Why apocalypse now

To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. You will be surprised, reader, to learn that I, as a year-old Blockbuster card holder, did not know better than the hordes of professional film critics who have consistently ranked Apocalypse Now among the greatest films ever made. I do stand by my initial judgment on one point. Apocalypse Now is loud. Otherwise, almost everything I thought I knew about the movie was wrong.

In no particular order, here are five moments that stood out to me as I reappraised this strange, elusive, horrifying film. His men are gathered around him. His voice, considering the roar of the battle, is low. But Duvall actually loves the smell of napalm in the morning. It makes him nostalgic. This sets up a tidy little alternate-history mind game: What if Lucas had stuck with his original project?

He worked on it for years. He was sufficiently tied to its creative germination that when Star Wars exploded, Coppola, mired in massive budget overruns on the project Lucas had abandoned, felt comfortable wiring him to ask for money. Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.

The dark side! If anything, cause and effect are reversed: The war is shown to be the creation of the kinds of people who fall back on these kinds of thoughts when confronted with something as terrible as war. Philosophy, which inadvertently perpetuates forms of thought that lead to colonialism and violence, is doomed as a means of coping with trauma, because it is part of the same system that makes trauma inevitable.

Certain sequences have been used to rev up people to be warlike. I ask him if he feels any guilt. Coppola dropped his leading man, Harvey Keitel, a couple of weeks into shooting, only for his replacement, Martin Sheen, to have a near-fatal heart attack.

A typhoon destroyed much of the set. Coppola had an epileptic seizure. The helicopters he had rented from the Philippine government repeatedly disappeared off to go to take part in actual combat, fighting an insurgency in the south of the country. The pilots were rarely the same from rehearsal to rehearsal and the choppers had to be repainted twice a day to change their colours from American back to Filipino.

When Brando turned up on set he was overweight and underprepared. He insisted his character should be called Col Leighley, and Harrison Ford shot scenes referring to him by that name which had to be redubbed later on when Brando belatedly came around to the name Kurtz.

Coppola, however, says he personally steered clear of that kind of debauchery. I would want to work, and then I would stay up all night to rewrite the script. In terms of Dennis Hopper, God knows what he was doing. This only encouraged Francis to go even further. Always, when presented with the option of A or B, if B was riskier yet offered the potential for something really unique, he would go for that. Apocalypse Now , which was shot before Star Wars, was released afterwards.

Inspired by Haskell Wexler's film Medium Cool , which had shot footage during the Democratic National Convention riot in Chicago and incorporated it into the plot, Milius wanted to shoot the movie on location in Vietnam while the war was still being fought.

Coppola rejected the idea, and eventually shot the movie on location in the Philippines because President Ferdinand Marcos has agreed to lend the production as many helicopters and gunships as they needed. The U. Department of Defense, then led by Donald Rumsfeld, had denied the film any assistance due to its anti-Vietnam message.

Coppola, along with production designer Dean Tavoularis and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, appears in a cameo as the newsreel director telling Willard and the boat crew not to look at the camera during the rendezvous scene with Colonel Kilgore.

Part of the extended post-production process included the addition of an entire voiceover track for Willard. In , Coppola hired writer and Vietnam War correspondent Michael Herr to write whole selections of possible voiceover parts that he could pick and choose from to give to the character.

The five-and-a-half-hour early assembly cut of the movie was scored entirely using songs by The Doors before an actual score was created. All of his costumes had to be scrapped because Coppola expected the actor to show up as an astute and fit Green Beret soldier. When Coppola finally got him on the subject of how to play Kurtz, Brando rejected all of his ideas, including the suggestion to play him as a bald man like in the book. Instead, Coppola created the drugged-out war correspondent photographer on the spot, giving Hopper a peasant shirt, necklaces, and a bunch of cameras to hang from his neck.

Eliot quotes, was improvised. Instead, he took the advice of his UCLA friend Dennis Jakob and actor Dennis Hopper to create a more mythical ending of the concepts of death and rebirth.