APOCALYPSE NOW
As he prepares to unleash A definitive new cut of his Francis Ford coppola war epic, apocalypse now reflects on why has lost none of its chilling power
Empire loves the smell of an interview with Francis Ford Coppola about his tempestuous masterwork in the morning. Smells like... victory.
a voice rang out over a sky full of burning palm trees. In fact, it was just the beginning. When Apocalypse Now blazed into cinemas 40 years ago this August, it opened with a scene that’s as mesmerising today as it was in 1979. A jungle engulfed in flames blurs into a face haunted by untold terrors, his head — and seemingly, world — turned upside down. The noise of distant helicopter blades accompanies the sight of a spinning hotel ceiling fan, as strange visions of ancient relics fade in and out of frame. All the while, that voice carries on, the sorrowful sound of Doors singer Jim Morrison: “This is the end…”
It was the start of not just a cinematic masterpiece — director Francis Ford Coppola’s hallucinogenic war epic about a soldier’s mission into the heart of darkness — but a cultural obsession. Coppola’s vision has clung to the public imagination with napalm-like stickiness ever since. It’s regularly referenced and parodied, and appears time and again atop polls determining the greatest movies of all time. The Vietnam conflict it depicted may be over, but Apocalypse Now’s take on the dark, primal power lurking in man remains scarily relevant in 2019’s time of terrorism, drones shot down over Iran and containment camps for migrants in America.
Apocalypse Now has never become Apocalypse Then. It isn’t merely a film about Vietnam, nor one about the darkness war brings out in those who fight it. It’s a movie about the darkness within us that makes war inevitable: the recurring catastrophe our species can’t stop venturing up river towards. It might always remain relevant for precisely this reason, suggests the man who risked everything to make it.
“It’s outrageous what we do to each other, what’s going on in the world,” sighs Coppola
himself. “Human beings are the only species that can believe in fictions. Corporations. Religions. Nationalism. Terrible things have been done in the name of these fictions — and they’re still being done.” Empire’s conversation with Coppola, a rare extensive interview for the filmmaking legend, is taking place on a hot June morning in Bologna, Italy, in a hotel near the city’s Piazza Maggiore; tonight, thousands will congregate in the square for an open-air screening of a new version of Apocalypse Now, branded the ‘Final Cut’. The director is 80 now but still strapping and handsome, turning up today in a fashionable jacket-and-cravat combination. He’s gentler and more playful than you might expect, too, if you’ve heard the stories from the film’s famously disastrous shoot. While making his magnum opus, depression, pressure, power and money turned Coppola into a Colonel Kurtz-like monster, or so the legend goes. His production became as chaotic and consumed by madness as the war he was there to depict, or so Hollywood lore would have you believe.
He’ll confirm which of the many outlandish rumours that have swirled around Apocalypse Now ever since are true, and which are false. But first, he wants to explain how elated he is that his film remains resonant. “Awards are voted for by people. Depending on who those people are, you win or lose. But the test of time is something that’s not controlled by anyone,” he smiles. “To me, the real judgement as to whether what you did was successful is if people are still watching it 20, 30, 40 years later.”
Its longevity might be because the film grapples with the same questions great art has always sought to answer. “When I made a movie, I always wanted to know what its theme was, in one word if I could,” he says. His acclaimed Godfather films, released prior to Apocalypse Now and earning the Californian nine Oscars, were about succession. Apocalypse Now, arriving five years after his second chapter in the Corleone saga, dealt with morality. “There was one sentence in the script I always felt was the gist of the entire movie. Which was, and pardon the language: ‘We teach the boys to drop fire on people. Yet we won’t let them write the word “fuck” on an airplane because it’s obscene.’ This strange contradiction, that sometimes what we know is morally wrong can be turned around and made morally right in certain religious and nationalist contexts, is very troublesome.”
Themes such as succession and morality are everywhere in ancient stories, in Greek myths and Persian poetry: they’re timeless topics for dramatists, Coppola explains. “So if your movie deals with those sorts of essential themes, there’s a chance your movie might survive.”
Apocalypse Now has survived. But Coppola and his cast almost didn’t in the process of making it. Grab your surfboard: the director of one of the most celebrated films of its era wants to take you on a journey through its troubled creation, a production that endured typhoons, terror threats, tropical diseases and much more. “The film is a reflection of the circumstances of how it was made,” he says. “Would it have been the same end product if making it had been a smooth ride? No way. If it had been made in a sane, logical way, it’d have been a sane, logical movie. And war is an insane, illogical thing. Was then, and it is now.” In a parallel universe, Star Wars never happened. Instead, a young George Lucas went wading through landmine-littered fields on location in Vietnam, slap-bang in the middle of actual combat. This was the original plan for Apocalypse Now: a guerilla-style, 16mm adaptation of screenwriter John Milius’ script, loosely based on the novella Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Coppola had taken Lucas and Milius under his wing and into his inner circle: a filmmaking cabal named Zoetrope. Funnily enough, Warner Bros., the studio Coppola had pitched the script to, had some reservations about packing a cast and crew off to a literal war zone. Apocalypse Now was rejected, so Coppola put a pin in it. He made
The Godfather, then The Conversation, then in 1974, The Godfather Part II. This run of artful box-office hits made him a king of New Hollywood: an auteur with endless acclaim and ambition in his belly. His next project, he decided, would be Apocalypse Now. Except it would no longer be a scrappy, band-on-the-run type movie. It was to be an epic unlike anything else that had been seen on screen before.
“I thought, ‘Hey, maybe I should do it as this big war picture,’” he remembers. “In those days, we were always trying to do a big picture that’d be successful, so that we’d have some money to do little pictures.” He had no real personal connection to the conflict that he wanted to exorcise, no friend or relative who went to
Vietnam and never came back, whose death he’d hoped to process. “I can’t say I did it for any moralistic reason — it was just practical. No-one else was there. I owned the script, after Warner Bros. rejected it. So I just decided I’d do it myself.”
The film would be shot in the Philippines. But still, Coppola faced problems. Firstly: no-one wanted to finance it. The US military’s loss in Vietnam was still a raw topic that studios weren’t sure they wanted to touch. Coppola, in fact, got so frustrated at his inability to find funding that one night he threw all his Oscars out of a window, damaging them in a fit of fury. His mother ended up asking the Academy for replacements, making up a lie about a clumsy cleaner.
Problem number two was that no-one wanted to be in it. Production was to take six weeks. None of the stars Coppola approached wanted to spend that long in swamps and rice fields: not Steve Mcqueen, not Jack Nicholson, not Robert Redford or Tommy Lee Jones. “I offered Al Pacino any role he wanted, because I had no actors who would go. I was desperate. I said to both Al and Bobby De Niro they could play any part they wanted: ‘Take your pick!’”
Coppola decided to self-finance the picture, eventually persuading Harvey Keitel to play Captain Willard: a military man with demons of his own, sent to assassinate a colonel who’s seemingly gone insane, played by Marlon Brando. The first hiccup came when Coppola realised he had to fire Keitel soon into filming: he didn’t command the right darkness. Hours of footage were ruined, with scenes needing to be reshot and Willard recast. On most movie sets, this would constitute disaster. On Apocalypse Now, it ended up being a minor blip compared to the catastrophes to come.
“I was very distraught, very worried,” Coppola recalls of a shoot that plunged headlong into pandemonium. Cast and crew were struck down with tropical diseases. The Philippine army, who’d loaned the production helicopters and vehicles, kept stopping the shoot so they could tackle Communist insurgents hidden in the hills. At one point, the director was warned that the film set may be attacked. The production was already millions over budget and weeks behind schedule when in May 1976 a typhoon wrecked their set, halting filming for two months. Brando turned up underprepared and overweight (“I didn’t know what kind of costume to put him in because you couldn’t have a military costume — they didn’t make them that big!” chuckles Coppola). And while shooting the scenes at Kurtz’s compound, police threatened to seize the crew’s passports after it transpired actual dead bodies were being used on set, supplied by a grave robber who sold cadavers to medical schools for autopsies. Coppola wasn’t aware at the time but says today: “Knowing the mentality of the prop department… that’s very possible.”
On 5 March 1977, a year after the film began shooting, star Martin Sheen, roped in to replace Keitel, suffered a heart attack. According to reports, this was the moment Coppola — whose family faced bankruptcy if Apocalypse Now was abandoned — imploded, suffering an epileptic seizure as guilt and stress finally broke him. “That’s not quite true,” he clarifies. “I felt no responsibility. Martin was a big smoker. And also every morning he’d jog like five miles. Obviously that was bad for him, to be such a serious smoker and to be exerting himself in the morning like that. I was concerned that I was going to lose him because he was a wonderful person.”
Coppola found himself juggling his worry for his star with his need to keep things rolling: the banks he’d borrowed from, he feared, would pull the plug on his production if they heard Sheen was unwell. “What I told his wife was, ‘Let’s take him immediately to the best possible care, but just don’t take him out of the movie. I’ll keep shooting while you’re gone.’ And I did. I shot for the whole time he was gone with his brother. Eventually he did come back, thank God.”
It all sounds, well, apocalyptic. But Coppola’s official line is that it really wasn’t so bad. “It’s normal when a director is making a film [that] they’re in a state of fear. ‘I’m falling behind, I’m
gonna get fired! This is the worst movie ever made!’ People are very self-doubting. All artists are. Even very acclaimed artists get frightened. It’s part of the work.” In Hearts Of Darkness, the 1991 ‘making of’ documentary that uses on-set footage shot by his wife Eleanor, he describes wanting to kill himself. Was that just talk, a fleeting moment of terror? He pauses. “I’ve never really felt close to suicidal thoughts,” he says. “I was scared because I knew I was getting into danger of financial ruin. [But] I figured, ‘Hey, I was born poor.’ The idea of being poor [again] wasn’t scary to me.” With each setback, Coppola picked himself back up. He had to finish Apocalypse Now. What other option was there? Somehow, against the odds, the movie came together. A new ending was written and filmed on the fly, replacing a big battle (“Willard decides to stand alongside Kurtz, and at the end they’re firing together. It didn’t work”). It had been an unspeakably painful shoot that Coppola still can’t quite believe he made it through; if they were making it today, he says, he’d use greenscreen. The film bowed at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where it won Coppola a second Palme d’or, making him only the second director to win the award twice. Reviews were mixed at first but audiences kept coming back. Key scenes soon became ingrained in pop culture: the baptismal shot of Willard emerging from water, ready to carry out his murderous mission, for example, became one of the defining images of 1970s US cinema. “It’s supposed to show the human being emerging from the chaos to face this strange destiny,” says Coppola today. Robert Duvall’s line about “the smell of napalm in the morning” took on a life of its own, as did the film’s showpiece moment: a helicopter ambush in which the US military obliterates a village to the blaring din of ‘Ride Of The Valkyries’.
The story of that sequence sums up the entire chaotic nature of making Apocalypse Now. “I didn’t know how to do it. But I had the confidence to trust that I’d learn how to do it while I’m there,” says Coppola. “It takes a lot of courage to not know what you’re doing and just go ahead on the assurance that you’ll figure it out. That’s the secret of life, really.”
In 2004, the year after US soldiers invaded Iraq, news footage showed troops going into battle using music to psych themselves up. The track, as they crashed through Fallujah front doors and reduced homes to rubble, was ‘Ride Of The Valkyries’. Art imitates life and life imitates art. Apocalypse Now retains a prominent place in our cinematic landscape because of moments like these: reminders that mankind’s capacity for madness remains intact. Apocalypse Now still captivates at 40, and Coppola hopes it will another four decades down the line. “Then we’ll see if it’s really stood the test of time,” he laughs. In other words — this isn’t the end. Not by a long shot.