APOCALYPSE NOW 9
Willard. Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Steve McQueen, James Caan, and Al
Pacino all refused the part, prob ably because it involved 14 weeks of location
shooting in fetid Philippine jungles. Harvey Keitel (Mean Streets) accepted the role
of Willard, and production began in March 1976, but just a week into the shoot
Coppola fired Keitel and replaced him with Martin Sheen. Marlon Brando ulti-
mately took on the role of Kurtz— for the exorbitant fee of $3.5 million for 20 days
work (i.e., $175,000 a day). In late May, about seven weeks into the shoot, Typhoon
Olga destroyed sets and halted production for six weeks while they were rebuilt,
putting the movie $2 million over bud get. When production resumed that sum-
mer, Marlon Brando presented more prob lems for Coppola when he arrived on set
weighing some 300 pounds and clueless about the role he was supposed to play.
Valuable time was wasted as Brando and Coppola improvised Kurtz’s lines and
Brando’s corpulence forced Coppola to dress him in black and shoot him mostly
in close-up and deep shadow to obscure his bulk. By the end of the year Coppola
had a rough cut of his movie assembled but still needed to improvise an ending.
Filming in the Philippines resumed in February 1977 and continued until 5
March 1977 when Martin Sheen, then in the throes of severe alcoholism, had a
near- fatal heart attack, which delayed production for another six weeks while he
recuperated. The shoot fi nally wrapped on 21 May 1977. Coppola’s cinematogra-
pher, Vittorio Storaro, shot an unpre ce dented 1.5 million feet of film: 550 hours
of raw footage that was eventually edited down to a film running 153 minutes
(making for an unheard of 216:1 shooting ratio). What was supposed to be accom-
plished in 14 weeks took 14 months and ran $16 million over budget— more than
double the original projection— forcing an often- frantic Coppola to subsidize the
proj ect with millions of dollars of his own money. Post- production complications
with editing, sound mixing, and voice- over narration delayed the movie’s release
until the Cannes Film Festival on 10 May 1979, more than three years after the
start of principal photography and a full de cade after Coppola commissioned
Milius to write the script. During a press conference at Cannes Coppola waxed
grandiloquently: “My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. The way we made
it is the way Americans were in Vietnam. We had too much money, too much
equipment and little by little we went insane.”
Plot Summary
The setting is the Vietnam War, c.1969. An opening montage establishes Army
Capt. Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) as deeply troubled, likely suffering from
post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). On leave in Saigon, Willard is summoned
to a communications security (COMSEC) intelligence briefing in Nha Trang, where
Gen. Corman (G. D. Spradlin), Col. Lucas (Harrison Ford), and CIA agent R. E.
Moore ( Jerry Zeismer) order Willard to terminate Special Forces (“Green Beret”)
Col. Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) “with extreme prejudice” (Kurtz has become
a dangerous renegade and formed his own Montagnard army inside Cambodia).
After reluctantly accepting the mission Willard joins a Navy PBR [river patrol boat]
heading upriver, commanded by Chief Petty Officer George Phillips “Chief” (Albert
Hall) and manned by Gunner’s Mates Lance (Sam Bottoms), “Chef” (Frederic For-
rest), and “Mr. Clean” (Laurence Fishburne). They soon rendezvous with Lt. Col.