Restoration, Coppola’s tinkering lead to yet another ‘Apocalypse’
In tackling the Vietnam War, “Apocalypse Now” is hard-hitting, surreal and often violent.
Yet that doesn’t stop director Francis Ford Coppola from invoking a children’s fairy tale to explain the existence of the multiple versions of the film.
Joining the 147-minute version released in 1979 and the 196-minute “Apocalypse Now Redux” re-imagination brought out in 2001 is the 183-minute “Apocalypse Now: Final Cut,” which had its first showing in April at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
“He sort of calls it the Goldilocks cut for him,” said James Mockoski, a film archivist at Coppola’s company, American Zoetrope, in San Francisco.
“The ’79 version was something that came out at 2½ hours long but out of a necessity to please the distributors,” he said. “‘Redux’ was sort of … ‘Let’s just throw everything back in it.’ ”
What: “Apocalypse Now: Final Cut”
Where: Gateway Film Center, 1550 N. High St.
Contact: 614-247-4433, www. gatewayfilmcenter.org
Showtimes: 7:30 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and various dates and times through Aug. 27
Tickets: $11.50
By contrast, “Final Cut” — which will open at the Gateway Film Center on Monday — opts for neither extreme.
“Let’s not be too long but not too short, but somewhere in the middle,” Mockoski said.
At first, the goal was to restore the image and audio quality of the first two versions of the film, but as that work got underway, Coppola decided to make tweaks to the film itself.
“Once Francis sort of engaged with it, he saw an opportunity to make the definitive cut that he wanted to make,” said Pete Horner, the re-recording mixer on the project. “Then we also had a third version of the film to deliver.”
Coppola, who has prepared alternate edits of “The Godfather” trilogy (1972, 1974, 1990) and the drama “The Outsiders” (1983), does not restrict himself from tinkering with past work.
“Francis likes to play with it,” Mockoski said. “It’s a toy for him. … He’s like, ‘Well, you know, what if we try it this way?’”
“Apocalypse Now: Final Cut” retains the key components of the earlier versions of the film: All three cuts ask the audience to follow in the footsteps of Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) as he embarks on a jungle manhunt to locate the elusive Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando). The film co-stars Robert Duvall, Laurence Fishburne and Frederic Forrest.
Audiences who grew accustomed to the extra footage in “Apocalypse Now Redux,” however, will be in for some surprises in the final cut. For example, a sequence set at a French plantation has been shortened.
“We finessed the pacing a little bit to just try to get a little bit more momentum in there,” Mockoski said.
Omitted entirely is a scene set in a medevac unit, as well as a moment in which Kurtz is presented in broad daylight while reciting an article from Time magazine.
“For (Coppola), Brando should still be in the shadows,” Mockoski said. “He’s still a man who’s in the dark.”
Film buffs can debate the changes, but the behind-thescenes team promises that one thing is beyond question: No matter its running time, “Apocalypse Now” looks and sounds as good as it ever has.
“They went back to the original negative and rescanned it and restored it frame-by-frame,” Horner said. “People are less aware of what the sound is doing, but they are receiving exactly the same kind of treatment — just going back to the earliest source, getting a lot of the dirt and gunk out of the way and letting you hear the pristine original track.”