Word: coppolas
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...mortgaged his house to cover ballooning costs. He fired his first leading actor (Harvey Keitel) and found that his second (Martin Sheen) had suffered a heart attack. At one point the director told his wife, "I'm thinking of shooting myself." So when it was all over, Francis Ford Coppola figured he had earned the right to a public primal scream. "My film is not a movie," he told the press at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where Apocalypse Now had its premiere. "My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like...
...production so bizarre that it inspired a fascinating documentary (Fax Barh's 1991 Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse) and a full-length study (Peter Cowie's new The Apocalypse Now Book), the quality of the resulting film could be irrelevant. But despite Coppola's protestation, Apocalypse Now is a movie--the most ambitious, artful attempt to capture on film the sundering trauma of American soldiers in Southeast Asia. Like any movie, it can be assembled into any shape, any length, that its powerful auteur deems suitable. So last year Coppola went back into the jungle of his Vietnam...
...Being Coppola--sire of the Godfather films, mogul of his own Zoetrope studio, vintner and publisher, capo di tutti capi of the Movie Brat generation--he would not come up with any old director's cut. Apocalypse Now Redux is more than a tinkering, with a brief scene added here, some computer effects daubed in there. It is a complete recutting of the original 5-hr. assemblage; the 2 1/2-hr. running time of the 1979 version has been expanded to include 53 minutes of previously unshown footage. If any recut can be a "new" movie, this one is--vivid, harrowing...
John Milius, the author of the original script, thought of Apocalypse as a modern Odyssey. He gave it a modern Cyclops (Robert Duvall's demented surfer stud Kilgore, who thinks napalm "smells like victory") and a group of Sirens (the Playboy Playmates who entertain the horny troops). Coppola, deep into his own Big Muddy in the Philippines, was calling his film "the Idiodyssey." He soon felt himself devolving from Willard to Kurtz--from the man on a quest to the madman at its end. But he was enough of a showman to release a picture of Academy-consideration length...
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA 22 years after studio release, Apocalypse Now screens at Cannes in form he intended...