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71. Apocalypse Now 1979 USA Francis Ford Coppola ESSENTIAL
(post 1 of 2)
I don't know if it's the best movie of all time as such (although it is a contender), but I'm coming to the view that it's the movie of all movies. Reinforced by watching it on the big screen recently, which was an incredible experience, and by seeing the documentary about its filming, and now by reading through the Wikipedia entry, which I've reduced below. What Coppola did to make this is really staggering. The risks he took, the pressure he was under, the conditions and misfortunes endured, Brando's apparently terrible attitude and the madness of Hopper, the post production issues. It must be difficult to think of a greater achievement in the history of cinema to get this made, and to this standard. As for the film....there's so much to love about it. The opening titles/sequence must again be about the greatest of all; the viewer is suddenly flung into this world far away, hypnotised by the sounds of helicopters and images of Cambodian Kings or Divinity. Then we find ourselves landing in Sheen's quarters in Saigon. We see squadrons of helicopters in formation, the likes of which had never been filmed before. In some versions a tiger roaring in the jungle towards us. Playboy playmates in their underwear getting rescued from 100s of horny soldiers. A madman. The King of the madmen. The horror.
Wikipedia:
“[i]Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American epic war film produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The screenplay, co-written by Coppola, John Milius, and Michael Herr, is loosely inspired by the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, with the setting changed from late 19th-century Congo to the Vietnam War. The film follows a river journey from South Vietnam into Cambodia undertaken by Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), who is on a secret mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a renegade Special Forces officer who is accused of murder and presumed insane…
Milius became interested in adapting Heart of Darkness for a Vietnam War setting in the late 1960s, and initially began developing the film with Coppola as producer and George Lucas as director. After Lucas became unavailable, Coppola took over directorial control, and was influenced by Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) in his approach to the material. Initially set to be a five-month shoot in the Philippines starting in March 1976, a series of problems lengthened it to over a year. These problems included expensive sets being destroyed by severe weather, Brando showing up on set overweight and completely unprepared, and Sheen having a breakdown and suffering a near-fatal heart attack on location. After photography was finally finished in May 1977, the release was postponed several times while Coppola edited over a million feet of film. Many of these difficulties are chronicled in the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991).
…Cast
…Martin Sheen as U.S. Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard… The opening scene—which features Willard staggering around his hotel room, culminating in him punching a mirror—was filmed on Sheen's 36th birthday when he was heavily intoxicated. The mirror that he broke was not a prop and caused his hand to bleed profusely, but he insisted on continuing the scene, despite Coppola's concerns. Sheen has said this performance where he writhes and smears himself in blood was spontaneous and was an exorcism of his longstanding alcoholism. Sheen's brother Joe Estevez stood in for Willard in some scenes and performed the character's voiceover narrations while his son Charlie appears in the film as an extra. Both went uncredited.
…Laurence Fishburne (credited as "Larry Fishburne") as Gunner's Mate 3rd Class Tyrone "Mr. Clean" Miller, the cocky seventeen-year-old South Bronx-born crewmember. Fishburne was only 14 when shooting began in March 1976, as he had lied about his age to get the role. The production took so long, he was 18 by the time of its release.
…Harrison Ford as Colonel G. Lucas, aide to Corman and an Army intelligence specialist who gives Willard his orders. The character is named for George Lucas…Lucas was also intended to direct Apocalypse Now before getting busy making Star Wars.
…Co-writer, producer, and director Francis Ford Coppola makes an uncredited cameo playing a TV news director filming beach combat; he shouts "Don't look at the camera, go by like you're fighting!". Additionally, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro plays the cameraman by Coppola's side.
Adaptation
Although inspired by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it is not a direct adaptation. The novella, based on Conrad's experience as a steamboat captain in Africa, is set in the Congo Free State during the 19th century. Kurtz and Marlow (whose corresponding character in the movie is Capt. Willard) work for a Belgian trading company that brutally exploits its native African workers.
….Marlow is the pilot of a river boat sent to collect ivory from Kurtz's outpost, only gradually becoming infatuated with Kurtz. In fact, when he discovers Kurtz in terrible health, Marlow makes an effort to bring him home safely (which Willard also does in Milius's draft screenplay)….
After arriving at Kurtz's outpost, Marlow concludes that Kurtz has gone insane and is lording over a small tribe as a god. The novella ends with Kurtz dying on the trip back and the narrator musing about the darkness of the human psyche: "the heart of an immense darkness." …
In the film, Willard is an assassin dispatched to kill Kurtz. Nevertheless, the depiction of Kurtz as a god-like leader of a tribe of natives, Kurtz's written exclamation "Exterminate all the brutes!" (which appears in the film as "Drop the bomb. Exterminate them all!") and his last words "The horror! The horror!" are taken from Conrad's novella.
Coppola argues that many episodes in the film—the spear and arrow attack on the boat, for example—respect the spirit of the novella and in particular its critique of the concepts of civilization and progress.
…While Coppola replaced European colonialism with American interventionism, the message of Conrad's book is still clear.
…Other episodes adapted by Coppola—the Playboy Playmates' (Sirens) exit….and Kurtz's tribe of (white-faced) natives parting the canoes (gates of Hell) for Willard (with Chef and Lance) to enter the camp—are likened to Virgil and "The Inferno" (Divine Comedy) by Dante.
It is often speculated that Coppola's interpretation of the Kurtz character was modelled after Tony Poe, a highly decorated Vietnam-era paramilitary officer from the CIA's Special Activities Division. Poe's actions in Vietnam and in the "Secret War" in neighboring Laos, in particular his highly unorthodox and often savage methods of waging war, show many similarities to those of the fictional Kurtz; for example, Poe was known to drop severed heads from helicopters into enemy-controlled villages as a form of psychological warfare and use human ears to record the number of enemies his indigenous troops had killed. He would send these ears back to his superiors as proof of the efficacy of his operations deep inside Laos. Coppola denies that Poe was a primary influence and says the character was loosely based on Special Forces Colonel Robert B. Rheault, who was the actual head of 5th Special Forces Group (May to July 1969), and whose 1969 arrest over the murder of suspected double agent Thai Khac Chuyen in Nha Trang generated substantial contemporary news coverage….including making public the phrase "terminate with extreme prejudice," which was used prominently in the movie.
…Use of T. S. Eliot's poetry
In the film, shortly before Colonel Kurtz dies, he recites part of T. S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men." The poem is preceded in printed editions by the epigraph "Mistah Kurtz – he dead," a quotation from Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
Two books seen opened on Kurtz's desk in the film are From Ritual to Romance by Jessie Weston and The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer, the two books that Eliot cited as the chief sources and inspiration for his poem "The Waste Land." Eliot's original epigraph for "The Waste Land" was this passage from Heart of Darkness, which ends with Kurtz's final words:
“Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath”…(?) "The horror! The horror!"
When Willard is first introduced to Dennis Hopper's character, the photojournalist describes his own worth in relation to that of Kurtz with: "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas," from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
Additionally, Dennis Hopper's character paraphrases the end of "The Hollow Men" to Martin Sheen's character: "This is the way the ****ing world ends! [...] Not with a bang, but with a whimper."[35]
Production…
While working as an assistant for Francis Ford Coppola on The Rain People in 1967, filmmaker John Milius was encouraged by his friends George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to write a Vietnam War film. He came up with the idea for adapting the plot of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War setting. He had read the novel as a teenager and was reminded about it when his college screenwriting professor, Irwin Blacker of USC, mentioned…"No screenwriter has ever perfected a film adaption of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.”
…The title Apocalypse Now was inspired by a button badge popular with hippies during the 1960s that said "Nirvana Now."
Milius based the character of Willard and some of Kurtz's on a friend of his, Fred Rexer. Rexer claimed to have experienced, first-hand, the scene relayed by Brando's character wherein the arms of villagers are hacked off by the Viet Cong; and that Kurtz was based on Robert B. Rheault, head of Special Forces in Vietnam. Scholars have never found any evidence to corroborate Rexer's claim, nor any similar Viet Cong behavior, and consider it an urban legend.
(Milius) was influenced by an article by Michael Herr, "The Battle for Khe Sanh," which referred to drugs, rock 'n' roll, and people calling airstrikes down on themselves.
…had no desire to direct the film himself and felt that Lucas was the right person for the job. Lucas worked with Milius for four years developing the film, while working on other films, including his script for Star Wars. He approached Apocalypse Now as a black comedy, and intended…principal photography to start in 1971….They intended to shoot the film both in the rice fields between Stockton and Sacramento, California, and on-location in South Vietnam, on a $2 million budget, cinéma vérité style, using 16 mm cameras, and real soldiers, while the war was still going on. However, due to the studios' safety concerns and Lucas's involvement with American Graffiti, and later Star Wars, Lucas decided to put the project on hold.
Pre-production
Coppola was drawn to Milius's script, which he described as "a comedy and a terrifying psychological horror story," and acquired the rights….He asked Lucas, then Milius, to direct it, but both were involved with other projects (Lucas in particular had gotten the go-ahead to make Star Wars). Coppola was determined to make the film and pressed ahead himself. He envisioned it as a definitive statement on the nature of modern war, the contrasts between good and evil, and the impact of American culture on the rest of the world. He said he wanted to take the audience "through an unprecedented experience of war"
… He decided to make the film in the Philippines for its access to American military equipment and cheap labor….Frederickson (??) went to the Philippines and had dinner with President Ferdinand Marcos to formalize support for the production and to allow them to use some of the country's military equipment. Coppola spent the last few months of 1975 revising Milius's script and negotiating with United Artists to secure financing for the production. Milius claimed it would be the "most violent film ever made." According to Frederickson, the budget was estimated between $12 and 14 million. Coppola's American Zoetrope obtained $7.5 million from United Artists for domestic distribution rights and $8 million from international sales, on the assumption that the film would star Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen and Gene Hackman.
Casting
Steve McQueen was Coppola's first choice to play Willard, but McQueen did not want to leave America for three weeks and Coppola was unwilling to pay his $3 million fee. When McQueen dropped out in February 1976, Coppola had to return $5 million of the $21 million he had raised. Al Pacino was also offered the role, but he too did not want to be away that long, and was afraid of falling ill in the jungle as he had done in the Dominican Republic during the shooting of The Godfather Part II. Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford and James Caan were approached to play either Kurtz or Willard….In a 2015 The Hollywood Reporter interview, Clint Eastwood revealed that Coppola offered him the role of Willard, but much like McQueen and Pacino, he did not want to be away from America for a long time. He also revealed that McQueen tried to convince him to play Willard; McQueen wanted to play Kurtz because he would have to work for only two weeks. Coppola offered the lead role of Willard to Robert De Niro, but he declined due to other commitments.
Coppola also offered the role of Colonel Kurtz to Orson Welles and Lee Marvin, both of whom turned it down.
Coppola and Roos had been impressed by Martin Sheen's screen test for Michael in The Godfather and he became the second choice to play Willard, but he had already accepted another project. Harvey Keitel was cast in the role based on his work in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets.
By early 1976, Coppola had persuaded Marlon Brando to play Kurtz, for a fee of $2 million for a month's work on location in September 1976. Brando also received 10% of the gross theatrical rental and 10% of the TV sale rights, earning him around $9 million.
Hackman was set to play Wyatt Khanage, who later became Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall…
Before departing for principal photography, Coppola took out an advertisement in the trade press declaring Keitel, Duvall and others as the "first choices" for the film. It also listed other actors who did not appear in the film, including Harry Dean Stanton…
…Principal photography
…Shooting began on March 20, 1976. Within a few days, Coppola was unhappy with Harvey Keitel's take on Willard, saying that the actor "found it difficult to play him as a passive onlooker." With Brando not due to film until three months later, as he did not want to work while his children were on school vacation, Keitel left the project in April and quit the seven-year deal he had signed as well. Coppola returned to Los Angeles and replaced Keitel with Martin Sheen, who arrived in the Philippines on April 24. Only four days of reshoots were reportedly required after the change….
Typhoon Olga wrecked 40–80% of the sets at Iba and on May 26, 1976, production was closed down. …The Playboy Playmate set was destroyed, ruining a month's scheduled shooting. Most of the cast and crew returned to the United States for six to eight weeks….Also…one day the entire payroll was stolen. According to Coppola's wife, Eleanor, the film was six weeks behind schedule and $2 million over budget.
Coppola filed a $500,000 insurance claim for typhoon damage and took out a loan from United Artists on the condition that if the film did not generate theatrical rentals of over $40 million, he would be liable for the overruns. Despite the increasing costs, Coppola promised the University of the Philippines Film Center 1% of the profits, up to $1 million, for a film study trust fund.
Coppola flew back to the U.S. in June 1976. He read a book about Genghis Khan to get a better handle on the character of Kurtz. When filming commenced in July 1976, Marlon Brando arrived in Manila very overweight and began working with Coppola to rewrite the ending. The director downplayed Brando's weight by dressing him in black, photographing only his face, and having another, taller actor double for him to portray him as an almost mythical character.
After Christmas 1976, Coppola viewed a rough assembly of the footage but still needed to improvise an ending. He returned to the Philippines in early 1977 and resumed filming.
On March 5 of that year, Sheen, then only 36, had a near-fatal heart attack and struggled for a quarter of a mile to reach help. By then the film was so over-budget, Sheen worried that funding would be halted if word about his condition reached investors, and he claimed that he had suffered heat stroke instead. Until he returned to the set on April 19, his brother Joe Estevez filled in for him, being shot from behind so close-ups of Sheen could be shot after he got better. Coppola later admitted that he could no longer tell which scenes were of Joe or Martin. A major sequence in a French plantation cost hundreds of thousands of dollars but was cut from the final film.
Rumors began to circulate that Apocalypse Now had several endings, but Richard Beggs, who worked on the sound elements, said, "There were never five endings, but just the one, even if there were differently edited versions."…Coppola admitted that he had no ending because Brando was too fat to play the scenes as written in the original script….Coppola decided the ending could be "the classic myth of the murderer who gets up the river, kills the king, and then himself becomes the king" Principal photography ended on May 21, 1977.
Post-production and audio
The budget had doubled to over $25 million, and Coppola's loan from United Artists to fund the overruns had been extended to over $10 million. UA took out a $15 million life insurance policy on Coppola. By June 1977, Coppola had offered his car, house, and The Godfather profits as security to finish the film. When Star Wars became a major hit, Coppola sent a telegram to Lucas asking for money. The release date was pushed back to spring 1978.
…. In the summer of 1977, Coppola told Walter Murch that he had four months to assemble the sound. Murch realized that the script had originally been narrated but Coppola abandoned the idea during filming. Murch thought that there was a way to assemble the film without narration but that it would take ten months, and decided to give it another try. He put it back in, recording it all himself.
By September, Coppola told his wife that he felt "there is only about a 20% chance I can pull the film off." He convinced United Artists executives to delay the premiere from May to October 1978.
….Sheen was too busy to record the voice-over narration so Estevez, whose voice was almost identical to his brother's, was called back in to record the narration instead.
Murch had problems trying to make a stereo soundtrack for Apocalypse Now because sound libraries had no stereo recordings of weapons. The sound material brought back from the Philippines was inadequate because the small location crew lacked the time and resources to record jungle sounds and ambient noises. Murch and his crew fabricated the mood of the jungle on the soundtrack. Apocalypse Now used novel sound techniques for a movie, as Murch insisted on recording the most up-to-date gunfire and employed the Dolby Stereo 70 mm Six Track system for the 70 mm release, which used two channels of sound behind the audience as well as three channels from behind the movie screen. The 35 mm release used the new Dolby Stereo optical stereo system, but due to limitations of the technology at the time, the 35 mm release that played in most theaters did not include surround sound.
In May 1978, Coppola postponed the opening until spring of 1979. The cost overruns had reached $18 million, for which Coppola was personally liable, but he had retained rights to the picture in perpetuity.
Controversies
A water buffalo was slaughtered with a machete for the climactic scene in a ritual performed by a local Ifugao tribe, which Coppola had previously witnessed with his wife Eleanor (who filmed the ritual later shown in the documentary Hearts of Darkness) and film crew. Although it was an American production subject to American animal cruelty laws, such scenes filmed in the Philippines were not policed or monitored; the American Humane Association gave the film an "unacceptable" rating….
Real human corpses were bought from a man who turned out to be a grave-robber. The police questioned the film crew, holding their passports, and soldiers took the bodies away. Instead, extras were used to pose as corpses in the film.
During filming, Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando did not get along, leading Brando to refuse to be on the set at the same time as Hopper.
...
(post 1 of 2)
I don't know if it's the best movie of all time as such (although it is a contender), but I'm coming to the view that it's the movie of all movies. Reinforced by watching it on the big screen recently, which was an incredible experience, and by seeing the documentary about its filming, and now by reading through the Wikipedia entry, which I've reduced below. What Coppola did to make this is really staggering. The risks he took, the pressure he was under, the conditions and misfortunes endured, Brando's apparently terrible attitude and the madness of Hopper, the post production issues. It must be difficult to think of a greater achievement in the history of cinema to get this made, and to this standard. As for the film....there's so much to love about it. The opening titles/sequence must again be about the greatest of all; the viewer is suddenly flung into this world far away, hypnotised by the sounds of helicopters and images of Cambodian Kings or Divinity. Then we find ourselves landing in Sheen's quarters in Saigon. We see squadrons of helicopters in formation, the likes of which had never been filmed before. In some versions a tiger roaring in the jungle towards us. Playboy playmates in their underwear getting rescued from 100s of horny soldiers. A madman. The King of the madmen. The horror.
Wikipedia:
“[i]Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American epic war film produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The screenplay, co-written by Coppola, John Milius, and Michael Herr, is loosely inspired by the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, with the setting changed from late 19th-century Congo to the Vietnam War. The film follows a river journey from South Vietnam into Cambodia undertaken by Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), who is on a secret mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a renegade Special Forces officer who is accused of murder and presumed insane…
Milius became interested in adapting Heart of Darkness for a Vietnam War setting in the late 1960s, and initially began developing the film with Coppola as producer and George Lucas as director. After Lucas became unavailable, Coppola took over directorial control, and was influenced by Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) in his approach to the material. Initially set to be a five-month shoot in the Philippines starting in March 1976, a series of problems lengthened it to over a year. These problems included expensive sets being destroyed by severe weather, Brando showing up on set overweight and completely unprepared, and Sheen having a breakdown and suffering a near-fatal heart attack on location. After photography was finally finished in May 1977, the release was postponed several times while Coppola edited over a million feet of film. Many of these difficulties are chronicled in the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991).
…Cast
…Martin Sheen as U.S. Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard… The opening scene—which features Willard staggering around his hotel room, culminating in him punching a mirror—was filmed on Sheen's 36th birthday when he was heavily intoxicated. The mirror that he broke was not a prop and caused his hand to bleed profusely, but he insisted on continuing the scene, despite Coppola's concerns. Sheen has said this performance where he writhes and smears himself in blood was spontaneous and was an exorcism of his longstanding alcoholism. Sheen's brother Joe Estevez stood in for Willard in some scenes and performed the character's voiceover narrations while his son Charlie appears in the film as an extra. Both went uncredited.
…Laurence Fishburne (credited as "Larry Fishburne") as Gunner's Mate 3rd Class Tyrone "Mr. Clean" Miller, the cocky seventeen-year-old South Bronx-born crewmember. Fishburne was only 14 when shooting began in March 1976, as he had lied about his age to get the role. The production took so long, he was 18 by the time of its release.
…Harrison Ford as Colonel G. Lucas, aide to Corman and an Army intelligence specialist who gives Willard his orders. The character is named for George Lucas…Lucas was also intended to direct Apocalypse Now before getting busy making Star Wars.
…Co-writer, producer, and director Francis Ford Coppola makes an uncredited cameo playing a TV news director filming beach combat; he shouts "Don't look at the camera, go by like you're fighting!". Additionally, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro plays the cameraman by Coppola's side.
Adaptation
Although inspired by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it is not a direct adaptation. The novella, based on Conrad's experience as a steamboat captain in Africa, is set in the Congo Free State during the 19th century. Kurtz and Marlow (whose corresponding character in the movie is Capt. Willard) work for a Belgian trading company that brutally exploits its native African workers.
….Marlow is the pilot of a river boat sent to collect ivory from Kurtz's outpost, only gradually becoming infatuated with Kurtz. In fact, when he discovers Kurtz in terrible health, Marlow makes an effort to bring him home safely (which Willard also does in Milius's draft screenplay)….
After arriving at Kurtz's outpost, Marlow concludes that Kurtz has gone insane and is lording over a small tribe as a god. The novella ends with Kurtz dying on the trip back and the narrator musing about the darkness of the human psyche: "the heart of an immense darkness." …
In the film, Willard is an assassin dispatched to kill Kurtz. Nevertheless, the depiction of Kurtz as a god-like leader of a tribe of natives, Kurtz's written exclamation "Exterminate all the brutes!" (which appears in the film as "Drop the bomb. Exterminate them all!") and his last words "The horror! The horror!" are taken from Conrad's novella.
Coppola argues that many episodes in the film—the spear and arrow attack on the boat, for example—respect the spirit of the novella and in particular its critique of the concepts of civilization and progress.
…While Coppola replaced European colonialism with American interventionism, the message of Conrad's book is still clear.
…Other episodes adapted by Coppola—the Playboy Playmates' (Sirens) exit….and Kurtz's tribe of (white-faced) natives parting the canoes (gates of Hell) for Willard (with Chef and Lance) to enter the camp—are likened to Virgil and "The Inferno" (Divine Comedy) by Dante.
It is often speculated that Coppola's interpretation of the Kurtz character was modelled after Tony Poe, a highly decorated Vietnam-era paramilitary officer from the CIA's Special Activities Division. Poe's actions in Vietnam and in the "Secret War" in neighboring Laos, in particular his highly unorthodox and often savage methods of waging war, show many similarities to those of the fictional Kurtz; for example, Poe was known to drop severed heads from helicopters into enemy-controlled villages as a form of psychological warfare and use human ears to record the number of enemies his indigenous troops had killed. He would send these ears back to his superiors as proof of the efficacy of his operations deep inside Laos. Coppola denies that Poe was a primary influence and says the character was loosely based on Special Forces Colonel Robert B. Rheault, who was the actual head of 5th Special Forces Group (May to July 1969), and whose 1969 arrest over the murder of suspected double agent Thai Khac Chuyen in Nha Trang generated substantial contemporary news coverage….including making public the phrase "terminate with extreme prejudice," which was used prominently in the movie.
…Use of T. S. Eliot's poetry
In the film, shortly before Colonel Kurtz dies, he recites part of T. S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men." The poem is preceded in printed editions by the epigraph "Mistah Kurtz – he dead," a quotation from Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
Two books seen opened on Kurtz's desk in the film are From Ritual to Romance by Jessie Weston and The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer, the two books that Eliot cited as the chief sources and inspiration for his poem "The Waste Land." Eliot's original epigraph for "The Waste Land" was this passage from Heart of Darkness, which ends with Kurtz's final words:
“Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath”…(?) "The horror! The horror!"
When Willard is first introduced to Dennis Hopper's character, the photojournalist describes his own worth in relation to that of Kurtz with: "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas," from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
Additionally, Dennis Hopper's character paraphrases the end of "The Hollow Men" to Martin Sheen's character: "This is the way the ****ing world ends! [...] Not with a bang, but with a whimper."[35]
Production…
While working as an assistant for Francis Ford Coppola on The Rain People in 1967, filmmaker John Milius was encouraged by his friends George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to write a Vietnam War film. He came up with the idea for adapting the plot of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War setting. He had read the novel as a teenager and was reminded about it when his college screenwriting professor, Irwin Blacker of USC, mentioned…"No screenwriter has ever perfected a film adaption of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.”
…The title Apocalypse Now was inspired by a button badge popular with hippies during the 1960s that said "Nirvana Now."
Milius based the character of Willard and some of Kurtz's on a friend of his, Fred Rexer. Rexer claimed to have experienced, first-hand, the scene relayed by Brando's character wherein the arms of villagers are hacked off by the Viet Cong; and that Kurtz was based on Robert B. Rheault, head of Special Forces in Vietnam. Scholars have never found any evidence to corroborate Rexer's claim, nor any similar Viet Cong behavior, and consider it an urban legend.
(Milius) was influenced by an article by Michael Herr, "The Battle for Khe Sanh," which referred to drugs, rock 'n' roll, and people calling airstrikes down on themselves.
…had no desire to direct the film himself and felt that Lucas was the right person for the job. Lucas worked with Milius for four years developing the film, while working on other films, including his script for Star Wars. He approached Apocalypse Now as a black comedy, and intended…principal photography to start in 1971….They intended to shoot the film both in the rice fields between Stockton and Sacramento, California, and on-location in South Vietnam, on a $2 million budget, cinéma vérité style, using 16 mm cameras, and real soldiers, while the war was still going on. However, due to the studios' safety concerns and Lucas's involvement with American Graffiti, and later Star Wars, Lucas decided to put the project on hold.
Pre-production
Coppola was drawn to Milius's script, which he described as "a comedy and a terrifying psychological horror story," and acquired the rights….He asked Lucas, then Milius, to direct it, but both were involved with other projects (Lucas in particular had gotten the go-ahead to make Star Wars). Coppola was determined to make the film and pressed ahead himself. He envisioned it as a definitive statement on the nature of modern war, the contrasts between good and evil, and the impact of American culture on the rest of the world. He said he wanted to take the audience "through an unprecedented experience of war"
… He decided to make the film in the Philippines for its access to American military equipment and cheap labor….Frederickson (??) went to the Philippines and had dinner with President Ferdinand Marcos to formalize support for the production and to allow them to use some of the country's military equipment. Coppola spent the last few months of 1975 revising Milius's script and negotiating with United Artists to secure financing for the production. Milius claimed it would be the "most violent film ever made." According to Frederickson, the budget was estimated between $12 and 14 million. Coppola's American Zoetrope obtained $7.5 million from United Artists for domestic distribution rights and $8 million from international sales, on the assumption that the film would star Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen and Gene Hackman.
Casting
Steve McQueen was Coppola's first choice to play Willard, but McQueen did not want to leave America for three weeks and Coppola was unwilling to pay his $3 million fee. When McQueen dropped out in February 1976, Coppola had to return $5 million of the $21 million he had raised. Al Pacino was also offered the role, but he too did not want to be away that long, and was afraid of falling ill in the jungle as he had done in the Dominican Republic during the shooting of The Godfather Part II. Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford and James Caan were approached to play either Kurtz or Willard….In a 2015 The Hollywood Reporter interview, Clint Eastwood revealed that Coppola offered him the role of Willard, but much like McQueen and Pacino, he did not want to be away from America for a long time. He also revealed that McQueen tried to convince him to play Willard; McQueen wanted to play Kurtz because he would have to work for only two weeks. Coppola offered the lead role of Willard to Robert De Niro, but he declined due to other commitments.
Coppola also offered the role of Colonel Kurtz to Orson Welles and Lee Marvin, both of whom turned it down.
Coppola and Roos had been impressed by Martin Sheen's screen test for Michael in The Godfather and he became the second choice to play Willard, but he had already accepted another project. Harvey Keitel was cast in the role based on his work in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets.
By early 1976, Coppola had persuaded Marlon Brando to play Kurtz, for a fee of $2 million for a month's work on location in September 1976. Brando also received 10% of the gross theatrical rental and 10% of the TV sale rights, earning him around $9 million.
Hackman was set to play Wyatt Khanage, who later became Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall…
Before departing for principal photography, Coppola took out an advertisement in the trade press declaring Keitel, Duvall and others as the "first choices" for the film. It also listed other actors who did not appear in the film, including Harry Dean Stanton…
…Principal photography
…Shooting began on March 20, 1976. Within a few days, Coppola was unhappy with Harvey Keitel's take on Willard, saying that the actor "found it difficult to play him as a passive onlooker." With Brando not due to film until three months later, as he did not want to work while his children were on school vacation, Keitel left the project in April and quit the seven-year deal he had signed as well. Coppola returned to Los Angeles and replaced Keitel with Martin Sheen, who arrived in the Philippines on April 24. Only four days of reshoots were reportedly required after the change….
Typhoon Olga wrecked 40–80% of the sets at Iba and on May 26, 1976, production was closed down. …The Playboy Playmate set was destroyed, ruining a month's scheduled shooting. Most of the cast and crew returned to the United States for six to eight weeks….Also…one day the entire payroll was stolen. According to Coppola's wife, Eleanor, the film was six weeks behind schedule and $2 million over budget.
Coppola filed a $500,000 insurance claim for typhoon damage and took out a loan from United Artists on the condition that if the film did not generate theatrical rentals of over $40 million, he would be liable for the overruns. Despite the increasing costs, Coppola promised the University of the Philippines Film Center 1% of the profits, up to $1 million, for a film study trust fund.
Coppola flew back to the U.S. in June 1976. He read a book about Genghis Khan to get a better handle on the character of Kurtz. When filming commenced in July 1976, Marlon Brando arrived in Manila very overweight and began working with Coppola to rewrite the ending. The director downplayed Brando's weight by dressing him in black, photographing only his face, and having another, taller actor double for him to portray him as an almost mythical character.
After Christmas 1976, Coppola viewed a rough assembly of the footage but still needed to improvise an ending. He returned to the Philippines in early 1977 and resumed filming.
On March 5 of that year, Sheen, then only 36, had a near-fatal heart attack and struggled for a quarter of a mile to reach help. By then the film was so over-budget, Sheen worried that funding would be halted if word about his condition reached investors, and he claimed that he had suffered heat stroke instead. Until he returned to the set on April 19, his brother Joe Estevez filled in for him, being shot from behind so close-ups of Sheen could be shot after he got better. Coppola later admitted that he could no longer tell which scenes were of Joe or Martin. A major sequence in a French plantation cost hundreds of thousands of dollars but was cut from the final film.
Rumors began to circulate that Apocalypse Now had several endings, but Richard Beggs, who worked on the sound elements, said, "There were never five endings, but just the one, even if there were differently edited versions."…Coppola admitted that he had no ending because Brando was too fat to play the scenes as written in the original script….Coppola decided the ending could be "the classic myth of the murderer who gets up the river, kills the king, and then himself becomes the king" Principal photography ended on May 21, 1977.
Post-production and audio
The budget had doubled to over $25 million, and Coppola's loan from United Artists to fund the overruns had been extended to over $10 million. UA took out a $15 million life insurance policy on Coppola. By June 1977, Coppola had offered his car, house, and The Godfather profits as security to finish the film. When Star Wars became a major hit, Coppola sent a telegram to Lucas asking for money. The release date was pushed back to spring 1978.
…. In the summer of 1977, Coppola told Walter Murch that he had four months to assemble the sound. Murch realized that the script had originally been narrated but Coppola abandoned the idea during filming. Murch thought that there was a way to assemble the film without narration but that it would take ten months, and decided to give it another try. He put it back in, recording it all himself.
By September, Coppola told his wife that he felt "there is only about a 20% chance I can pull the film off." He convinced United Artists executives to delay the premiere from May to October 1978.
….Sheen was too busy to record the voice-over narration so Estevez, whose voice was almost identical to his brother's, was called back in to record the narration instead.
Murch had problems trying to make a stereo soundtrack for Apocalypse Now because sound libraries had no stereo recordings of weapons. The sound material brought back from the Philippines was inadequate because the small location crew lacked the time and resources to record jungle sounds and ambient noises. Murch and his crew fabricated the mood of the jungle on the soundtrack. Apocalypse Now used novel sound techniques for a movie, as Murch insisted on recording the most up-to-date gunfire and employed the Dolby Stereo 70 mm Six Track system for the 70 mm release, which used two channels of sound behind the audience as well as three channels from behind the movie screen. The 35 mm release used the new Dolby Stereo optical stereo system, but due to limitations of the technology at the time, the 35 mm release that played in most theaters did not include surround sound.
In May 1978, Coppola postponed the opening until spring of 1979. The cost overruns had reached $18 million, for which Coppola was personally liable, but he had retained rights to the picture in perpetuity.
Controversies
A water buffalo was slaughtered with a machete for the climactic scene in a ritual performed by a local Ifugao tribe, which Coppola had previously witnessed with his wife Eleanor (who filmed the ritual later shown in the documentary Hearts of Darkness) and film crew. Although it was an American production subject to American animal cruelty laws, such scenes filmed in the Philippines were not policed or monitored; the American Humane Association gave the film an "unacceptable" rating….
Real human corpses were bought from a man who turned out to be a grave-robber. The police questioned the film crew, holding their passports, and soldiers took the bodies away. Instead, extras were used to pose as corpses in the film.
During filming, Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando did not get along, leading Brando to refuse to be on the set at the same time as Hopper.
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Last edited by Robert the List; 03-14-25 at 02:09 AM.
