A planned five-month shoot for Apocalypse Now stretched past a year
Francis Ford Coppola went to the Philippines in March 1976 expecting five months of filming. Storms wrecked costly sets, Marlon Brando showed up unprepared and Martin Sheen nearly died of a heart attack. Photography ended in May 1977, and Coppola then faced more than a million feet of footage.
The idea began with John Milius, who in the late 1960s wanted to move Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness from colonial Congo to the war in Vietnam. At first George Lucas was meant to direct with Coppola producing. When Lucas dropped out, Coppola took the chair himself, drawing on Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God for his approach. Michael Herr, the war correspondent, wrote the narration.
The story sends Captain Willard, played by Sheen, upriver from South Vietnam into Cambodia on a secret order to kill Colonel Kurtz, a Special Forces officer gone rogue and thought to be insane. Brando took Kurtz, and Robert Duvall played Kilgore, the surf-obsessed cavalry commander. Duvall found the written version of Kilgore too cartoonish and got permission to reshape him, and the character blends several real officers. Sheen filmed the opening hotel-room scene drunk on his 36th birthday, cut his hand on a real mirror and kept going; he later described it as an exorcism of his alcoholism.
The unfinished film premiered at Cannes and shared the Palme d'Or. United Artists released it on August 15, 1979, and it took $80 million in North America and $150 million globally. Critics were split: Vittorio Storaro's photography drew near-universal praise, but some reviewers found the handling of the big themes flat. Of eight Oscar nominations, it won for cinematography and sound.
Its standing has grown enormously. It is now widely rated Coppola's masterpiece and among the greatest films ever made, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2000. Coppola kept reworking it, releasing a longer Redux cut with extra scenes in 2001 and a Final Cut in 2019, which he considers the definitive version. The chaos of the shoot is documented in the 1991 film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse.
Source: Apocalypse Now
