Original subtitles

(HELICOPTER ENGINE ROARING) (PIGS SQUEALING)

(ENGINE FADES AWAY) (SQUEALING CONTINUES)

(GUNFIRE)

Oh, Christ, I don't believe it.

Mike? Mike!

Jesus Christ! Hey!

(SHELLS ROAR) MAN: Incoming!

(GUNFIRE)

Starring Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken,

and directed by Michael Cimino,

The Deer Hunter can lay claim to have invented a genre.

(MOVING PIANO MUSIC PLAYS)

I mean, I think in some ways, looking back now,

I think it's almost as remarkable

that this film got made so soon after the war ended.

Because, try to imagine,

this was a defeat at arms of America.

It wasn't that America, somehow,

attritionally had to pull out a few troops,

this was defeat.

Helicopters lifting off the American Embassy,

people scrambling for safety.

So the sense of national humiliation was very high.

I think it would've been untouchable before, during the war itself.

I think the filmmakers would have been eviscerated

for lack of patriotism.

Told from the perspective of ordinary men,

here was a radical new way of depicting war on screen.

A film about the damage done to the bodies,

minds, and souls of those who fought.

The political was wrapped up in the personal.

The Vietnam movie was born.

(DEEP CHORAL SINGING)

(GUNSHOT, MUSIC ENDS)

(GENTLE THEME MUSIC PLAYS)

(WIND SWIRLS)

(VEHICLE ENGINE ROARS)

Released in 1978, The Deer Hunter became a sensation.

A huge box office hit that swept America off its feet,

winning five Oscars.

But the film was more than simply a commercial and artistic success.

Before The Deer Hunter, what was Hollywood's attitude toward Vietnam?

Did such a thing as the Vietnam film even exist?

I think it took Hollywood a few years for the dust to settle,

for the evacuation of Saigon in '75,

to really start making films seriously about the war.

And in fact, there was only one feature film made in Hollywood

about the war during the war, and that was in 1968,

and it was John Wayne's film The Green Berets.

An extremely militaristic, pro-US-intervention film,

and not really attached to any of the actual realities

of what we'd expect from the Vietnam war film today,

which we might think about with The Deer Hunter.

There were a few documentaries being made

that were more on the anti-war side,

things like Hearts and Minds in 1974,

which won Best Documentary at the Oscars.

But it was more of a thing that was not explicitly mentioned.

NEWSREADER: 'Before the parade, mass draft-card burning was urged.

Demonstrators claimed 200 cards were burned,

but no accurate count could be determined.

Reporters and onlookers were jostled away on purpose.

(FANFARE-STYLE MUSIC PLAYS)

Although mostly peaceful, shouted confrontations were frequent

and fiery during the course of the march.

The anti-war marchers were picketed by anti-anti-war marchers,

who were hawkish toward the parading doves.'

Before The Deer Hunter came along,

Hollywood was very nervous about making films about the Vietnam War.

It'd been going on for 20 years, and in that time of course,

it was very, very contentious with the American public.

John Wayne decided that he wanted to make a film

which was pretty well a sort of propaganda movie,

to boost the morale of the troops.

And also to give the folks back home

an idea of what was happening over there.

Of course, this was very, very designed

to bring everybody up as opposed to keeping them down.

There was one other film, actually, made in 1972 called Limbo,

which was about the wives who were left behind, the military wives,

waiting for their men, whether they were going to come back or not.

That didn't do very well either,

but those are the only two extant movies

from the period when the Vietnam War was actually happening.

We are, in Christian Action, convinced that the war in Vietnam

is an offence to all people of goodwill.

That it should and must be brought to an end at once.

And that the British government...

..should be persuaded to do everything it possibly can...

..to get the dispute out of the hands of the military,

and into the conference room.

There were a couple of films which were allegories, I guess.

If you think the Rob Altman's M*A*S*H

was ostensibly about the Korean War,

but it was very clearly technically about the Vietnam War.

But really, Hollywood didn't want to go into it.

It felt that it was divisive, it was unpopular,

and that making a film about it would really...

No-one in America wanted to break away from the TV,

which was showing the war every night,

and go to the cinema to watch the war again.

So they really... It was very, very hands off.

America was not keen on remembering or reliving the war.

The veterans, when they came home from Vietnam,

found very little appetite to welcome them.

There were no heroes welcomes, it was really brushed aside.

It was almost as if everyone was embarrassed by the fact

that the war had taken place. Terrible for the veterans,

but also something that Hollywood didn't want to set out to write.

Well...

we didn't have the brass bands,

and we didn't have crowds meeting us at the airport.

We kind of snuck in the back door.

Uh... I came back...

even more so, cos I didn't even come...

I came back in a hospital plane.

Even by the mid-'70s, Hollywood stood firm

that audiences did not want to see Vietnam on the big screen.

The Deer Hunter led a cinematic revolution.

Films that went in search of reality.

# JOHN WILLIAMS: Cavatina (Theme From "The Deer Hunter")

(TYRES SCREECH) MAN: Hey, wait!

(MUSIC CONTINUES)

(MUSIC CONTINUES)

Think of the context.

I mean, the war was unbelievably divisive in the States.

There were mass demonstrations in London.

People were being arrested for complaining about the war.

Fifty thousand servicemen died.

People were running away to Canada,

large numbers of young men were crossing the border to Canada

and becoming refugees, effectively, from their own country.

So the social divisions provoked by the war at large,

but particularly among liberal Americans, were huge.

And Hollywood, being a liberal place,

was right at the crux of that kind of anguish.Mm.

That it would be unpatriotic to protest publicly,

but it was a source of disgust and shame.

So there was terrible conflicted feelings, I think,

within the entire creative community within the media at large,

and, of course, within the wider public,

where this had been the first televised war.

Cimino would often recall a preview screening held in Chicago.

During the showing of the three-hour film,

men and women would rush into the lobby,

not because they disliked what they were watching,

but to stem the flow of tears.

The Deer Hunter unlocked America.

It allowed audiences to finally confront the reality of Vietnam.

(HELICOPTER WHIRRING)

(INDISTINCT SHOUTING)

(HELICOPTER CONTINUES WHIRRING)

STEVE: I hit some rocks, Michael.

I hit some rocks. I'm alright, Michael.

MIKE: OK.

(SOLEMN MUSIC PLAYS)

(HORNS BLARING)

(HORNS CONTINUE BLARING)

(HELICOPTER DROWNS OUT SHOUTING)

(HELICOPTER WHIRRING OVERHEAD)

The original script had told the story

of a psychologically damaged veteran,

who heads to Las Vegas to play Russian roulette.

But when producer Michael Deeley

brought in writer/director Michael Cimino,

the script began to evolve.

Inspired by the combat footage on American television news,

Cimino inverted the idea

into a story of young men going to war.

Three contrasting friends

from a tight-knit Pennsylvania steel town,

who would leave for Vietnam after a local wedding.

# The air is filled with troopers... They sound like shit.

# Join the stick of angels Kill the lengthy Amazon...

It's the Screaming Eagles Airborne song.

# It's a gory road to glory but we're ready, here we go!

# Shout Geronimo... Screaming assholes.

# Look out below, look out below #

# Let me be free # La da-da-da...

I can't remember the rest of the words.

(SINGING DROWNS OUT SPEECH)

# You'll always be happy with me #

Chickenshit, get scared. (LAUGHS)

(TYRES SCREECH)

It didn't take on the subject directly, did it?

Michael Deeley had a different script he was working on,

which was sort of about someone returning from Vietnam?

Yeah, it was about a returning Vietnam vet who goes to Vegas

and starts to become a gambler.

But all based around playing Russian roulette, which is,

of course, a key thematic thing in The Deer Hunter,

and which we know would later, you know, retool it in that way.

But this was supposed to be something

which was quite light in tone.

It was compared to Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid

at one point when it was being shopped around.

So it was completely different to what we get with The Deer Hunter,

which is focused on people going off to Vietnam,

and young men whose hopes and lives are shattered by that experience.

Cimino insisted he was making a non-political movie.

This wasn't even about the Vietnam War.

Brilliantly structured in three movements

from wedding to funeral,

this was a movie about people.

Particularly, what happens when the horror

affects the lives of a group of friends.

These people are waiting hopefully,

but I imagine vainly,

for a helicopter to land here on the roof of the American Embassy

in the middle of Saigon, and take them to safety.

But they have no papers, they have just come here.

Because the whole embassy is wide open, they've come up the stairs.

They're in fact on the chopper pad,

no helicopter would probably land under these circumstances.

And so they wait here vainly,

possibly a helicopter will come back, but it looks most unlikely,

because about ten past eight this morning,

what looked like a final Marine helicopter

touched down here briefly, took aboard a handful of Marines,

and then lifted off.

And that looked like the end of the American evacuation.

The background to the film is quite interesting.

Michael Deeley, the producer, had wanted to make a film

that was very much about a veteran of the war.Yep.

He had come back and he had sort of landed in Vegas

where the Russian roulette comes into it,

become obsessed with Russian roulette.

So it was very different,

it wasn't quite a Vietnam War film to begin with.

No. I mean, the history of the genesis of this film

is partly tied up with these two Englishmen.

Michael Deeley in particular, who'd been part of the Woodfall,

he'd been part of New British Cinema.

He'd done The Italian Job.

And then he, basically, British Lion, his company,

became EMI films.

And they made, I think, three films only,

two of which were deeply troubled.

And one of them was The Deer Hunter,

the other was Convoy with Sam Peckinpah,

an equally troubled film.

And I think the genesis of the script,

with I think originally Roy Scheider possibly attached

to play in that version of the film.

The fact that Cimino then pitched in for it

on the strength of his work with Clint Eastwood,

who had kind of slightly mentored him.

That was a very interesting genesis.

And of course, the idea of the Russian roulette

and its transposition to Vietnam, in a sense,

is the heart, dramatically, of the film.

De Niro's Mike, Walken's Nick and John Savage's Steve

are eager to head off to Vietnam,

to break the monotony of their steel-mill night shifts.

They all leave behind small-town loves and lives,

including Meryl Streep as the girl both Mike and Nick adore.

Vietnam will prove a living nightmare.

Imprisoned by the Viet Cong,

their captors will gamble on who might live or die.

(GUARD SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE)

(GUARD 2 GRUNTS, SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE)

(SPEAKING OWN LANGUAGE)

(SHOUTS)

(SMACK) (SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE)

Cimino is a demanding and often temperamental artist.

Having made his debut directing Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges

in the surprisingly dark caper movie Thunderbolt And Lightfoot...

..his intensity and dedication would nevertheless elevate the material.

He took buses and trains through the Northeastern states

to find his perfect community,

writing the script as he was in search of American authenticity.

This is set in a community which is Russian Orthodox Christianity.

So the wedding itself

is a wonderful sort of elaborate celebration,

with all the kind of rituals and adornments

that you would get from that kind of community.

It contrasts very much, actually, with, of course,

the actual outside and their working conditions,

and even their living conditions, which are relatively poor,

they're quite impoverished.

All this is set up because you want to be able to see the relationships

and how they actually exist and survive in this environment.

And it brings them all closely together.

They're a very close-knit community.

And so, by the time you've got even to the wedding ceremony,

which is, of course, a wonderfully glorious...

Full of dancing, full of music as well as the actual ceremony itself,

which is very ritualistic,

you've got to understand each of those characters individually,

not just as a group, but individually,

and that means you actually care about them.

Backed by the record label EMI,

making a short-lived foray into film,

and stirred by the vitality of '70s Hollywood,

The Deer Hunter was an independent production.

Producer Michael Deeley maintained

that they would never have achieved the financing without De Niro.

Michael Cimino wasn't interested

in a political film about the Vietnam War.

He didn't want to make any statement about it.

He, when he was developing the film,

almost saw the Vietnam War as something

that happened to these three friends.

He was interested in what happens to three people in a community

when a catastrophe hits. He was on the record really,

saying this is about what happened to these three men,

not about the grand sweep of war,

and the historical injustices or so on.

He didn't want people to see it as a political film most of all.

So he is not commenting on the war,

he's using the war to tell the story.

Now at the time, the war had only been over for three years,

the war ended in 1975, they shot The Deer Hunter in 1978.

Perhaps that was important

not to be making a statement about the film for him,

because it was clearly an incredibly divisive subject still in America.

It was something that he was exploring, you know,

in a way, at great risk to the film,

to the likelihood of the film attracting an audience,

because there would be a lot of people who,

if they thought this was either leaning one way or the other,

would probably not want to go.

So he was very keen to say the war is the event of the film,

it's not about the war.

NEWLAND: He said later on that he was influenced

by the Visconti movie The Leopard,

and the long, long sequence in the ballroom.

And although that's about aristocracy,

and this is about the working class, there is something about this idea

of this kind of elegiac, end-of-an-era feeling to it.

The sense that, you know,

three days before they're gonna get shipped out to Vietnam

and things are, you know...

Things are never going to be the same again after this.

So you carry that melancholy with you when you watch it.

But equally, just in terms of the set up of it, it's something.

Because so many of the extras came in,

something like 250 extras were from the community

and were from a Russian Orthodox background,

most of them didn't even have to learn the traditional dances.

He wants to do an almost fly-on-the-wall thing.

It does feel very influenced by cinema verite,

by things like the Maysles brothers,

and even filmmakers like Milos Forman as well,

who... had such a great eye

for capturing the textures of everyday working-class life.

And yeah, you can just watch the small little petty incidents,

the little dramas, the little kind of jealousies, these moments of joy,

happiness, drunkenness, sadness, that go on at a big wedding.

De Niro still claims that The Deer Hunter

is the most physically and emotionally taxing film

he has ever made.

And this is the man who starred in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.

He was the backbone of the project.

He opened doors to the New York acting community,

persuading John Cazale and Meryl Streep to be in the film.

And of course, he went deep into character,

meeting real steelworkers, hanging out at local bars.

The thrust of the story is the violent juxtaposition

between home and the horrors of Vietnam.

(MOUTHING)

PRIEST: Blessed is the kingdom of the Father and of the Son

and of the Holy Spirit.

Now and ever and unto ages of ages.

CHOIR: (SINGS) A-A-Amen.

Ah, blessed.

(UPBEAT TRADITIONAL RUSSIAN MUSIC PLAYS)

CROWD: (CHANT) Hey, hey - hey, hey, hey.

(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)

The casting of De Niro's Mike had come easily,

but finding the perfect Nick, his best friend,

had seemed impossible.

Warmer than Mike, more open,

the doomed Nick is the glue that holds the group together.

One morning, casting director Cis Corman

slipped a folded-up piece of paper into Cimino's pocket.

After another fruitless day of auditions, Cimino found it,

unfolding the message to read: "Christopher Walken IS Nick."

Walken would go in search of real experiences,

but found that veterans clammed up, even his own brother.

That silence spoke volumes.

So the year before The Deer Hunter comes out, you've got Annie Hall.

Christopher Walken plays a little part in that as,

very memorably, as Dianne Keaton's psychotic brother.

He's got a quality about him, which is both sort of everyman-ish.

He's kind of a normal-looking guy in some respects,

but also, he has a little bit of... There's an edge to him.Yeah.

You know, and he looks like he could be dangerous.

And I think that's really what probably worked in his advantage

when it came to taking on the part of Nick,

because, of course, the part of Nick is the one

which ends in a psychosis of its own.Mm-hm.

You know, when I think about the fact

that someone like a young Jeff Bridges

was also auditioning for this part,

that is a completely different performance.

Young Jeff Bridges looks like a golden retriever,

he's, you know, that's not Christopher Walken's energy at all.

Arguably, the first on-screen representation

of trauma, of PTSD.

He's the first time anyone, I think,

had portrayed that to such a degree that it was quite shocking.

I think Walken's excellent in the role,

and he has a difficult thing that he has to do,

which is that he is embodying both specific psychological trauma,

but also it's pretty clear that Cimino is aiming at it being

a larger thing about American trauma,

and about what has happened to the American psyche

and the disillusionment of that.

I mean, almost directly after what happens to Nick,

when he reaches this, you know, the final ebb of his story,

it cuts to the helicopters leaving Saigon during the evacuation,

during the fall of Saigon.

So it doesn't take brain surgery to kind of work out

that there is like a metaphorical link being made,

which is not always an easy thing for an actor to portray.

BRITISH MAN: 'But then, suddenly we, too,

forty or fifty of us in the safety of the coaches,

had to get out and fight our way to the American compound,

where the helicopters were landing to fly us

and the thousands more out of the country.

Seeing us in the streets with our bags, the Vietnamese followed.

Any chance, they thought, was better than none.

But the embassy gates were closed

and we, like the frightened Vietnamese and their families,

had to fight and claw our way up.

And we did claw and we did fight.

And if it wasn't for one single American Marine

whose name I didn't have the chance or time to discover,

we would never have climbed our way to our evacuation.

He hauled us up, kicking and punching Vietnamese,

who were clambering over our bodies.

(BOAT ENGINE ROARS)

(COFFINS CLATTER)

What do you make of Christopher Walken's performance?

It was the Oscar-winning performance in the film.

The Nick character is complicated,

and in some senses, that's...

We had Best Years Of Our Lives, I suppose.Mm.

But this was the first frank portrayal of PTSD,

of post traumatic stress in relation to war.

Look, I think one of the ways of looking at the film...

..is that this is really, it's a love story.

It's not... Meryl Streep is not really part of that love story.

It's a love story between...

..the De Niro character and the Walken character.

It's a love story that we know will end badly.

It's a love story that neither can contemplate openly.

It's a love story that cannot sort of speak its name, in a way.

Even that's maybe going too far.

I do remember thinking...

that this was at the heart of Cimino's own fascinations.

Because as a very young journalist,

I interviewed him about Thunderbolt And Lightfoot,

And I brought up this thematic thing

about the kind of latent homo-eroticism

of the relationships in the film,

and he lost his temper in the most spectacular fashion,

I think at the Dorchester Hotel, and hurled me out of his suite.

He was enraged.

And I remember the publicist standing outside going,

"What happened, what happened?"

And I said, "I've no idea." (CHUCKLES)

So this was, you know... And I realised then,

and years later I met him in a very different context,

I realised then this was a place

that he was touched but did not want to be touched.

And that was touching to us, but in a very, very painful way.

And I think it's at the heart of the film's quality...

..is that it speaks of masculinity.

And I think David Thomson talks about

the impossible difficulties of American masculinity,

the culture of the gun.

He encapsulates it around the one-shot philosophy.

And the film encapsulates it at the very end,

with these shattering, only five words of dialogue, five words.

And De Niro says to him,

"I love you."

And he says back, "One shot."

And pulls the trigger and blows his brains out.

And that's the end of the love story,

it's the end of the dream,

and all that's left is to close the film,

and that's how we end up in the bar.

ANGELA: It's been such a grey day.

(CHINA CLINKS)

Meryl Streep took the role of the yearning Linda

because she wanted to stay by the side of her partner John Cazale.

He was dying of lung cancer.

But De Niro had convinced Cimino

he was perfect as wastrel Stan, left behind.

Cazale took the film because he wanted to work with De Niro.

When EMI resisted his casting, claiming he was an insurance risk,

both Cimino and Streep threatened to drop out.

It was De Niro who covered his insurance.

ARMSTRONG: When Meryl Streep arrived to film,

she found that there were almost no lines for her character, Linda.

And indeed, Michael Cimino said, "Well look,

she's not really written, do you want to write her yourself,

and develop the lines yourself?"

So she said in an interview later on

that that was both an enormous opportunity,

but actually quite daunting.

So how are you going to create the character, literally,

not just in your sort of method or your understanding

or your interpretation, but how do you actually write the part?

So she thought of the girls at home who she went to school with,

who were waiting for a man to rescue them,

whose idea about life was, "Who will marry me?

Who will I be able to attach myself to?"

And that's how she created Linda,

someone who was only alive, in a sense,

through the men who were beside her.

And she portrays a woman who really struggles

with lots of fairly straightforward circumstances.

She's looking all the time, to find an arm to hold.

She's initially in love with Christopher Walken,

Robert De Niro's character is in love with her,

but she doesn't really know how to handle this idea

that there are two men, she only knows the man she wants.

And then when Christopher Walken doesn't return,

but Robert De Niro does, she attaches herself to him.

"This is my way to exist, this is my way to be."

It's a very... it's really interesting.

When you think that, you know,

Meryl Streep arrives on set to play this character,

as a woman who is very in charge of her career and life,

and is about to forge one of the greatest Hollywood careers,

in charge of all the decisions she makes.

And the first part that she has to create from scratch,

she creates someone who is entirely dependent on men

for her own existence.

It's very interesting actually,

because Meryl Streep was dating John Cazale at this time,

and John Cazale was very unwell.

He had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at that point,

and so a big part of why she ended up taking the role,

was that, you know, they wanted her for it,

she said she felt it was, a little bit at first,

of a bit of a stock girlfriend character.

But she came to imbue that role with so much more,

and part of that was for her own personal reason -

she didn't wanna be separated from her boyfriend when he was,

you know, seriously unwell.

And so she took on the part.

There was also the problem of the insurance,

which was that nobody would want to insure an actor

who was basically on death's door.

So there are various stories around how they got around it,

but there was a point where the producers

were actually asking Cimino to rewrite a version of the script

in case John Cazale didn't make it to the end of filming.

Thank God that didn't happen,

and Cimino was completely against the idea anyway.

There are also very fine performances from John Savage as Steve,

who returns from Vietnam in a wheelchair.

And George Dzundza as John, another who is left behind.

Pierre Segui as the French businessman,

who runs the Russian roulette den in Saigon,

had been a military pilot in the Indo-China War,

and also appeared in Apocalypse Now.

The cast were asked to go beyond themselves.

Cimino instructed De Niro, Walken and Savage

to never take off their uniforms, no matter how filthy they became.

They didn't shave, they didn't wash.

Trapped in water-logged cages, drifting volatile rivers,

leaping from helicopters.

The cast inspired each other to reach a new level of realism.

(STEVE CRIES OUT, CHOKES)

(COUGHS)

(GROANS)

I can't feel my legs.

MIKE: Alright, alright, come on.

My arm.

Push yourself up.

The entire film was shot on location.

Cleveland was used for the steelworks,

Clairton in Pennsylvania was used for the town exteriors,

and the Cascade mountains in Washington

for the scenes of the friends hunting deer.

The wedding sequence that lights up the beginning of the film

would run for 40 daring minutes,

a feast of naturalistic detail.

In his travels, Cimino had attended a Serbian wedding.

He saw the bride and groom sip together from the same cup of wine.

If they spilled a drop, it would mean bad luck.

In the film, we see a small stain form on the bride's dress.

The opening wedding sequence in The Deer Hunter

is critical to the film.

It's a very unusual piece of character development

in Hollywood terms. Most of the time in a screenplay,

you'd find a character developed through a series of maybe three

or four actions at the beginning of the film,

where you go, "Oh, I understand,

they've saved the cat, they've looked after the kid."

We get the senses of the sort of person they are.

Michael Cimino wasn't interested in that kind of shorthand.

The script had a wedding sequence in it,

which lasted on the page for 21 minutes of the film.

And Michael Cimino, in the end, delivered over 50 minutes.

It took him five days to shoot.

And he gave the extras real alcohol, and he filmed and filmed and filmed,

take after take after take, until towards the end,

the actors were tired, they were chaotic, they were falling over.

And a lot of the sequences which end up in the final film,

are actually accidents on set, or things that weren't scripted.

Because Michael Cimino wanted the naturalism,

the realness of a wedding where people were drunk and tired

and falling over and messing around.

And so it becomes increasingly sloppy

in an incredibly realistic way.

By the end of that 51 minutes, you know these people.

He's given you enough detail, without underlining it,

without hammering it home,

"Oh, this is a person who will do this thing,

this is the kind of person they are."

You just feel that you've seen into their lives, you've...

you know, you've snuck into that wedding and you've watched.

For the shocking contrast of Vietnam, they shot in Thailand.

Cimino wanted to revitalise a landscape

he felt audiences had become inured to

after night upon night of news footage.

They filmed in Bangkok for Saigon,

and on the famous River Kwai for the devastating middle act

in the prison camp.

NORMAN: What's fascinating about their entry into Vietnam

is that their war doesn't last very long.

They go from one status,

straight into the terrible sort of cages in the water,

in which they are sort of taunted and beaten.

And eventually forced

to play out this game of Russian roulette.

Walken said, "I'm not entirely sure

how I'm going to actually be able to play this sort of terror."

I mean, they were in terrible conditions, anyway.

But I'm not sure I've got the sort of wherewithal to do this.

And De Niro said to Cimino, he says,

"Why don't you get the guy playing the main guard,

the main sort of torturer,

to actually really slap us,

you know, whenever we hesitate, just slap us."

And Walken said... I mean, him as well.

Walken has subsequently said, you know, he said, you know,

"Once you've been slapped 50 times around the head quite hard,

really, you don't have to act having the shakes."

(CHUCKLES) He said it was, it really worked.

He said it wasn't pleasant, but it really worked.

Go ahead, Nicky, go ahead, Nicky.

It's gonna be alright, it's gonna be alright.

Go ahead, go ahead, Nicky.

(GUARD LAUGHS, SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE)

(GUARDS CHATTER IN OWN LANGUAGE)

(TENSE MUSIC PLAYS)

Over the years, the film has courted controversy

for its portrayal of the Viet Cong and their use of Russian roulette.

Cimino claimed reports existed of Russian roulette dens in Vietnam,

but more important was its dramatic function.

It was a device to capture a soldier's constant anxiety,

never knowing if this was going to be the day you die.

(GUARD SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE)

Its legacy is an Oscar-winning film, won Best Picture and Best Director.

Yup. It, for a short space,

made Cimino sort of the chosen son of Hollywood.Yes.

Yet it's never shaken off this idea

that its portrayal of Vietnam is somehow negative.

Context is everything.

The question that politically,

the world was divided on Vietnam.

This was really what, in a way,

was the beginning of the realisation

that the Cold War could never be won.

The realisation that the superpowers

would mince any millions of people necessary to death

in the meat grinder of the Cold War conflict.

So focusing on these soldiers and on these blue-collar characters,

rather than on the suffering of the Vietnamese...

..was in itself, inimical, I would say, to liberal opinion.

Now, that is true,

but film is not a realist medium.

And I think at the time, I remember when I wrote up that interview,

I said the portrayal was of America with a gun to its own head.

That sense of,

well, this is deeply troubling.

This is not a celebration of nationhood,

this is an attempt to clutch at something

that's almost beyond reach in terms of hope.

So it shows us that the POW camps are these horrendous places,

and by 1978, many of the ones who did return had come home,

so there was some understanding in the American public and in,

you know, international understanding of what had happened

to a lot of these men in these camps.

Having said that, it's not entirely realistic.

It isn't really based on any kind of documentary reality,

it is, essentially, melodrama.

So it's worth taking it with a grain of salt.

But having said that, it's still a pretty remarkable accomplishment

for a second-time ever director, to go all the way to Thailand,

which had no infrastructure for filmmaking really at the time,

on the verge of a military coup, and make this film.

Crowning its success at the box office,

The Deer Hunter would win five Oscars.

Best Sound, Best Editing,

Best Supporting Actor for Christopher Walken,

and the ultimate achievement of Best Director and Best Picture.

The film was established as a classic,

Cimino as a great new talent,

a reputation that would be consumed in the budgetary

and artistic excesses on his next film Heaven's Gate.

Cimino had consciously focused on the effect of the war

on blue-collar men.

Through this prism, the political ramifications

of the great American folly could be prised open.

The ordinary man's love of his country is movingly captured,

as the remaining friends gather and sing God Bless America

at the end of the film.

The moment is unspeakably sad, yet defiant.

I mean, one of the things that did happen

with the release of The Deer Hunter,

was that it gave an insight into the American public

about the sort of things that the soldiers had gone through.

Even not specifically about the Russian roulette,

but the sort of pressures and the psychological damage,

particularly, that they would have gone through,

which is not visible - I think that's what's important.

Physically, if they were physically damaged,

they had the veteran's, you know, hospitals and things like that.

If they were psychologically damaged,

they had almost no support whatsoever.

And that, I think... that alone opened up the whole debate

about post traumatic stress syndrome, all those things,

the damage that was done to these men internally,

in their heads, that you can't actually see,

suddenly became real.

Cinematically, it was as if the floodgates had opened.

With The Deer Hunter, a new anti-heroic realism was established,

not only in the depiction of combat,

but in revealing the psychological impact war had on soldiers.

Apocalypse Now was nearing completion.

Oliver Stone was writing his exploration

of the Vietnam experience with a platoon.

Hal Ashby, Barry Levinson, Brian De Palma,

Stanley Kubrick and Spike Lee would be drawn to its flame.

American film would never be the same.

Watching the film again after all these years,

I found myself crying as I watched the last scene,

and I was sitting alone watching the film.

It's very rare to have that experience of viewing a film

for the fourth or fifth time in one's life,

and be so transported.

And that's not just about the performance.

It is the dramatic construction of this idea,

the idea you're referring to.

Where, somehow,

the social commentary, which is realism,

the mythic construction of the film, which is epic...

..and the intimacy of how it touches us

in respect of our own feelings about each other.

And how all men, at some level,

are touched by this idea of the bond between men.

I think it brings those together

in a really unusual and quite unique way.

It's remarkable to see the film survive so well

after, you know, 40 years.

(TUNE OF "GOD BLESS AMERICA" HUMMED)

# God bless America

# Land that I love

# Stand beside her and guide her

# Through the night with the light from above

# From the mountains, through the prairies

# To the oceans, white with foam

# God bless America

# My home sweet home

# God bless America

# My home sweet home #

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