Godfather
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Moreover, one of the elements of Coppola’s film that serves to bring it closer to the original story is the employment of Willard as the narrator of the film, just as Marlow is the narrator of the novella. Hence, the screenplay of Apocalypse Now remains most faithful to its source in its attempt to depict the action through flashback, with the narrator’s comments on the action heard as voice-over on the sound track. Willard gives his personal reactions to his own experiences as he narrates them over the sound track.
Coppola’s screenplay, dated December 3, 1975, is preserved in the Research Library at the University of California at Los Angeles. It begins and ends with scenes of Willard sitting on the deck of a cabin cruiser in the harbor at Marina del Ray, a beach town in Southern California. He is the bodyguard of the wealthy man who is hosting a party for his friends on deck. These scenes, which were never filmed, introduce Willard as narrator of the story. One of the guests in the first scene asks him to tell some stories about Vietnam, but he declines. “There’s no way I can tell them to these people,” he reflects in a voice-over. They wouldn’t grasp what he had to say about the horrors of war.16 Then the scene shifts to Saigon in 1968. The Marina del Ray scenes were to provide a framing device for the film. Consequently, in the final scene in the screenplay we return to Willard on the deck of the cabin cruiser, silently pondering all that has happened to him. There is no such framing device in the finished film.
Another scene in the script that Coppola did not film dramatizes how Willard returns to the United States and visits Kurtz’s widow and son in a “scrubbed-clean California neighborhood.”17 Willard gently speaks of Kurtz’s demise without suggesting that he killed Kurtz. When Mrs. Kurtz asks him what her husband’s last words were, Willard cannot bring himself to inform her that Kurtz’s final utterance was “the horror, the horror.” He rather tells her that Kurtz died speaking her name. Willard, after all, does not wish to destroy her fond memories of her deceased husband, which are all she has left of him.
Eleanor Coppola mentions in Notes, her diary of the making of Apocalypse Now, that during postproduction Coppola still talked of “shooting one last scene,” where Willard talks with Kurtz’s widow and son, because he did not want the movie to end on a note of violence (i.e., with Willard’s slaying of Kurtz). Coppola abandoned the idea on October 29, 1978.18 Presumably Coppola discarded both the scenes with Kurtz’s family, as well as the scenes aboard the cabin cruiser, because the expense of filming them did not justify their inclusion in a film that was going over length and over budget.
Coppola decided to shoot Apocalypse Now almost entirely on location in the Philippines because of the similarity of the terrain to Vietnam and because building and labor costs were in general lower there than in Hollywood. When Coppola approached the Pentagon in May 1975 for its cooperation in making the film there, he pointed out that Milius’s initial script still needed considerable revision. Nevertheless, Army officials took one look at the screenplay and refused to cooperate with the film. They pointed to several objectionable passages, starting with the film’s springboard incident, which has Captain Willard sent to assassinate the crazed, power-mad Colonel Kurtz. Coppola made no effort whatever to revise his screenplay according to Army specifications and dropped the matter. Once he began shooting the picture in the Philippines, Coppola arranged with the regime of President Ferdinand Marcos to rent American-made surplus helicopters and vital military equipment for the production.
In order to ensure that he would be relatively free of studio interference while shooting the movie, Coppola decided to finance the production, insofar as possible, with his earnings from the first two Godfather films. He started by investing $2 million of his own capital in the movie and then obtained $7 million in exchange for American distribution rights. But Coppola insisted on retaining control over the film as an independent production made by American Zoetrope. The other backers agreed, so long as he was held responsible for any overruns on the budget, which at that point he fixed as $12 million.
Coppola had difficulty in casting the picture, because several actors, including Al Pacino, whom he wanted to play Willard, were not willing to spend several months filming in the jungle. He became so frustrated about his casting problems that he furiously hurled his Academy Awards out of the window of his San Francisco home. Eleanor picked up the pieces and had them repaired. For the role of Willard he finally settled on Harvey Keitel (Taxi Driver). Three veterans of earlier Coppola movies signed on: Marlon Brando as Kurtz; Robert Duvall as Lieutenant Colonel William Kilgore (whose real-life counterpart, Colonel John Stockton, had inspired Milius to write Apocalypse Now in the first place); and G. D. Spradlin as General Corman, named after Coppola’s early mentor, Roger Corman. Some other veterans of previous Coppola films were also on hand: production designer Dean Tavoularis; supervising editor Richard Marks; sound specialist Walter Murch, who would double as a film editor as well; and composer Carmine Coppola. New to the team was Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (The Spider’s Stratagem).
On March 1,1976, Coppola embarked with his family for the Philippine Islands, where he rented a house in Manila, the capital of Luzon, the chief island, and set up a production office. Eleanor not only kept a diary, which she later published with Francis’s approval, but also, at his suggestion, planned to make a promotional film for the United Artists Publicity Department. The promo film was eventually abandoned, and she subsequently turned over the footage to Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper for their feature-length documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991).
Principal photography began on March 20, with a scene of Willard and the crew of his river patrol boat (called a PBR in military parlance, rather than an RPB). As shooting progressed, Coppola began to feel that Keitel was miscast. Willard is really “an observer” of events early in the movie, “an introspective character,” and Keitel found it difficult to play him as a “passive onlooker,” Coppola explains. Keitel was playing Willard too aggressively, “too feverishly.” Coppola huddled with his production team on April 16 and decided to replace Keitel with Martin Sheen, whom Coppola was confident could play Willard as the impassive individual the script called for.19 Sheen took over the role on April 26.
Apocalypse Now is the only one of his films in which Coppola makes a cameo appearance. As Willard stands on the beach during a battle scene, Coppola, in the role of a TV newsreel director, shouts at him, “Don’t look at the camera! Just go by like you’re fighting!”
Replacing the male lead, of course, had put the film behind schedule. On May 25, while the unit was shooting at Iba, a village near Subic Bay, a much worse calamity took place. Typhoon Olga struck with its full fury and demolished the sets. The resulting damage was estimated at $1.32 million. On June 8 Coppola announced that he was suspending production for six weeks. So most of the cast and crew returned to the United States, while Tavoularis built new sets from scratch in a different location on higher ground to prevent further flooding.
Coppola spent some of the time afforded by the hiatus making further revisions in the script in consultation with Murch at his home in the Napa Valley outside San Francisco. One incident he devised came neither from Milius’s script nor from Conrad’s novella. It was incorporated into the script on pages dated June 29, 1976. Willard’s PBR intercepts a sampan manned by North Vietnamese refugees. His crew suspects, quite gratuitously, that the occupants are really civilian Vietcong resistance fighters and massacres them all. An innocent woman lies dying, and the skipper of the PBR urges Willard to take her to a nearby field hospital. But Willard instead shoots the hapless peasant point blank in the chest, putting her out of her misery. He cannot risk jeopardizing his secret mission by taking her to a hospital. His action is remorseless because he realizes that he must press on with his mission, which overshadows any human concerns. Incidentally, this episode also foreshadows Willard as capable of exterminating Kurtz when the time comes.
The production log, which was included
in the souvenir program for the movie, records that on July 27 the film unit returned to the Philippines and relocated at Pagsanjan, a two-hour drive from Manila. Because of major setbacks the production was now six weeks behind schedule and $3 million over budget, which UA agreed to put up.
Assistant Director Jerry Ziesmer, in his memoirs, gives a detailed account of the filming of Apocalypse Now. Ziesmer describes in great detail how the director encouraged Martin Sheen to get really drunk while shooting a scene early in the film. This scene was shot silently, so that Coppola talked Sheen through it as they improvised together. In the scene in question, Willard, who has already been missioned to assassinate various enemy agents in the field, is on a binge while awaiting his next assignment. “Francis wanted to see Willard come out of Martin Sheen, for Marty to reveal the assassin inside Willard,” Ziesmer explains. At one point Sheen glares at himself in a mirror in his hotel room, and then he drunkenly smashes his own image with his fist and bloodies his hand. Sheen says in the documentary Hearts of Darkness that “Francis wanted to stop filming, but I said, ‘No, let it go’. Willard was looking for the killer inside himself.” That would explain how he could commit another assassination.20 Ziesmer sagely adds a thought-provoking comment on the proceedings: “Should we have pushed and prodded Marty to the extent we did for a performance in a motion picture? Did the end justify the means?”21
Coppola’s predilection for improvisation is well known, and he allowed Dennis Hopper in particular to improvise during his scenes. Coppola cast Hopper as the weird, mercurial photojournalist, an amusing figure inspired in part by Sean Flynn (the son of swashbuckling superstar Errol Flynn), who was a marijuana-smoking photographer during the Vietnam War. It seems that Hopper, who had been on a downhill slide throughout the mid-1970s, was deep into drugs and had been in and out of rehabilitation centers. He himself comments laconically in the documentary, “I was not at the time in the greatest shape.” It was an open secret that Hopper was smoking grass while he was on location, and so he found it easy to play the photojournalist as a spacey, eccentric individual who goes around babbling mindlessly that Kurtz is a great man.22
Coppola beefed up Hopper’s part during shooting with some additional dialogue. “Francis would come in with a small, white piece of paper, typed from top to bottom with suggested dialogue,” which he would give to Hopper a couple of days in advance of shooting the scene he had just revised. Hopper’s key scene is the one in which the photographer welcomes Willard to Kurtz’s fortress and rambles on about Kurtz’s exploits with his renegade band of warriors. At this juncture Hopper seemed incapable of remembering his lines, and Coppola was irritated when Hopper kept wandering too far from the dialogue as written. “For God’s sake,” he roared, “we’ve done thirty-seven takes, and you’ve done them all your way! Would you do just one for me, Hopper?” Hopper replied, “Alright. I’ll do one for you!” and stuck essentially to Coppola’s dialogue for once.23
A local tribe of 264 primitive Ifugao Philippine aborigines arrived in late August 1976 to play Kurtz’s Montagnard followers, headhunters whom Kurtz has trained as part of his rebel army. Coppola thought that, rather than dress up Filipino extras as aborigines, it would be better to recruit authentic tribesmen. In the documentary Eleanor Coppola says that they actually lived on the Kurtz temple compound set while they worked in the film. The sacrifice of a carabao, which takes place during the Kurtz episode, was “a real ritual slaughter performed by the Ifugaos.” As a result, Apocalypse Now is one of the few mainstream Hollywood films not to carry a statement in the closing credits that no animal was harmed during the making of the picture. When some filmgoers subsequently complained about the butchering of this water buffalo, Coppola answered that, as with the horse’s head scene in The Godfather, some people were once again more outraged by the killing of animals than of people in the film.
On September 3, Marlon Brando arrived to play Kurtz for $1 million a week for three weeks. Brando showed up overweight and unprepared. “He was already heavy when I hired him,” says Coppola in the documentary Hearts of Darkness, but by now he had ballooned to 250 pounds. “He had promised me he was going to get into shape, but he didn’t. So he left me in a tough spot,” because Kurtz is supposed to be wasting away from malaria. Coppola therefore had cinematographer Vittorio Storaro shoot Brando immersed in the cavernous darkness of his murky quarters, where Brando’s girth would not be obvious. Actually, Storaro thought it dramatically right to photograph Brando as a disembodied voice so that Kurtz materialized out of the black void. “The Marlon Brando character represents the dark side of civilization,” he explains. “[H] e had to appear as something of a pagan idol.” As a result, Storaro filmed Brando “in the shadows or partially lit” and that gave him an air of mystery.24
Brando had also promised Coppola that he would read Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” but he admitted frankly that he had failed to do so. When Coppola remonstrated, “But you said you read it,” Brando answered, “I lied.” Coppola would work out a scene with Brando by improvising during rehearsals, then he would type up the dialogue in final form and shoot the scene the following day. When he attempted to steer the material back toward Conrad, “Brando resisted my doing so, saying it would never work.”25
One day, when the improvisations with the temperamental Brando were going nowhere, Coppola lamented, “This is like opening night; the curtain goes up and there’s no show.” Coppola finally prevailed upon Brando to read “Heart of Darkness.” The next morning Brando announced that the role of Kurtz was now “perfectly clear” to him and that he would play Kurtz closer to the way Conrad had written the character—which is what Coppola had been angling for all along.26
In the wake of the other woes that had dogged the production, Coppola suffered another unforeseen misfortune when his leading man suffered a severe heart attack on March 1,1977. Sheen, like Pacino during the shooting of Godfather II, had collapsed because of the strain of carrying a demanding role during a strenuous shoot. Moreover, Sheen was working in isolated locations and in stifling heat. In addition, Sheen confessed that he was “smoking and drinking too much,” and that had exacerbated his heart condition.27
Because of his serious condition, Sheen, an Irish Catholic, received the Last Rites from a Filipino Catholic priest, who did not speak English. A rumor quickly spread that Sheen was about to meet his Maker. The documentary Hearts of Darkness contains an excerpt from a taped phone conversation in which Coppola discusses the crisis with one of his staff. (The director of The Conversation, a film about wiretapping, had once more bugged himself.) Coppola is absolutely livid that his production assistant, Melissa Mathison, made an unauthorized statement to Barry Hirsch (Coppola’s attorney back in Los Angeles) about the precarious state of Sheen’s health, which could lead to rumors spreading all over Hollywood like wildfire. “Fucking gossip can ruin us!” he exclaims. Coppola informs his subordinate that he plans to announce that Sheen has been admitted to a Manila hospital suffering from “heat exhaustion.” In order to squelch the spread of further gossip that Sheen is near death, Coppola blurts out, “Marty is not dead … until I say so!”
Some commentators on the documentary have said that Coppola’s last remark seems callous. He responds that his purpose was to avoid the panic that would ensue if rumors that Sheen could not finish the picture reached United Artists officials. They might just pull the plug on the production by pressuring Coppola into cutting the film, together with the footage that he had shot up to that point, which was not enough to make a coherent narrative. “The idea was not to tell anyone that the situation was more serious than it was,” he says. “If you view my statement out of context, it seems I didn’t care about Marty.”28
In actual fact, Eleanor Coppola explains in the documentary, Francis was able to shoot around Sheen by filming master shots with Sheen’s brother Joseph as a double, shooting over the double’s shoulder. Then, when Sheen came back, Coppola shot the close-ups of him, which could be w
oven into the scenes. Sheen did return to work, groomed and rested, on April 19.
Ziesmer explains how the shooting period of Apocalypse Now lasted an unprecedented 238 days, spread over fifteen months. He is quite candid in detailing how the shooting schedule and the budget of the film steadily got more and more out of hand: “All of us were at fault. First of all, there were too many of us in the Philippines making the movie. All of us worked to please Francis Coppola, the world’s most respected film director. If he asked for a hundred explosives, we prepared five hundred … . To please him we felt we could never tell him ‘No,’ and in order not to do that we all bought more, hired more, rented more. We got the bigger, the newer, the best.” For example, George Nelson, the Oscar-winning set decorator (The Godfather), rented some very expensive antiques for the colonial house in the French plantation sequence, which had to be imported from Paris. Ziesmer concludes ruefully, “No one told Francis about the cost.”29
When John Milius was not invited to visit the set, he joked that Coppola feared a coup. Actually, the worried UA executives had sent a delegation to check out Coppola’s progress at one point, and he feared that UA might yet lobby to have Milius, himself a writer-director, replace him. Admittedly, some of the budget overages were not Coppola’s fault, such as natural disasters and the outrageous fees President Marcos was assessing for the use of the Philippine Air Force helicopters. Be that as it may, the budget eventually soared to $31 million, and Coppola was responsible for $14 million in overruns when he film was completed. Just when the press had christened the movie “Apocalypse Never,” Coppola decided to drop some minor scenes from the shooting schedule, and the production wrapped.