How Brando was paid $3 million and turned up overweight and unprepared. How Pacino, McQueen and James Caan all passed on the role of Willard. How the budget, originally set at $14 million, doubled after a calamitous shoot, with Coppola personally liable for the overage. His experience in the Philippines wrote itself into Hollywood legend. For Coppola, it was the culmination of a journey steeped in madness and mythology, as arduous and transformative in its own way as the events he set out to capture on camera. Shot in the Philippines between 1976 and ’77, with post-production stretching into 1978, Apocalypse Now, still unfinished, received its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979, where it shared the Palme d’Or with Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum. Kurtz, in his viciousness and savagery, has achieved enlightenment. In the face of madness, the only sane response is insanity. Evil, certainly, but also a kind of terrible clarity.
To Coppola, who reimagines him as a renegade Colonel, he is even more complex.īrando’s Kurtz shows us what lies beyond the limits of human behaviour. Here, in the character of Kurtz the ivory trader, Conrad created a symbol of the west’s destructive greed and cruelty. It fell to him, or so he thought, to make sense of Vietnam.įor inspiration, he reached beyond the war to something more fundamental, finding it in ‘Heart of Darkness’, Joseph Conrad’s account of colonisation in the Belgian Congo, first published in 1899.
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If Apocalypse Now appears to pre-empt many of the Vietnam movies that followed – distilling into a single film the action spectacle of Platoon, the psychological drama of The Deer Hunter and the moral ambivalence of Full Metal Jacket – it is because at the time, Coppola imagined it would be the only American film to deal with the war. That truth is less about the events of the war itself (though they are recreated with stunning authenticity) than the madness at the heart of human nature. Pushed to the limits of his own ambition, he refashioned his film into something closer to poetry than fiction, and conferred on Apocalypse Now its own awful, irresistible truth. But in doing so, he embarked on a parallel journey – a ruinous, cathartic expedition both physical and spiritual. Because here, in the journey of a Marine captain through the dark heart of Vietnam, Francis Ford Coppola has captured the full spectrum of war – its horror, madness and grotesque, cosmic absurdity.
If the first casualty of war is truth, Apocalypse Now must be the greatest lie ever told. A jaw-dropping spectacle and brain-melting existential nightmare, Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam opus is touched by genius.
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