Nightmare movie that kind of worked out

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was a legend before it was completed.

So long in production that some industry wags dubbed it “Apocalypse When”, it survived the departure of its original leading man – Harvey Keitel was replaced by Martin Sheen – the near-fatal heart attack that afflicted 36-year-old Sheen, typhoons that laid waste to the sets in the Philippines, the removal of army support by the Philippino government and the frankly eccentric behaviour of Marlon Brando, the lithe ’50s star turned gargantuan caricature.

It was, in all senses of the word, an epic. It also drove Coppola close to madness. Today, nearly forty years since it cranked into production, Apocalypse Now stands tall as arguably the ultimate war movie. Set in the 20th century, it could actually be about any war in any era. Coppola’s vision ranks alongside those of Remarque, Kubrick and Grass, such is its grandeur.

Loosely adapted from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and updated to the Vietnam War, Coppola’s tale snakes its way via music by The Doors to a hellish finale as Captain Willard is told to kill the highly decorated career soldier Colonel Walter Kurtz. The senior officer has gone native and quite insane.

Perhaps this is what the mighty spectacle of cinema is all about. Millions of words have been written about Apocalypse Now. Marlon Brando died in 2004 and as the surviving cast enter their dotage the film can once again be re-evaluated.

It is packed full of incident and character, but only one personality emerges as a bona fide icon: strutting air cavalry colonel Bill Kilgore, a war-hungry soldier who memorably confesses “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Smells like... victory.”

Kilgore was played by Robert Duvall. Now 80, Duvall got the part when his contemporary Gene Hackman (for whom the role was written) couldn’t do it. Duvall asked Coppola for the role and got it. Having previously worked with him on The Godfather and its sequel, Duvall enjoyed something of an established relationship with the bear-like enfant terrible of ’70s American cinema. Nothing could have prepared him for what he fell into.

“It was a nightmare,” recalls Duvall today, “but fortunately no one was killed and it kind of worked out.

“For me, I worked for six weeks, then I left for six months and then came back for three weeks to do the first half of my part; it was that broken up. They had the typhoon, which ruined the sets and led to a 10-month hiatus.

“We were getting just one shot a day. That was it. The cinematographer would insist on waiting for the sun. We’d break for the day, maybe do a shot, come back in the Jeep, do a little body surfing… There were so many things that happened.”

The stories of Brando’s casting have become movie lore. He agreed to play Kurtz after Steve McQueen turned it down. McQueen had originally been sought to play Willard but baulked at spending a year in the jungle. Coppola then asked him to play Kurtz, a part that could, he claimed, be completed in three weeks. McQueen agreed – for the same sky-high $3m fee. Coppola passed.

Enter Brando. Already overweight when he had played Don Corleone five years earlier, by 1976 Brando was corpulent. He asked Coppola to shoot him in shadow to hide his bulk. And without consulting the director, he shaved his head.

Talking about the film on a chat show years later, Duvall recalled Brando to host Charlie Rose: “He was so talented, but he was so fat and so lazy…”

Adds Duvall: “I bumped into Sean Penn afterwards. He said he’d been watching the show with Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando. And Brando sat there saying ‘What’s he saying about me? Bastard! Ahh, he’s right!’ What an experience that film was.”

Brando was known for his dry sense of humour – at least in his early days. By the time of Apocalypse Now the 52-year-old legend seemed to have had a humour bypass. Many of the problems associated with the movie seemed to have been exacerbated by Brando and his awkwardness.

Yet it wasn’t always that way. Before Brando took a self-imposed career break – he didn’t appear before the camera for nine years after making The Formula in 1980 – he was still capable of taking a ribbing.

“I remember on The Godfather, big Lenny Montana, who played Luca Brassi, he was a professional wrestler and he was really connected to the Mob.

“Well, he did that scene with Brando, saying that he hoped he had a beautiful son. When they first did it, after he was done, he stuck his tongue out at Brando and written on it was ‘F*** you!’ And Brando laughed and ruined the take. We did keep the set loose that way. On The Godfather II, though, Jimmy Caan wasn’t around, so it wasn’t quite much as fun.”

Then there was Dennis Hopper, playing a manic war photographer trapped within the daily slaughter triggered by Kurtz’s decaying mental state. “Dennis was so hopped up on dope; he did 50 takes on one day. Or 48 at least,” says Duvall. “And Francis was going nuts, screaming, ‘Will you do it my way!’

“And, I remember this: Hopper said this to Coppola, really. ‘Listen, mother****er, I’ve directed, acted and played Gabby Hayes all in one movie, and what have you done?’ That’s what he’d say! It was a mess.”

Duvall left Apocalypse Now to come to England to make The Eagle has Landed, an altogether different type of war movie in which he played, very plausibly, a German colonel at the heart of a plot to assassinate Churchill.

“Yeah, it was funny,” smiles Duvall. “When I was leaving the set of Apocalypse I got in the helicopter. As it was going up I dropped my drawers and mooned them from way up there! That seemed a fitting tribute.”

* Apocalypse Now is in selected cinemas and is released on Blu-ray on June 13.

THE LONG ROAD TO NUMBER ONE

Apocalypse Now, despite its deeply troubled production, went on to become recognised as one of the great pieces of cinema of the last century.

The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama. The movie is on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years 100 Movies list at number 28.

In 2002, Sight and Sound magazine polled several critics to name the best film of the last 25 years and Apocalypse Now was named number one.