One Brief Hour for Madness: Looking Back at Apocalyse Now [1979-1999]
"The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world." --Jean Baudrillard, America, 1988
"I spent eleven months & ten days in a war & the last twenty years pinning myself against a wall waiting on the door to close & the voices to fade with enough air for three minutes of peace" --Bill Shields, Human Shrapnel, 1991
"We live, as we dream - alone." --Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
"I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like . . . victory." --Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall)
Apocalypse Now is loosely based on Joseph Conrad's 1902 novella Heart of Darkness, the action moved from the African Congo in the 1800s to Vietnam in the late 1960s.
Director Francis Ford Coppola's assistant, George Lucas, was set to direct the film before he opted to take on a project called Star Wars.
Steve McQueen, Al Pacino, James Caan, Jack Nicholson and Robert Redford all turned down the part of Captain Willard.
Coppola fired Harvey Keitel after only one week of filming and replaced him with Martin Sheen as Willard.
The stellar cast included Frederic Forrest as Chef, Albert Hall as Chief Phillips, Sam Bottoms as surfer Lance Johnson and Laurence Fishburne as Mr. Clean.
Look for bit roles from Harrison Ford as Colonel G. Lucas (a tribute to George Lucas, who gave Ford his big break in American Graffiti), Bill Graham as the Playboy Bunnies' manager and R. Lee Ermey (Full Metal Jacket) as a helicopter pilot.
The film opens with helicopters, napalm and The Doors' haunting ballad, "The End."
During the first scene in the hotel room, Sheen was actually heavily drunk and accidentally smashed a mirror with his hand. Coppola kept the camera rolling during the entire episode.
Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro's credits include The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris and 1900.
Coppola's father, Carmine, composed the score.
Coppola appears in a cameo directing a war documentary.
"We'll come in low out of the rising sun and about a mile out, we'll put on the music . . . Yeah, I use Wagner - scares the hell out of the slopes! My boys love it!" --Kilgore
In May 1976, a typhoon forced the production to shut down for three months.
In March 1977, 35-year-old Sheen suffered a massive heart attack. He returns to the set on April 19.
Sheen's left arm is 3" shorter than his right arm.
The U.S. military, still reeling from the disaster in Vietnam, offered no cooperation in the film's production.
Coppola borrowed helicopters from the Philippine Air Force, which would routinely reclaim them in order to fight rebels in the mountains.
"Charlie don't surf!" --Kilgore
Marlon Brando, who received $1 million in advance for his portray of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, showed up on the set severely overweight. He admitted to Coppola that he hadn't read the script or Heart of Darkness. His scenes were filmed in shadows.
"We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write 'fuck' on their airplanes because it's obscene." --Kurtz
"I heard there are some real cadavers in body bags at the Kurtz Compound set. I asked the propman about it; he said, 'The script says 'a pile of burning bodies'; it doesn't say a pile of burning dummies.'" --Eleanor Coppola, Notes
Kurtz reads "The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot and his bookshelf contains The Golden Bough by James Frazier and From Ritual to Romance by Jessie Weston.
The insane photojournalist portrayed by Dennis Hopper quotes from T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland": "I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
The ox butchered near the end of the film was from an actual ceremony by native tribesmen.
"More and more it seems like there are parallels between the character of Kurtz and Francis. There is the exhilaration of power in the face of losing everything, like the excitement of war when one kills and takes the chance of being killed." --Eleanor Coppola, Notes
Coppola shot a record 1.5-million feet of film and about 23 hours of film ended up on the cutting-room floor. An indecisive Coppola also filmed two different endings.
Budgeted at $12 million, the film ended up costing $31 million. It earned $150 million worldwide.
"My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam." --Coppola
Despite all of the hype, Apocalypse Now only garnered two Oscars for Best Cinematography and Best Sound. The film did share the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival (along with The Tin Drum).
"While much of the footage is breathtaking, Apocalypse Now is emotionally obtuse and intellectually empty. It is not so much an epic account of a grueling war as an incongruous, extravagant monument to artistic self-defeat." --Frank Rice, Time magazine, August 27, 1979.
". . . the picture is annoyingly self-conscious. Too often Coppola seems to be calling attention to his artistry and imagination. The boat trip comes across like a ride at Disneyland, where the special-effects men have prepared tableaux on the banks at every turn of the river." --Danny Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic
A strip bar called "Apocalypse Now" opened in Ho Chi Minh City in the early 1990s.
The National Y2K Command Center in Washington, D.C., screened Apocalypse Now for members of the press on New Year's Eve, 1999.
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Journey is an award-winning documentary on the making of the film. It was based on Eleanor Coppola's home movies and diary of the filming.
"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." --Coppola