Coppola on the making of the film and working with Brando
Guardian article on the new edited version 2020
" It is highly doubtful that any major production would be allowed to take such risks today. Coppola argues that, as well as the technological advances that have transformed movie-making since the 70s, power has tilted in the direction of studios and away from directors. “There’s not only control with the extraordinary things you can do in … it shouldn’t even be called post-production. It is all production,” he says. “But, also, the studios during the period of the 70s learned how to prevent runaway directors. I mean the famous experience with United Artists and Michael Cimino’s film Heaven’s Gate so traumatised companies that they developed techniques to prevent that type of runaway-director behaviour which we, in my generation, sort of exploited.” The perfectionist Cimino’s slow-moving, hugely expensive and enormously long western flopped so badly it bankrupted the studio. "
In the spring of 1975, having completed his second Godfather film, Francis Coppola told an interviewer that his next movie would deal with Vietnam, “although it won’t necessarily be political—it will be about war and the human soul . . . I’ll be venturing into an era that is laden with so many implications that if I select some aspects and ignore others, I may be doing something irresponsible.” He told another interviewer that his planned film would be “frightening, horrible—with even more violence than The Godfather.“
As the vehicle for his explorations, Coppola selected John Milius’s six-year-old screenplay based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Shifting Conrad’s story of civilization’s submission to the brutality of human nature from the jungles of Africa to Vietnam, the script told the story of a Green Beret officer who defects and sets up his own army across the Cambodian border where he proceeds to fight both American and Vietcong forces.
Throughout the film’s production, Coppola shifted his intended focus from an anti-war film to an action adventure film and back again. At one point, he characterized Apocalypse Now as pro-American, denying it was anti-Pentagon or even anti-war. During filming in the Philippines, he described Apocalypse Now as “anti-lie, not an anti-war film. I am interested in the contradictions of the human condition.” With his intellectual attraction to the good and evil that are inherent to all men, Coppola said that he was trying to make a war movie that would somehow rise above conventional images of valor and cowardice. When asked why he was attempting to show this in a film set in Vietnam, the director responded that it was “more unusual that I am the only one making a picture about Vietnam.”
In coming to the Pentagon with his plans in May 1975, Coppola told Public Affairs officials that his initial script would need considerable work, especially the end, which he considered “surrealistic.” While recognizing that the screenplay had considerable problems, the officials forwarded it to the Army with the recommendation that the service should work with the director so that the completed film “will be an honest presentation.”
The Army found little basis to even talk to Coppola, responding that the script was “simply a series of some of the worst things, real or imagined, that happened or could have happened during the Vietnam War.” According to the service, it had little reason to consider extending cooperation “in view of the sick humor or satirical philosophy of the film.” Army officers pointed to several “particularly objectionable episodes” which presented its actions “in an unrealistic and unacceptable bad light.” These included scenes of U.S. soldiers scalping the enemy, a surfing display in the midst of combat, an officer obtaining sexual favors for his men, and later smoking marijuana with them.
The military probably could have lived with at least some of these negative incidents if put in what it regarded as a realistic and balanced context. But, from the initial script onward, the Army strongly objected to the film’s springboard which has Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) sent to “terminate with extreme prejudice” Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) who has set up an independent operation and is waging a private war against all sides. The Army said Kurtz’s actions “can only be viewed as a parody on the sickness and brutality of war.” The service maintained that in an actual situation, it would attempt to bring Kurtz back for medical treatment rather than order another officer to “terminate” him. Consequently, the Army said that “to assist in any way in the production would imply agreement with either the fact or philosophy of the film.”
Although Coppola’s staff maintained intermediate communication with the Pentagon, Coppola made no immediate effort to modify his script in order to obtain even limited assistance. Instead, he went off to the Philippines to shoot Apocalypse Now, thereby beginning a struggle that was to last more than three years, cost more than $30,000,000, and come to resemble America’s conduct of the war. The film’s schedule release date proved as illusionary as the military’s regular predictions of victory as the opening was pushed back from April 1977, to November, then to December 1978, spring 1979, and finally, August 1979.
In the meantime, other filmmakers followed Coppola’s lead and began to create images of America’s Vietnam experience. In contrast, however, they chose to make their comments about the horrors of war, not through portrayals of violence, but by using the conflict as a starting point and as the villain which scarred individuals and the nation. By focusing on the victims of the war, these first movies continued the anti-war, anti-military movement of the Sixties and early Seventies.
