’s all true, you can’t get the same veracity, the same sound digitally. The film tells the story of a real episode in American history, and is based on accurate documents. It talks about the Johnson County war, where in Wyoming the rich cattle owners hired killers to wipe out the immigrant farmers, accused of stealing. I was fascinated by the idea of bringing to light this episode, where Americans were killing other Americans and where the enthusiasm and delight in this young nation was mixed with a feeling of depression, of a defeat of ideals, of precocious awareness and I was naive enough to think that other people would have shared my interest. I didn’t know they would hate me for it. And that’s how I moved from the triumph of The Deer Hunter to the scathing criticism of Heaven’s Gate, which led immediately to the film being cut from its original length of 325 minutes to a version of just over two hours.

Michael Cimino, from an interview held in Bologna on 17.02.2003