The Making of Apocalypse Next

Director Michael Cimino shoots a $30 million western

The Johnson County War, a bloody skirmish involving cattlemen, rustlers, vigilantes and the U.S. Cavalry in 1892 Wyoming, ranks well below Jenkins' Ear as a minor footnote to history. No longer. In fact, if the Guinness Book of World Records ever devises an entry for History's Most Expensive Minor Footnote, the frontier fracas may find itself at the top of the list. Credit for the elevation goes to Michael Cimino, 38, the Oscar-winning director of The Deer Hunter. Cimino's new film, Heaven's Gate, will dramatize the Johnson County War as lavishly as his last film did the war in Viet Nam, but the price will be steeper. The Deer Hunter was a $12 million movie. By the time Heaven's Gate is completed in October, it will probably cost more than twice that much.

Cimino submitted a script for the movie last fall to United Artists. The studio agreed to finance the picture for $7.5 million. "A really well-done western hadn't been made in a long time," explains U.A. Senior Vice President David Field. The studio's faith in Cimino was undiminished when the director's script rewrites necessitated a bigger budget of $11.6 million. The film had become more sweeping than a conventional western. It opens in the 1870s with the Harvard graduation of the hero, James Averill, who, like many of his generation, went West to help settle the land. Ten years later, as a federal lawman in Johnson County, he sides against his own class in the growing war between landed gentry and immigrant farmers. His story incorporates themes of love, class struggle and war. Says Kris Kristofferson, who plays Averill: "The movie ends where The Great Gatsby begins."

With Christopher Walken, John Hurt and Jeff Bridges in other major roles, shooting started April 15, just after the Academy Awards. "It was apparent within a few weeks that Cimino was going to go over budget," says Field. "It wasn't apparent until the summer that he was going to go seriously over."

Cimino decided to shoot much of the film in a majestic section of Montana's Glacier National Park. The other major location is the picturesque mining town of Wallace, Idaho. Cimino built an entire frontier street there. He also built a period roller rink called Heaven's Gate near the production headquarters in Kalispell, Mont.

The logistics of making an epic are awesome. Cimino, like Napoleon, is not the kind of strategist to skip a legion. The film involves more than 1,200 extras; from cravats to camisoles, their costumes had to be authentic. He went to Philadelphia to find a top-hat maker, and even farther afield to track down contemporary firearms and long-retired craftsmen who could make scores of wagons. From Denver, Cimino ordered a 19th century locomotive that had to be rerouted because it was too big for many tunnels. Then came the roundup of 80 wagon teams. Using fewer horses, says Cimino, "would have been like trying to show Fifth Avenue with only ten taxicabs."

He also set up an academy of frontier skills. Hundreds of extras were made to practice skating for weeks. There were also courses in waltzing, horse and buggy handling, bullwhipping, and music for a band using instruments of the time. Kristofferson and Walken took handgun lessons from a former Green Beret weapons specialist. French Actress Isabelle Huppert (The Lacemaker) was installed in Wallace's real-life whorehouse for three days to learn the rituals over which she would preside in the film.

Heaven's Gate will cost as much as Francis Coppola's $30 million Apocalypse Now, which was also released by United Artists. But Coppola put up more than half the money for Apocalypse, while Heaven's Gate is being almost entirely financed by U.A. The dialogue between director and studio, according to one production insider, was "switchblades and garbage-can covers," but Field claims to be unperturbed. Says he: "I think Michael is making a masterpiece. We are trying to do everything in the world to keep that picture going."

Certainly Cimino and his company are working as well as spending. The director pores over the day's takes until after midnight and sleeps only three or four hours a night. "I have no private life," maintains Cimino, who is a bachelor. Says the film's cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond (who also shot The Deer Hunter), "Michael fell in love with this film."

So has just about every actor, extra, grip and gaffer on Heaven's Gate. Cimino, a short (5 ft. 6 in.), shy, plump New Yorker, gets the most out of his cast and crew. A scene in which Kristofferson lashes out at a crowd with a bullwhip had to be shot 53 times. Says Walken, who won an Oscar for The Deer Hunter: "There are extraordinary moments with him. He takes you to places that make the whole event special."

Cimino believes in the intensity of his method. He told TIME Correspondent James Willwerth on location: "You follow an obsession. It leads you somewhere. If you make an honest film, the audience will relate to the people who live and die in that film. Your obsession has nothing to do with it." More simply, he explains: "You make a movie with as much passion as you can bring to it--and people respond."

Heaven's Gate, like The Deer Hunter, is a morality play that does not aspire to strict factual accuracy. To Cimino the new film's historical period is "not terribly different from the late 1960s. It was a period of turmoil. There was a sense of guilt and responsibility in the country." This perhaps is Cimino's real obsession: to analyze the psyche of a society in conflict. He hopes soon to look at the 18th century, in a film about the Sioux culture. That movie, Cimino insists, will be told in subtitled Indian dialogue. No doubt the sounds of switchblades and garbage-can covers in Hollywood will follow close behind.

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