APOCALYPSE NOW’S CHOPPER ASSAULT

Romeo Foxtrot, shall we dance?” asks Robert Duvall’s Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, signalling his attack squadron to start blasting Wagner’s ‘Ride Of The Valkyries’ through the skies, announcing the arrival of not just his aerial assault on a Viet Cong village, but also the most iconic scene in a film that’s as famous for its quotable lines as it is for having one of the most chaotic productions in Hollywood history.

The operatic attack, as imagined by writer John Milius, was key to the film’s conflicted heart. “That Valkyrie scene,” he told Harper’s, “came from a vision I had of the exhilaration of war – alongside the terror and the horror. The glory of it! Either [ horror or glory] by itself is a ridiculous half-statement.”

Filming the attack, however, in time to Georg Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic’s 1965 recording of ‘Valkyries’ – with Baler, a fishing village in the northern Philippines standing in for the fictional Vinh Dinh – proved as problematic as the rest of Apocalypse Now’s shoot.

The first troublemaker, oddly, was Donald Rumsfeld. Then US defence secretary, he, said Coppola, “categorically refused” to let the anti-war production use any American machines. Coppola turned to Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos to supply the Hueys and pilots, the problem being that Marcos was battling a rebel uprising, so would regularly recall his fighting force for real war work.

“It was a logistical nightmare,” explained ‘helicopter wranger’ Doug Claybourne. “We’d ask for 10 [ choppers] and often five would show up. [ Plus the pilots] just weren’t movie pilots.

It was hard to get them to fly within the frame. We had to drag them to the ground and tell them to do it again.”

It wasn’t any easier on land. While an army of Italians and Filipinos built sets and a dolly track coming out of the sea, assistant director Jerry Ziesmer struggled to control the 750 extras. The real ’Nam vets, he said, tilted radically between “joy during the scene, and terrible lows when it was over”, while extras playing blindfolded prisoners had to be rugby-tackled before being “sliced like a sausage” by rotor blades. “I’m so thankful,” Coppola has since added, “that there was not one accident or loss of life.”

It was also a baptism of fire for Martin Sheen. Then an alcoholic who’d suffer a heart attack later in the shoot, it was his first scene as Willard, having replaced Harvey Keitel. “Through all the noise and smoke and blades, the cow being lifted, I was beside myself with terror,” admitted Sheen, who cut his face during the scene, hence the plaster he wears for much of the film. “I’d never seen anything like that before or since.” Neither had we. AW