• 5 months ago
A chronicle of the production problems — including bad weather, actors' health, war near the filming locations, and mo | dG1fVUdqQ2hLWWN5RmM
Transcript
00:00He is one of the most acclaimed and controversial filmmakers of all time.
00:13In 1979, his adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness captured the horror of Vietnam
00:21and instantly became a classic.
00:24My film is not a movie.
00:25My film is not about Vietnam.
00:27It is Vietnam.
00:33It's what it was really like.
00:34It was crazy.
00:39My greatest fear is to make a really embarrassing, pompous film on an important subject, and
00:45I am doing it.
00:46I said, Jim, I don't know who this guy is.
00:50Who is this Willard?
00:51And Francis just looked me square in the eye and he said, he's you.
00:58I would have done anything.
00:59He had convinced me that this was the first film that would win a Nobel Prize, you know.
01:05It's like you're in a dream or something, you know.
01:09It's a scenes unknown on the call sheet.
01:12You just would show up, you know.
01:14They didn't know what they were going to do.
01:17I was not in the greatest of shape, you know, as far as like my career was concerned.
01:22It was delightful to hear that I was going to go do anything, anywhere.
01:26Yeah, but are they seriously saying that Marlon would take a million dollars and then not
01:31show up?
01:32I swallowed a book.
01:33I mean, it's just, it's not in the cards that we're not going to finish the movie.
01:37You know, I felt that he'd do whatever he had to do, he'd borrow the money, but part
01:41of me was just fearless in that regard.
01:43It really didn't matter.
01:44It's one thing to go over there for three weeks with like five people, but if you go
01:48over there, there's a big Hollywood production, they're going to kill you.
01:57We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, and little by little we went insane.
02:10What are they going to say about him?
02:11What are they going to say?
02:12He was a kind man, he was a wise man, he had plans, he had wisdom?
02:18The making of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.
02:24I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
02:26The questions that I kept facing, I couldn't answer.
02:29Yet, I knew that I had constructed the film in such a way that to not answer would be
02:35to fail.
02:36Hearts of Darkness, a filmmaker's apocalypse.
02:42Look at my movie, you'll see what I'm talking.
02:48I love it.
02:49I love it.
02:50I love it.