Where to watch The Deer Hunter (1978)

Trivia & production notes

• The original spec script that became The Deer Hunter was purchased for $19,000 and was initially titled The Man Who Came to Play, centering on people traveling to Las Vegas to play Russian roulette.
• During the mid-1970s, major Hollywood studios considered Vietnam War films unmarketable, with executives telling producers that no American would want to see a picture about Vietnam.
• The Deer Hunter was the first feature film depicting the Vietnam War to be shot in Thailand, with all scenes filmed on location rather than on a backlot.
• Meryl Streep accepted her role as the girlfriend Linda specifically to remain on set during filming with John Cazale, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and she wrote all of her own lines.
• The wedding scenes took five days to film at St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Cleveland and were shot during 95-degree weather but set in autumn, requiring cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond to desaturate colors and have individual leaves removed from trees.
• Director Michael Cimino originally claimed the wedding scene would be 21 minutes but it ended up being 51 minutes long, a length producer Barry Spikings feared would sink the entire project given the budget overruns already occurring.
• The bar set was constructed in an empty storefront in Mingo Junction, Ohio for $25,000 and subsequently became an actual saloon where local steel-mill workers drank.
• The deer seen in the hunting scenes was a red deer native to Eurasia rather than the white-tailed buck native to Pennsylvania, and the stag that Michael allows to escape was the same animal used in commercials for The Hartford insurance company.
• During the Russian roulette scenes filmed in Thailand, the three lead actors were tied in bamboo cages with real rats and mosquitoes, and De Niro and Savage each performed their own stunt falling 30 feet into the river, repeating the drop 15 times in two days.
• De Niro requested a live cartridge be placed in the revolver for the Russian roulette scene with John Cazale to heighten the scene's intensity, and Cazale obsessively rechecked the gun before each take to ensure the live round would not be in the next chamber.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article The Deer Hunter, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.