Apocalypse Now at 40
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| Francis Ford Coppola overcame many obstacles including much self-doubt during the four years he spent making Apocalypse Now. He was often driven to despair as indicated in this "playful" shot from Hearts of Darkness, a documentary about the making of the picture. |
In September 1979, while starting my junior year of college, I saw Apocalypse Now six times during the first two weeks it opened. (I have probably watched it two dozen more times since then.) It blew my mind and I knew I was watching a great film. Not everyone agreed. I argued with fellow students and professors at the University of Georgia. They felt the film was meandering and lost, pretentious, the narration was cheesy, and that basically it was a colossal failure. They were all wrong and, by now, it is obvious that director Francis Ford Coppola created a cinematic masterpiece, one of the greatest films of the 20th century.
It was a highly anticipated film, largely to due to how long it took to produce and to Coppola’s own fame from directing two great films, The Godfather, and The Godfather Part II. There were stories of constant funding problems, rumors of disorganization on the set, a typhoon stopped shooting and wiped out certain sets for several weeks, the original leading actor, Harvey Keitel, was fired and his scenes re-shot with Martin Sheen, who, in turn, suffered a serious heart attack, and Marlon Brando was behaving like a prima donna. All this bad press gave the film a sense of failure and desperate megalomania long before it premiered.
Shooting began in 1976. It was supposed to take four months. It ended up taking over 230 days scattered over two years. When it was finally released in late August 1979, the critics were mixed about it, at best. The Deer Hunter had recently come out and the critics all loved it. With that film’s approach and the mythic culture of chaos of Apocalypse Now fresh on everyone’s mind, the critics simply couldn’t accept it for what it was. It garnered a fair share of praise (especially outside the United States), but the critiques were primarily negative and brutal (inside the United States). I don’t think I had ever known so much controversy in movie-making up to that time. But, back then, the Vietnam War was not some distant thing, it had just happened a couple of years ago. It was still an almost taboo subject in the American psyche.
The publicity would have been even worse had the press knew about Coppola’s actual mental state as filming went on. He was battling the rain and other elements of the Philippines while attempting to coordinate sophisticated battle sequences with actors and crew and military specialists that required interpreters for three different languages on set. Though John Milius’ script (he wrote about 10 versions, all those great lines above are his) remained largely intact, the ending was not acceptable to him but he had no alternative. Literally, he was shooting a film with no end in sight. His mental resilience was often tested and faltered. As revealed in Hearts of Darkness, the documentary about the making of the movie, toward the end he felt he had no idea what he was doing. He kept calling the film “a bad movie” and a “$20 million disaster.”
Which is pretty much what all those people at UGA were arguing after the film came out. They bought into the preconceived idea that the movie was a chaotic mess. Their minds were somewhat made up before they saw it. When I told them the film was rich visually and in allegorical content they laughed, although some conceded that the cinematography was superb (it won an Academy Award for Cinematography). I asked them to consider that the PBR traveling up the Nang River was really a journey into the deepest recesses of the human mind and that the ambiguity which frustrated them was really just an representation of the Vietnam War itself. This gave some of them pause. Others laughed at me.
Apocalypse Now is loosely based on the 90-page Joseph Conrad novella, Heart of Darkness. The novella is an examination of civilization and savagery, of imperialism and racism, of certainty and darkness. It is also a symbolic and atmospheric story of one man’s journey up an African river to find an ivory trader who has gone insane. Milius' script(s) takes these elements and transposes them, with significant variation, onto the Vietnam War.
As such, Apocalypse Now is an internal journey into our instinctual selves as expressed through a covert mission by Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Sheen) up a river through South Vietnam into Cambodia to assassinate Marine Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Brando) who has gone rogue and is fighting the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese on his own terms, worshiped by his Montagnard army, beyond the control of the American military. But this mission is more about a journey into the depths of the human psyche than anything else. Vietnam is a metaphor for our base, animal nature and the thin line between clarity (light) and insanity (darkness).
The shooting of the film took place in the Philippines because of the geographic similarities with Vietnam. As the shoot progressed, the filmmakers became more engulfed by the jungle and elements of being on location and gradually the themes of the film inter-meshed with the experience of making it, engulfing most of the cast and crew. As Coppola put it after the (still not completely finished) movie had won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979:
“My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam. The way we made it was very much like the way Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.”
At one point in the film’s narration Willard says: “I took the mission. What the hell else was I gonna do? But I didn’t know what I’d do when I found him.” So it was with Coppola and Apocalypse Now. The movie was his mission. He did not like the way the script ended on day one of the shoot. He struggled with the ending throughout the whole movie, making sure to shoot it last (partly due to the fact that hiring Brando was expensive and the actor only agreed to a contract for 3 weeks. Brando later tried to back out of the film because his 3-week shoot kept being pushed back due to the much delayed film moving into a second year of shooting.) As the film evolved, the ending became even more elusive. Coppola did not know what he would do when he got around to shooting it.
But there’s is plenty to tell before we get to that part. So let’s start at the beginning – which is actually “The End” by the Doors. The film has no opening credits as we listen to Robby Krieger’s slow, confident electric guitar. We dissolve from blackness to a close-up of the jungle. Yellow smoke and dust drift in and out of frame. Helicopters whiz by in slow motion, the whipping sound of their propeller blades mixed in time with the music. We see only parts of them, a main rotor blade here, landing skids there, a tail rotor. Then…Jim Morrison starts to sing and we see a gigantic napalm explosion burning the jungle. This is a pure Coppola moment, and where he starts coming in as the co-writer of the script.
Captain Willard is lying in the bed of a hotel room smoking cigarettes and drinking heavily. Gradually “The End” cranks up to its climax. Willard, drunk off his ass, cuts his hand punching a wall mirror. His blood is spread everywhere. He strips naked and cries before passing out. This is a powerful opening scene, immediately informing the audience of the psychological nature of the film. It was shot on Martin Sheen’s 36th birthday. Coppola wanted him to get really drunk and improvise for the camera. The hand cut was an accident, the blood Sheen’s. The anguish and tears were real. Shooting the scene affected the director and the crew and, of course, Sheen. As he later put it, “My head was on fire and I was trying to put it out with a hammer.” Sheen was already in darkness’s heart from the beginning.
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| The triple overlay at the beginning of the film. Willard and the carving from Kurtz's temple. The fire is all that remains of the bombardment of the compound that Coppola later edited out of the closing credits. This is Willard looking into the future. |
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| Willard has a drunken breakdown in his hotel room. Martin Sheen accidentally cut his hand while punching a wall mirror. Coppola asked if Sheen needed the camera to stop filming. Sheen refused, ready to wrestle with his own demons in front of the camera. This is an excellent example of how the subject of the film and the making of the film fused into one powerful psychological force, taking director, cast, and crew with it. For much of the shoot it was Apocalypse - out of control. |
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| Willard receives instructions for his mission to take out Colonel Kurtz. "Terminate with extreme prejudice." |
Willard is chosen for a mission, “a real choice mission. And when it was over I wouldn’t want another.” This opening narration is important because it is spoken after the events of the movie have taken place. Willard serves the role of Marlowe in Heart of Darkness. He is telling the story in retrospect but we experience it as an audience in the present tense. He is sent by a PBR boat up the Nang river into Cambodia to “terminate” Kurtz’s command after we learn of Kurtz’s murderous rogue nature. The mission is obviously classified. The US isn’t supposed to be in Cambodia.
The PBR’s mission name is “Street Gang” and is crewed by Chief (the Captain), and three diverse but basic young guys, Chef who is a saucier, Lance who is a famous surfer, and Mr. Clean, a black kid who is only 17. (Lawrence Fishburne who portrays Clean was only 14 at the time shooting began.) To get into the Nang River, Willard requires assistance to entire the river at Charlie’s Point, a Viet Cong infested area. He receives from an 1/9 Air Cavalry Regiment commanded by the charismatic Colonel William Kilgore (superbly played by Robert Duvall). (In the original Milius script the Colonel’s name is Kharnage. A little too obvious for Coppola.)
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| A cameo by Coppola. He is urging Willard and the crew to not look at the camera and keeping moving. "Like you're fighting! Like you're fighting!" |
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| The cinematography in Apocalypse Now is outstanding. Much of the film is like a painting of darkness and color. Here the air cavalry prepares to approach a target. |
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| Charlie's Point is hit hard by the air cavalry. |
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| Robert Duvall is sensational as Colonel Kilgore. |
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| Ultimately, a napalm strike is ordered so the PBR can begin its journey along the Nang River...as so Kilgore can see a little surfing too. |
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| Another angle of the napalm blast with US troops in the yellow haze foreground. |
Almost. Apocalypse Now uses surrealism and absurdity to help guide the viewer’s experience of the film. One of the best examples of absurdity is in the fact that Kilgore’s primary concern isn’t getting Willard into the river. Rather, it is because he is a surfing enthusiast and this particular beach at Charlie’s Point has six-foot waves with a decent break. He wants to surf and he wants to see Lance surf as well. Lance is frightened by the VC mortar fire and that is why the napalm air strike is ordered to begin with.
It is worth noting the particular frustration Coppola experienced when directing these helicopters. He had gone to the Philippines in advance and, in personal meetings, gotten President Ferdinand Marcos to agree to Coppola’s use of the helicopters (for a generous weekly fee) in the film. There was one condition, however. If needed, the helicopters can be ordered away by the Filipino military to fight a guerrilla insurgency in the south. This, of course, happened on several occasions during shooting. Coppola would have everything set for a retake or a different angle and, suddenly, the choppers would all fly away for the rest of the day. This is one of many reasons shooting Apocalypse Now was so behind schedule.
Moreover, when the helicopters did stick around, Coppola’s direction had to be translated into Filipino and French before everyone was on the same page. Attempts to direct the scene “in action” was like a slow slog through thick monsoon mud. Coppola often found it difficult get the helicopter pilots to fly at lower altitudes so they would be in the camera shot along with the ground. It was nerve-wracking for the director.
Nevertheless, the PRB makes into and up the Nang River and we are introduced to the untamed jungle interior when Chef and Willard go in search of mangos so that Chef can make a mango cream pudding. They end up being lunged at by a Tiger, who is frightened off by their gunfire. The PBR is the only source of safety in the wilds. Lance and Clean unleash aimless rounds of machine gunfire into the jungle. The first attack upon the boat is really just an attack of raw fear, showing how on edge everyone is. Fear following so closely the napalm explosion shows how far we have come in terms of warfare. We have moved from the external force of napalm to the internal, primal force of being afraid.
Except Willard isn’t afraid. He runs for his life, of course, but, unlike Chef, he doesn’t freak out and start convulsing in an uncontrollable rant against the war. He observes the crew and their fear. He is distant from it. Instead, he buries himself into additional classified intelligence about Kurtz and the audience starts getting a better sense of the back-story and motivation for the mission.
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| Playmate of the Year. The Bunnies offer the troops a USO show that gets out of control. |
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| Lawrence Fishburne blasts his mounted machine gun into the villagers on a sampan boat. He was 14 years old when the filming of Apocalypse Now began. His character, Mr. Clean, was supposedly 17. |
It is worth noting that, for writer Milius, Kilgore’s attack and the Playboy Bunnies represented the Cyclops and the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey. Milius intended the approach of Apocalypse Now to be based on Homer’s classic as well as Conrad’s story. From that perspective, the movie is very basic and almost straightforward. But, as he filmed it, Coppola kept coming up with brilliant improvisations and visual ideas that stretched beyond Milius’ vision of pure battle and absurdity. The film became more nuanced, cerebral, and ambiguous. Part of this ambiguity, no doubt, stems from the fact that, as he shot it, Coppola was still unclear as to how it would end and therefore had to shoot the rest of the picture to accommodate multiple possible endings.
“The war was being run by a bunch of four-star clowns who were going to end up giving the whole circus away,” Willard narrates. Then he goes back into his shell to learn more from the Kurtz dossier as the crew find ways of killing time and the PBR snakes its way further upriver. Kurtz had an impeccable and highly decorated career. Why did he go rogue is the question constantly nagging at Willard.
A word about the film's narration is appropriate. It was written after shooting was complete by noted Vietnam War correspondent Michael Herr. Originally, Coppola was not going to use any narration because he was going for a purely visual aesthetic. But it became obvious some verbal guidance was necessary while editing the sequences of the PBR going upriver. I thought Herr's writing was gritty, semi-poetic, and excellent but I recall one UGA professor who found it praticularly trite. I never convinced him otherwise but we had a couple of long discussions pertaining to Herr's work.
One of Coppola’s improvisations occurs when the PBR conducts a routine check of a sampan to verify there are no enemy supplies hidden onboard. This results in the film’s representation of the My Lai massacre. The idea was really a part of spontaneous group-think as Coppola prepped the scene. The cast were all-in for it. A normal Vietnamese family, young and old, are suddenly murdered when Clean freaks out at the sudden movement of a woman trying to protect her puppy. The crew blast the bags of rice and (interestingly) mangos killing everyone on board. Except for the badly wounded woman who wanted to protect the puppy.
When Chief decides to bring her aboard so that they can take her to receive medical attention, Willard, who has not fired a shot yet, aims his pistol and kills the woman, insisting that his mission takes priority over everything and that the whole search was a complete waste of his time. The crew is disgusted at Willard, except for Lance, who is high on weed and decides to take the puppy with him on the PBR.
The crew has now fired their guns twice. Both times were pointless; the first time out of fear of a Tiger and the second out of fear of simple, innocent, sudden movement. This says a great deal about the indiscriminate nature of the war upon the South Vietnamese civilian population. It drives home once more the underlying (and building) sense of fear and dread that Coppola crafts into Milius’ script as the PBR goes deeper into the jungle.
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| Lance and Willard navigate the chaos of the Do Long Bridge in search of a commanding officer. There apparently isn't one. |
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| PBR Street Gang moves past the Don Long Bridge amidst a heavy mortar attack. |
This scene has a distinct feel from the rest of the film. One of my older friends who saw the movie with me back in 1979 told me he had never seen anything on the big screen that so closely articulated what is was like to shoot-up heroin. It is a freaky trip with Willard and Lance attempting to find the commanding officer. But they search in the darkness of night in vein. Apparently, no one knows who is in command of US forces – obviously symbolic of America’s complex internal conflict between military, political, and cultural interests during the war.
The PBR now reaches Cambodia. There are no US forces of any kind. We are back to being in the primordial jungle again. But the crew received mail from home at the bridge stop. Willard opens new dossier information. Several months ago, another soldier was sent on Willard’s mission. He never came back. Army intelligence believes he is now operating with Kurtz. This rather shocking revelation draws both Willard and the audience closer to Kurtz, who is by now taking on mythic proportions.. The audience has been witness to Willard’s drunkenness, his chaotic and often violent state of mind, while somehow remaining detached from all events. The mystery deepens. By now Willard is obsessed with Kurtz.
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| Sam Bottoms portrays Lance, a famous surfer, who spends much of the film either high or tripping on acid. |
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| Albert Hall as Chief. As the PBR moves upriver it is exposed to attacks that become more primitive, accentuating the fact that we are on a journey back in time or into our primordial selves. Chief is killed by a thrown spear. |
This journey into an ever more primal psychological state is soon visited with a second attack, this time tribal in nature. Hundreds of small arrows are shot that the boat from both sides of the river, causing a lot of panic even as Willard tries to calm everyone down claiming “they’re just little sticks.” Thump. Chief is hit from the back through the torso by a large spear. He soon bleeds out but not before he grabs Willard, who is checking on him, and attempts to pull Willard into the head of the spear. Chief essentially wants to take Willard, who disgusts him by now, with him as he dies. We have now devolved into our most primal, instinctual nature yet. The simple need to kill.
Willard survives, however, and tells Chef the purpose of his mission. This pisses Chef off because, quite obviously, the mission is absurd. “That's f#cking typical, shit. F#cking Vietnam mission. I'm short, and we got to go up there so you can kill one of our own guys. That's f#cking great, that's just f#cking great! That's f#cking crazy.” The absurdity of the Vietnam War in a nutshell, but Chief and Lance will nevertheless take Willard further upstream to find the Kurtz compound.
Which they soon do. Film has been mostly a mix on physical warfare and psychological journey up until we arrive the Kurtz compound. At that point it becomes an entirely internalized experience. After about 140 minutes we arrive at the endgame. We encounter a crazed photojournalist. Dennis Hopper is highly entertaining and provides a bit of relief from the anticipation of the encounter with Kurtz. Willard comes face-to-face with Colby, the previous officer sent to assassinate Kurtz, who is now obviously a disciple.
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| Members of the Ifugao tribe serve as extras at the Kurtz compound. They allow the PBR through without incident. |
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| The Kurtz compound. The set definitely meets our built-up expectations of a fantastic place in the middle of the Cambodian jungle where Kurtz is running his own kind of war. |
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| Frederic Forrest as Chef. He pilots the PBR into the Kurtz compound after Chef is killed. |
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| Dennis Hopper provides some needed semi-comic relief as a crazed photo-journalist at the compound. Many viewers believe he doesn't even have any film in his collection of cameras any more. |
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| "Our Motto: Apocalypse Now." Part of Kurtz's Montagnard Army. |
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| Marlon Brando finally appears as Kurtz the final minutes of the film. He is largely depicted in darkness and shadow. Much of his acting was improvised based on days of discussions with Coppola. |
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| Kurtz to Willard: "You're an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect the bill." |
Marlon Brando finally appears (mostly in darkness and shadows) in last half hour of the film. His compound is the most savage place we have seen so far. Dead bodies hang from trees waiting to be cut down and dropped into the river now and then. Severed heads litter the compound especially along the steps leading up to where Kurtz might be. There are flies everywhere. And yet Kurtz is writing a massive amount of notes on…something. He studies the Holy Bible, From Ritual to Romance, and The Golden Bough. He reads T.S. Eliot out loud. He is a classic example of the warrior-poet mixed with pathological killer.
Willard doesn’t see Kurtz until Kurtz’s followers properly prep Willard. They gang up on him and turn him upside down and rub his face in the mud. Then he appears, hands tied and on his knees, before a reclining Kurtz. Brando was criticized for not having properly prepared for his role before he arrived on set. That is true. He hadn’t read Heart of Darkness or even much of the script. But it is equally true that that did not matter to Coppola at this point.
Coppola did not know how to end the film. Milius had written several different versions. Kurtz and Willard end up working together to thwart a North Vietnamese attack on the compound in one version. There was another where Willard simply takes Kurtz’s place and the compound continues to wage war. Another had everyone in the compound killed by B-52 strike. There were several variations. Coppola didn’t like any of them and, subsequently, felt that he would not be able to deliver a resolution for the tension of the movie’s elaborate setup and the allegorical weight he had created. This, along with the fact he was practically broke financing his own film (the studio was no longer offering more funding), was the cause of great despair for him.
He thought that he would benefit from having Brando on the set for three weeks. He felt that he and Brando, whom he directed in The Godfather, would be able to hash out something worthy out of Milius’ multiple endings. Coppola tried rewriting the ending many times previously during the shoot but he didn’t like his own ideas.
Here is Coppola, consumed both materially and emotionally by this massive film. He is depressed because he thinks it is no good. The ending is not powerful enough. Then, gradually, Brando and Coppola have extended discussions. Some shooting days are canceled, yet everyone still gets paid while Coppola and Brando hash out ideas. The press was calling the whole thing a disaster at this point when, in fact, Coppola had managed extraordinary circumstances very well. True, he was way way way over budget. But, much of it was his own money and what he had captured of the script up to its conclusion was an incredible cinematic experience that the world didn’t know about yet. Far from being a disaster, the movie would be fantastic…if only he and Brando could bring home the goods.
Most of Brando’s dozen or so minutes of actual performance were improvised based on content ideas he and Coppola had batted about. It is a powerful performance and sets up the real punch of the ending. While in the Philippines, Coppola witnessed sacrificial rites as practiced by the Ifugao people. They were paid to play the Montagnard army and their ritualized sacrifice of a water buffalo is accurately captured at the end of Apocalypse Now. This is intercut with Willard’s butchering of Kurtz, the buffalo and Kurtz dying together in simultaneous bloody acts of violence. It is shocking to watch the buffalo being butchered with expert precision. This creates a deeply gripping, yet ambiguous conclusion to the film.
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| Kurtz in his temple as a water buffalo is led to a sacrifice. Both will be slaughtered. |
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| The Ifugao sacrificial ritual... |
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| ...is mixed in editing with Willard's butchering of Kurtz. |
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| Willard approaches Kurtz as the ritual is performed in the compound. |
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| After killing the rogue colonel, he sits at Kurtz's desk and takes the notebook Kurtz has been typing. A sacred text? |
Willard butchers Kurtz with a machete tied to a wooden pole. He then sits at his desk and gathers Kurtz’s typed notebook about….what? He carries Kurtz’s notebook out as if it were a sacred text when he takes Lance’s hand and leaves the compound. Everyone in the compound lays down their weapons and bows to him. ALMIGHTY is the headquarters for the air strike. When ALMIGHTY attempts to contact PBR Street Gang, Willard switches the radio off.
Just before Willard butchers Kurtz, we hear the renegade colonel speaking into a tape recorder. “We train young men to drop fire on people but their commanders won’t allow them to write ‘F#ck’ on their airplanes because it’s obscene!” This is one of my personal favorite lines in the film, bringing us to the fundamental absurdity and the lie at the heart of the film. Our morals are twisted by being offended by a word and not offended by trained mass death.
All the credits for the film, including its title, come at the end of the movie. In the original release that I saw during those first two weeks back in 1979, the credits were superimposed upon images of what appears to be the Kurtz compound being destroyed by explosions, which I took, like most everyone else, to be the result of the air strike Willard apparently called in on the compound. But Coppola did not intend for that to be the message at all. Why did he not realize that the viewer would likely make such a connection? He quickly re-edited the film and it continued its run with the credits against a simple black background.
Willard switches off the PBR’s radio and does not call in an air strike as the movie concludes. What happens next is intended to be ambiguous. Coppola did not want a neat finale. Rather, he wanted the audience to simply be affected more then reflective, perhaps beyond understanding, by the journey they had just witnessed including the sacrificial style butchering of Kurtz. That is the key to Apocalypse Now. It is about how the movie impacts your psyche and emotions rather than whether you fully understand it.
“The End” is featured in the movie’s final moments, just as it was at the beginning. The film seems to loop back onto itself. It closes with a triple overlay of images. Willard’s face as he pilots the PBR away from the compound, the craved stone face at the temple of the Kurtz compound, and recalling the jungle burning as the helicopters fly by when the film opens. This contrasts the opening triple overlay with Willard lying in his hotel room bed staring at the ceiling, with the same stone face at the temple, and with pure fire resembling the explosive footage Coppola chose to remove from the closing credits.
The two triple overlays bookend the film and bring everything back around full circle. Whereas at the beginning we see fire from the film’s (edited out) ending, in the ending we see the fire and helicopters from the beginning. The first instance is a glimpse into the future, while the second is looking into the past. Willard and his destination, the Kurtz compound, are seen in both. We can place any sort of meaning we want onto all this. For Milius, the film was simply an allegorical retelling of the Odyssey and Heart of Darkness. For Coppola, it was about the mission being accomplished but leaving us with questions as to what happens next and, more importantly, what random affect this inward journey and ultimate sacrifice has on our psyche as we experience it. Like the Vietnam War itself, the mission was accomplished, it was military victory, but the meaning of this “success” is completely debatable.
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| The triple overlay at the end of the film, looking into the past. Willard is still juxtaposed with the temple face carving. This time we also see the burning jungle and helicopters from the beginning of the film, bringing everything full circle. |
In the United States, it was the fifth most popular film in 1979 (Kramer vs. Kramer was number one). It grossed about $180 million worldwide, which, in Hollywood accounting terms, meant the $20+ million picture just about broke even after the promotion and distribution costs were factored in. But, like many great films, it has grown more popular with the passage of time. I give the film one of my rare “10” ratings. Apocalypse Now seems as fresh today as it did 40 years ago. When considered alongside the first two Godfather movies, it clearly demonstrates that Coppola was one of the greatest directors of the twentieth century.
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