Along the Way

by Martin Sheen

  On August 3, a Tuesday morning, a partial crew assembled in downtown Pagsanjan. Set designers had converted an upstairs room of a two-story gray courthouse to resemble a room in the Saigon Hotel for what became the opening scene of Apocalypse Now. In this scene, Captain Willard has returned to Vietnam after a brief and turbulent visit to the States and has holed up in his hotel room, smoking and drinking himself into near oblivion while he waits for his next assignment.

  The day and night of filming there has since become the stuff of legend. It was my father’s thirty-sixth birthday and he started drinking that morning to celebrate. By midday he had become so drunk that he miscalculated a punch in front of a mirror and broke the glass at close range, tearing open his thumb. He’d gone so deep inside his character that he had retreated to a place where no one could reach him. Francis tried to stop the cameras but my father insisted they keep running, intent on publicly purging whatever demons he was confronting in that room. You can see the raw footage in Hearts of Darkness, the documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now. It’s a brutal five minutes of film.

  Earlier that same day my mother and I had been on set to watch another scene being filmed, in which two servicemen knock on Captain Willard’s hotel room door with his orders to report to Nha Trang for a briefing. Finding him drunk and disoriented, the GIs drag him into the shower to clean him up. In the film that scene appears after Willard punches the mirror, but the shooting schedule that day called for it to be shot first.

  My mother and I stood behind the camera operators to watch the filming. The actor who handed Willard the letter from COMSEC headquarters was nervous. In each take, every time he pulled out the letter his hand would shake uncontrollably. You can actually see it in the finished film.

  Why is this guy so nervous? I wondered. What is there to be so nervous about? I had a lot of time to wonder that day. The edited version of a movie always looks like nonstop action, but the majority of time on set is spent standing around. There’ll be a fast flurry of activity, followed by more waiting, followed by another setup and another take of the exact same shot, and then more waiting. Years later I would work with a first assistant director who described it perfectly when he said, “It’s not the time that it takes to take the take, it’s the time in between the takes that takes the time.” (Try to say that ten times fast.)

  The hotel room set that day was small, crowded, and humid. The lighting equipment made the room unbearably hot. After a few hours of watching everyone else do their jobs, my mother and I got restless and headed into town to do some shopping. Toward the end of the afternoon we received word from one of the film’s producers that we needed to get back to the set. My dad was in a bad way, the producer said.

  He didn’t say what he meant, but I could guess.

  I can see myself now, a blond fourteen-year-old boy rushing across town with his mother, darting between the three-wheeled motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles, coughing from the dust and smoke that hangs thick in the air. I follow her into the courthouse and up the polished wooden staircase, around the corner and see—

  What had been a semipristine hotel room set that morning is now a disaster zone. Bloodied sheets lie twisted across the bed, exposing the bare mattress. Empty alcohol bottles are scattered everywhere. My father is lying naked in the center of the bed. He seems to be holding himself together but then I notice a heavyset Filipino nurse bandaging his hand. Francis and his wife Eleanor are standing at the side of the bed with producer Gray Frederickson and some members of the filming crew. Whatever happened in here while I was gone wasn’t good.

  “All right, everybody!” my father shouts. His voice is husky. Loud, and slurred. “Let’s sing again! ‘Amazing Grace.’ Let’s sing ‘Amazing Grace’!”

  I know that voice. He’s hammered.

  “I’m tired of singing ‘Amazing Grace,’ Martin,” Francis says. He manages to sound both patient and irritated at the same time. “We’re not singing ‘Amazing Grace’ anymore.”

  My father looks up, sees me and my mother, and immediately changes his strategy. “Okay, then. Let’s everybody hold hands and pray!” he shouts. “We need to confess our fears.”

  Those of us standing around the bed look at one another. I shrug. We take one another’s hands. What else can we do? And so here we are—me, my mother, my father, Francis, his wife Ellie, the producer, and the Filipina nurse—holding hands around the bed while my father prays and leads us in song. The nurse prays out loud with him.

  “Jesus loves you, Marty,” she says.

  None of this is nearly as charming to the rest of us as it seems to be to him. My mother and I have been called back to get him out of the room. We have a job to do.

  “All right,” my mother announces to him. “We’re wrapping it up here.” We pull my father from the bed and with no small amount of effort, guide his arms into a bathrobe. We get the belt tied around his waist.

  I’ve seen my father hammered and out of control before. This isn’t even the worst I’ve seen him. My mother and I manage to stay calm and deal with him. As we do.

  Once we have him vertical, we’re all faced with the challenge of getting him down the stairs and into the car without incident. There is no elevator, just the wide, public staircase of a government building. As we carefully lead him down, we can hear night court in session through an open door on the ground floor.

  “I’ve got to go in there!” my father shouts, lunging for the doorway. I move fast and pull him back. As if this whole thing wasn’t embarrassing enough, now we’re going to interrupt a legal proceeding?

  “I’ve got to go in there!” he shouts. He struggles against me, but with my mother on his other side, we’re able to hold him back. “I’ve got to go in there!”

  “Martin!” Francis says. “Why? Why do you have to go in there?”

  “I’ve got to speak my piece! I’ve got to protest! If I don’t, some poor son of a bitch is going to end up in front of a firing squad!”

  “You’re not going in there, Martin,” Francis says.

  Somehow we all get him onto the street and into the waiting car. More than an hour has passed since my mother and I arrived at the room. It’s nighttime by now, and raining. Francis climbs into the car behind us, and our caravan takes off. Within minutes we’re outside of town, enveloped by jungle on both sides of the road. The windshield wipers go back and forth, back and forth in the light rain.

  Fishburne’s mother Hattie has prepared a birthday dinner for my father, so Ramon, Charlie, Renée, and Laurence are waiting for us at her house. I imagine them sitting around a table piled high with food, wondering what’s taking us so long.

  A few miles down the road, my father motions for the driver to stop. “I’ve got to take a pee,” he announces. We pull to the side of the road. The jungle is dense, dark, forbidding. I hope he’s quick about it. He gets out of the car and walks toward the trees but, instead of stopping at the jungle’s rim, he spins around to face us.

  “Ha-ha!” he shouts gleefully. Then he throws off his robe and takes off naked into the trees.

  In seconds we’re out of the cars and chasing him into the jungle. It takes half an hour to corral him and coax him back to the car. We stuff him into the backseat. The driver takes off for a second time. The wipers start swishing back and forth again.

  Two miles down the road: “Pull over! I’ve got to take a pee!”

  “You know what, Martin?” my mother says. She’s exasperated, and who can blame her? We’re all exasperated by now. “Piss in your hat.”

  Finally, we roll up to Hattie’s house and herd him into the party. He bursts through the cabana door in his bathrobe, grabs a chicken leg from the table, and takes a huge bite. “Ha-ha!” he laughs through a mouthful of meat. He is ravenous. He has no interest in going to sleep or sobering up. I’ll never forget the looks on my brothers’ and sister’s faces, or on Hattie’s and Laurence’s, as they realized what was going on.

  What happened that nig
ht was embarrassing and humiliating for me as a son, but today as an adult and as a filmmaker I can understand it. Aided by alcohol, my father had gone so deep inside his own pain that he connected with a source of universal suffering. There, weeping and bloodied, he found the broken places that existed inside of Willard. For those few hours, he and Willard merged and, by journeying into the darkness of his own soul, he discovered the madman inside us all. When Francis tried to stop the cameras, my father insisted on exploring that place. He had traveled into a realm beyond self and other, beyond reality and illusion, beyond duality. My father wasn’t the first actor to get hammered and have a breakdown on set, and he won’t be the last. He was, however, one of the few who had the courage to insist that his be filmed.

  Francis and his wife Eleanor also had brought their kids to the Philippines, and we got to know them well. Their oldest son, Gio, was a year younger than I was, Roman was eleven, and Sofia five. All of us kids were welcome on set for the scenes filmed on land, but there was either no room or no safe place for us on the boat or in scenes with helicopters. My father had an intense daily schedule with an 8:00 a.m. pickup time, and we didn’t see him much during the first week of filming, unless we were on set. Standing around between takes, we became friendly with many of the crew members. Charlie developed an interest in special effects and makeup. Freddy Blau was one of the best makeup artists in the business. Some days he was responsible for making up hundreds of faces before a morning shoot. That summer he often let Charlie observe his work and even try it out. Charlie was particularly fascinated by how wounds were made. He would come back to the cabana at night with a big gash in his cheek or one eye hanging out of its socket. It was outrageous.

  Francis wanted Gio to play a GI in the Do Lung Bridge sequence, which started rehearsing in early August. Gio asked if I’d like to be an extra, too.

  Was he serious? Of course I did.

  Back home at Malibu Park Junior High, I’d joined the drama club and done some small productions. I knew I wanted to act, and the chance to appear in a major Hollywood film directed by the most celebrated director in the world wasn’t something to pass up. Also, standing around a set without anything to do gets boring, fast.

  The Do Lung Bridge scenes appear at about the film’s halfway point, when Willard and his PBR crew come upon a bridge under bombardment at night. It’s the last U.S. Army outpost on the Nung River, a trippy, anarchic place full of spaced-out GIs with seemingly no one in charge. Strings of lights span the river as the boat approaches and pyrotechnics go off constantly throughout the sequence. To get the eight and a half minutes of footage used in the film required an arsenal of more than 500 smoke bombs; 1,200 gallons of gasoline; 2,000 rockets, flares, and tracers; and 5,000 feet of detonating cord.

  We shot the scenes at a remote location along the Magdapio River outside Pagsanjan. A bridge had once been there before the Japanese blew it up in World War II, and the old concrete pilings were used as anchors for the bridge built on our set. Hundreds of extras were recruited, mostly American expats living in Manila and some Vietnam veterans living off their military pensions in the Philippines. Students from the American School in Manila who were the sons of businessmen and diplomats were also brought in.

  Every morning twenty of us in uniform would pile into the back of a military personnel carrier to be transported to the set. Glenn Walken, Christopher Walken’s brother, was there, and so was an actor named Jack Thibeau, who would later appear with me in 1982’s Tex. Riding over that first day, I noticed something unusual. Some of the extras were actors who were already done filming their scenes—actors who would have been able to find work back home—but they’d chosen to stay on as extras for twenty-five dollars a day. They hadn’t wanted to leave.

  Jimmy Keane was one of those actors. He’d played Robert Duvall’s machine gunner in the beach attack filmed in Baler back in April. When Captain Kilgore steps into a chopper and asks, “How you feeling, Jimmy?” Keane yells back, “Like a mean motherfucker, sir!” which became one of the most recognizable lines of the film. Jimmy and my father became good friends on set, and he often came by our cabana for dinner.

  Back in the 1970s and 1980s actors routinely committed to two or three weeks of rehearsal, sometimes without pay, before filming began. Now, however, it’s more common for an actor to show up the day before shooting. For the Do Lung Bridge sequence even the extras had weeks of intensive training. Real drill sergeants on set taught us how to dig trenches and crouch in them, how to use automatic rifles, and how to wear our battle gear properly. We even went out on night maneuvers and staged night firefights using live blanks. An enormous amount of time and resources were put into making the sequence look authentic.

  Back home, being fourteen meant playing soccer, learning geometry, trying to get a girl you liked to notice you were alive. There was a structure to each day and expectations were clearly defined. In the Philippines, a different set of rules applied, if you could call them rules at all. I’d just turned fourteen in May, which made me closer to thirteen than to fifteen, but in the Philippines I was treated like a man. After rehearsals we’d have to check our M16s with props but we’d wear our wardrobes home. Going to the bars in Pagsanjan with the other actors after work meant walking down the street in full battle gear. I was only about five foot six and wearing a uniform at least one size too big, but to the locals I looked like an occupier. “Hey, Joe! Hey, Joe!” they would shout, as if I were a serviceman from down in Subic Bay. That month, I learned how to drink like one, too.

  Sometimes I’d come back to the cabana in military uniform and my mother would stop in her tracks.

  “All these years I never wanted to see you go off to war, and now here you are,” she would say. “Do you know how much this terrifies me?”

  By the time shooting began, Gio and I had fully integrated into the group of extras, who treated us just like two of the guys. Very few of them knew I was related to Martin or that Gio was Francis’s son. We were both trying to downplay the connections, wanting to blend in.

  When the time came to film our scene, I was completely wired and ready to go. We shot at night, close to 2:00 a.m. Some nights we went almost till dawn, but I was never tired. Even if I had been, the flares soaring overhead and the explosions in the water would have kept me awake and edgy.

  The set was a beehive of activity. Hundreds of extras and crew members swarmed in all directions among all the trucks and lights and cords. Luciano, the lighting gaffer, shouted instructions in Italian over a megaphone to his lighting crew. The air was heavy with humidity; hordes of insects buzzed around the light towers. Every now and then someone on the special effects crew fired a test flare and the whole set brightened for a second or two, then went dark again.

  First assistant director Jerry Ziesmer walked over and started giving everyone instructions for the scene.

  “Okay,” he said to our little group in the trench. “I’m going to have you guys over here and”—he motioned to one of the extras—“you’re on the machine gun. Some guy’s going to get shot”—he motioned to Gio—“near you”—he motioned to me—“and I want you to scream, ‘Medic!’ just as Marty passes by.”

  “Okay,” I said, nodding. It was perfect. My first film role had just been bumped up to a speaking part.

  Ziesmer moved on to the next group of extras. A little while later, as we got closer to filming, I walked up to him. I wanted to be sure I had the instructions right. I didn’t want to mess up my first speaking role.

  “So when my dad runs past me, that’s when you want me to scream for a medic, right?” I asked.

  “Your dad?” Ziesmer said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, Martin is—”

  “You’re kidding me!” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to get my hands dirty. I wanted to play with you guys.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” he said. “Yeah. When your dad runs past you is when I want you to yell, �
�Medic!’ ”

  We got into position, someone yelled, ‘Action!’ and the cameras started to roll. The bridge was ablaze with white lightbulbs, and the special effects men and lighting technicians hovered way above us on platforms, swinging huge arc lights above the trenches. I looked up and saw my father run past at ground level. That was my cue.

  “Medic! Medic!” I yelled. I yelled it once, twice, three times, for each take we did and redid.

  This is so cool, I thought. I’m going to be in this movie.

  Except . . . I’m not. If you watch that sequence in the film you won’t see me or Gio in it anywhere. Nobody shouts for a medic in the final cut. My first speaking role, left lying on the editing room floor.

  It happens. The real value was in the experience, and that’s what remains over time.

  By the time the Do Lung Bridge sequence finished, we were well into the second half of August. At home, school would be starting up again after Labor Day. I was beginning to wonder how I’d get back in time. Even I could tell that a lot of filming still remained. But my father had promised he’d have me back for school. He knew how much being there meant to me.

  I loved school. I loved the ritual of it, the structure and the predictability. I loved studying and I loved reading. I wasn’t getting any of that intellectual depth in the Philippines. Before we left Malibu I’d been writing for the school newspaper, involved in the drama club, playing on the soccer team, and making honor roll. Most important, that past June I’d been elected boy’s vice president of the student body and I had an obligation to the school for the coming year. I’d already missed most of the spring semester when we’d been in Rome. I didn’t want to miss even a day of ninth grade.

  By the end of August, I thought, Okay, this has been fun. This has been an experience. But now I’m ready to go home.

  “Yeah, yeah, soon,” my father said, when I asked about it.