Apocalypse Now

• 1. Introduction

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  Apocalypse Now arrived in theaters on the 15th of August 1979, and it carried on its back over a million feet of film, a near-fatal heart attack, a typhoon that destroyed the sets, and the private financial ruin of one of America's most celebrated directors. Francis Ford Coppola, fresh from The Godfather and its sequel, had wagered his house, his car, and his Godfather profits on a movie that he was not entirely sure he could finish. At one point, he told his wife he felt there was only about a 20% chance he could pull it off. What drove the film past every catastrophe to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes and gross $150 million worldwide? And what is it about a river journey into Cambodia that still haunts viewers decades later? Those are the questions this documentary will follow upstream.

• 2. The Script That Waited

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  John Milius wrote the first draft of the screenplay in 1969, when he was working as an assistant on Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People. His college screenwriting professor at USC, Irwin Blacker, had challenged the class by declaring that no screenwriter had ever perfected a film adaptation of Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. Milius had read the novel as a teenager and immediately saw it as the right vessel for his feelings about Vietnam. Coppola paid him $15,000 to write the script, with a promise of another $10,000 if it received the green light. Milius wrote ten drafts over the years, totaling over a thousand pages, partly influenced by Michael Herr's article "The Battle for Khe Sanh," which connected drugs, rock music, and soldiers calling down airstrikes on themselves. The title itself came from a hippie button badge popular in the 1960s that read "Nirvana Now." For years, George Lucas was set to direct; he spent four years developing the project alongside Milius and sent his producer Gary Kurtz to scout the Philippines. Lucas intended to shoot the film with real soldiers, on a $2 million budget, in cinema verite style on 16mm cameras, while the war was still happening. When his commitments to American Graffiti and then Star Wars made that impossible, Coppola took over direction himself.

• 3. A Cast Nobody Wanted

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  Steve McQueen was Coppola's first choice to play Captain Willard, but McQueen refused to leave America for three weeks and Coppola would not meet his $3 million fee. When McQueen dropped out in February 1976, Coppola had to return $5 million of the $21 million he had already raised. Al Pacino turned the role down because he feared getting sick in the jungle, as he had during The Godfather Part II. Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, James Caan, and Robert De Niro were all approached and passed. Clint Eastwood revealed in a 2015 interview that Coppola offered him the role too, but he also declined. Harvey Keitel was ultimately cast, arrived in the Philippines on the planned start date, and was let go just weeks later because Coppola felt he found it difficult to play Willard as a passive onlooker. Martin Sheen, who had impressed Coppola in a screen test for The Godfather years earlier, arrived as the replacement on the 24th of April 1976. For Colonel Kurtz, Coppola had first approached Orson Welles and Lee Marvin, both of whom turned it down. He eventually persuaded Marlon Brando to take the role for $2 million for one month of work, plus 10% of the gross theatrical rental and 10% of the television sale rights, ultimately earning Brando around $9 million. Fourteen-year-old Laurence Fishburne, credited as Larry Fishburne, lied about his age to be cast. Because the production ran so long, he was 18 by the time the film opened.

• 4. 238 Days in the Philippines

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  Principal photography began on the 20th of March 1976, in the Philippines, chosen for its access to American military equipment and cheap labor. Coppola's producers had gone as far as to have dinner with President Ferdinand Marcos to secure the use of military hardware. Within weeks, Typhoon Olga wrecked between 40 and 80% of the sets at Iba on the 26th of May 1976, shutting down production entirely. Coppola's wife Eleanor calculated the film was six weeks behind schedule and $2 million over budget after the storm alone; Coppola filed a $500,000 insurance claim and took out a loan from United Artists tied to a minimum box-office threshold. When Marlon Brando finally arrived in Manila in July 1976, he was very overweight and had not read Heart of Darkness. Coppola dealt with Brando's weight by dressing him entirely in black, photographing only his face, and using a taller actor to double for him. The famous opening scene, in which Willard staggers through his hotel room and punches a mirror, was filmed on Martin Sheen's 36th birthday; he was heavily intoxicated, broke a real mirror rather than a prop, and cut his hand severely, but insisted on continuing despite Coppola's concern. Sheen later described the performance as a spontaneous exorcism of his longstanding alcoholism. On the 5th of March 1977, Sheen, then 36, suffered a near-fatal heart attack on location and struggled a quarter of a mile to reach help. Afraid that investors would pull funding, he told the press he had heatstroke. His brother Joe Estevez filled in for him until he returned to the set on the 19th of April 1977. Principal photography did not end until the 21st of May 1977, after 238 days.

• 5. Building the Sound

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  When photography finally wrapped, the budget had doubled to over $25 million, and Coppola's personal loan from United Artists to fund the overruns had extended past $10 million. United Artists took out a $15 million life insurance policy on Coppola. By June 1977, he had offered his car, his house, and his Godfather profits as security. Sound editor Walter Murch was told in the summer of 1977 that he had four months to assemble the sound. He discovered that the script had originally called for narration but that Coppola had abandoned the idea during filming; Murch decided to restore it, recording all of it himself before Michael Herr eventually rewrote the entire narration. Herr received the call from Zoetrope in January 1978, saying the existing narration was useless, and spent a year creating new material under Coppola's close guidance. Because Martin Sheen was too busy to record the voice-over, his brother Joe Estevez, whose voice was nearly identical, performed all the narration instead. For the sound itself, Murch faced a technical problem: no stereo recordings of weapons existed in sound libraries. He and his crew fabricated the jungle's sonic mood entirely. Murch used the Dolby Stereo 70mm Six Track system for the large-format release, adding two channels of sound behind the audience specifically for the helicopter sequences, a layout that became the template for what would later be called a 5.1 mix. The 35mm release used the new Dolby Stereo optical system but, due to the technology's limits, did not include surround sound for most theaters.

• 6. Cannes and the Critics

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  On the 19th of May 1979, a three-hour work-in-progress version of Apocalypse Now screened at the Cannes Film Festival. It was the first unfinished film ever shown in competition at the festival. At the press conference that followed, Coppola said, "We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane," and told the assembled journalists, "My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam." Those remarks upset at least one critic in the room, Rex Reed, who reportedly left the conference. The film shared the Palme d'Or with Volker Schlondorff's The Tin Drum, a decision that was reportedly met with some boos and jeers from the audience. When it opened in North America on the 15th of August 1979, it played in exactly three theaters: the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City, the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles, and the University Theatre in Toronto. Tickets in Los Angeles were $5, a new high for the city. The film ran without credits; audiences received printed programs listing the cast. The initial reviews were divided. Roger Ebert gave the film four stars and named it the best film of 1979, writing that it achieved greatness by re-creating rather than analyzing the experience of Vietnam. Frank Rich, writing for Time, called it "emotionally obtuse and intellectually empty." Vincent Canby dismissed it as "an adventure yarn with delusions of grandeur." The film grossed $322,489 in its first five days across those three theaters, and went on to gross over $80 million in the United States and Canada.

• 7. Literary Depths

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  Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness provided the film's skeleton, but the connections run far deeper than a plot transplant. In Conrad's 1899 original, the Kurtz character works for a Belgian trading company that exploits African labor in the Congo Free State; his written exclamation is "Exterminate all the brutes!" In the film, it becomes "Drop the bomb. Exterminate them all!" His dying words, "The horror! The horror!" survive verbatim. Shortly before Kurtz dies in the film, he recites from T. S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men," which is itself prefaced in printed editions by the epigraph "Mistah Kurtz he dead," a quotation taken directly from Conrad. Two books visible on Kurtz's desk are From Ritual to Romance by Jessie Weston and The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer, precisely the two books Eliot cited as the chief sources for his poem "The Waste Land." Dennis Hopper's photojournalist character quotes from Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to describe his own insignificance beside Kurtz, and paraphrases the closing lines of "The Hollow Men" in one of the film's most quoted exchanges. Coppola has also likened several episodes to Dante's Inferno, describing the white-faced natives parting their canoes for Willard's entry into the camp as the gates of Hell, and the stranded souls crying "take me home" as the lost. The character of Colonel Kilgore drew from a composite of real officers, including Colonels David Hackworth and John Stockton, and General James F. Hollingsworth.

• 8. Lasting Presence

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  On the 14th of December 1981, the day after martial law was declared in the Soviet-controlled Polish People's Republic, photographer Chris Niedenthal captured an armored personnel carrier parked in front of a building flying a banner with the Polish-language title of the film, Czas apokalipsy. That image became one of the most recognizable symbols of the martial law period in Poland. In 2000, the U.S. Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry as culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. Roger Ebert added it to his list of The Great Movies in 1999, calling it the best Vietnam film and one of the greatest films of all time. In the 2002 Sight and Sound director's poll, it ranked 19th among the greatest films ever made. Kilgore's line "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," written by John Milius, ranked 12th on the American Film Institute's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes list and was voted the greatest movie speech of all time in a 2004 Blockbuster poll. The Writers Guild of America ranked the screenplay 55th greatest ever in 2006. The film's production itself was documented in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, a 1991 documentary made in part from footage shot on location by Eleanor Coppola. Coppola released a Redux version in 2001 restoring 49 minutes of cut material, followed by the Final Cut in 2019, which runs three hours and three minutes and represents his preferred version of the film.