While Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now (1979) is broadly thought to be one of many best movies of all time, within the years main as much as its launch in late 70s it was often called the most important catastrophe within the historical past of Hollywood filmmaking. Production on what was initially deliberate as a six-week shoot within the Philippines dragged on into unprecedented and grueling 238 days of capturing.
The manufacturing of Apocalypse Now was affected by pure disasters, rampant drug use and alcoholism, suicidal breakdowns, deadly circumstances for Filipino set development employees, disturbing animal rights violations, coronary heart assaults, infantile film star egos, and investigations into precise human corpses found on set.
Like a lot of Coppola’s genre-defining classics, Apocalypse Now has garnered many spoofs. But the making of Apocalypse Now itself was so rife with real-life drama that Ben Stiller spoofed it in his action-comedy Tropic Thunder (2008). Recreating the Vietnam War got here at nice value, each financially and psychologically to everybody within the Philippines who labored on Coppola’s wildly bold and controversial venture, together with himself. Ironically for a filmmaker who, like a canine chasing its personal tail, was possessed with fears of constructing a pretentious film, Francis Ford Coppola mentioned throughout a press junket for Apocalypse Now:
My movie shouldn’t be a film. My movie shouldn’t be about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was actually like. It was loopy. And the best way we made it was very very like the best way the Americans had been in Vietnam. We had been within the jungle. There had been too many people. We had entry to an excessive amount of cash. Too a lot gear. And little by little we went insane.
Some critics had their reservations in regards to the movie’s hazy narrative, a Vietnam War revamp of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. Others applauded Apocalypse Now as one thing of an epic poem disguised as an motion film. Regardless, bringing the Vietnam War again to life wasn’t sunshine and roses for many who lived via it. For higher or for worse, Apocalypse Now is probably going Hollywood’s most profound case of life imitating artwork and vice versa. So let’s take a bit of journey upriver via the Philippines with the solid and crew via essentially the most controversial issues from the set of Apocalypse Now.
The Cast and Crew Were Taking Drugs
The Last Picture Show’s Sam Bottoms performed Lance in Apocalypse Now, the browsing soldier character who Robert DuVall’s iconic character Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore is virtually in love with. Like his character does within the movie, Bottoms admitted he and others dropped acid regularly on set. And they didn’t cease with psychedelics. Speaking within the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), Bottoms mentioned:
“I used to be doing velocity [too]. We had been working numerous nights and I wished a speedy type of edge. We had been unhealthy. We had been simply unhealthy boys.”
It in all probability goes with out saying that Easy Rider‘s Dennis Hopper discovered a house away from dwelling within the Philippines when he stumbled onto the set of Apocalypse Now drunk and excessive late in manufacturing. And though the movie’s director didn’t have a historical past of drug use, in movie critic Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) Coppola admitted:
“I started smoking grass. The grass affected me a little bit: I was more able to say how I felt. It was like Vietnam – it was there, and everybody was doing it. I also started getting very paranoid.”
Francis Ford Coppola Was Suicidal
To say Coppola was in over his head when he went to the Philippines to shoot Apocalypse Now can be placing it far too mildly. From the Sixties to the mid-Nineteen Seventies, Hollywood studios refused to the touch scripts set in Vietnam, fearing political backlash from an extremely divisive warfare that was nonetheless red-hot after the final troops got here dwelling in 1975. And Milius’ script for Apocalypse Now was no exception. Every studio on the town rejected Coppola’s pitch till United Artists lastly agreed to assist with funding.
But as a part of UA’s deal Coppola needed to guess the farm, placing up his personal home and winery in Northern California in addition to the cash he comprised of directing The Godfather motion pictures. To be truthful, Coppola’s colleague Steven Spielberg did the identical factor on E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. In 2023, Gaffer Jim Plannette recalled to the Team Deakins podcast that Spielberg would joke with the simply distracted youngster actors, saying issues like:
Come on, guys. We gotta maintain going or I’m gonna lose my home.
Coppola wasn’t coping with kids on digicam. But, in a questionable act of parenting, he introduced his younger kids (together with his then-five-year-old daughter, Sofia Coppola) to the Philippines to, , hand around in the jungle with a bunch of hippies. Even along with his household round to cheer him up, Coppola obtained tunnel imaginative and prescient and had frequent nervous breakdowns as manufacturing dragged on. In the audio tapes from the set of Apocalypse Now, Coppola mentioned:
Everybody says “Yes, well Francis works best in a crisis.” I’m saying that is one disaster I’m not gonna pull myself out of. I’m making a foul film, so why ought to I’m going forward? I’m gonna be bankrupt anyway. Why can’t I simply have the braveness to say it’s no good? There’s virtually something I’d do to get out of this. I’m already pondering of what sort of illness I can get. I used to be within the rain on a platform pondering if I simply moved a bit of I’d simply fall 30 toes. It would possibly kill me. It would possibly paralyze me or one thing after which it will be a swish method out.
Shooting Apocalypse Now within the Midst of a Civil War
When manufacturing started on Apocalypse Now, the Philippines was within the midst of a civil warfare. Although China had been funding the New People’s Army (NPA) since 1969, they reduce off provides in 1976, main the NPA to kidnap civilians and international businessmen for extortion. This positioned an enormous goal on Coppola’s again and endangered your complete manufacturing. Even his colleague George Lucas (who was initially going to direct Apocalypse Now earlier than twentieth Century Fox took curiosity in his Lucas’ little area opera concept) tried to warn Coppola he was going to get himself killed.
To make issues worse, the quite a few helicopters that Coppola rented from the Philippine authorities had been continually being drawn away to struggle NPA forces, which obtained as shut as ten miles away from the set of Apocalypse Now. In the audio tapes from the set of Apocalypse Now, Coppola mentioned:
Here I’m with about 50 issues which are simply quasi in my management just like the Philippine authorities and the [expletive] helicopters which they take away every time they really feel like, they’ve completed it 3 times already.
Each time the federal government took the helicopters again into the struggle towards the NPA, they ruined Coppola’s extremely bold and sophisticated pictures, costing upwards of tens of 1000’s of {dollars} a pop. Even in the event that they weren’t filming that near an energetic warzone, Coppola was nonetheless fortunate that a few of his most “hairy” pictures, involving actual helicopters and actual extras operating round actual explosives, didn’t value them any lives. In his guide In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective On Film Editing (1992), Apocalypse Now editor Walter Murch mentioned:
The helicopter assault on “Charlie’s Point” the place Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries is performed, was staged as an precise occasion and consequently filmed as a documentary moderately than a collection of specifically composed pictures. It was choreography on an enormous scale of males, machines, cameras, and panorama — like some form of diabolical toy that you may wind up after which let go.
Considering that Murphy’s Law appeared to observe Coppola’s each transfer within the Philippines, he was fortunate to have pulled off the long-lasting helicopter assault sequence with none lack of life, like those that died on the set of the supposedly cursed movie, The Twilight Zone Movie (1983). But Coppola’s luck would quickly run out.
A Typhoon Destroyed Half the Sets
As if the manufacturing of Apocalypse Now didn’t have sufficient delays, Typhoon Olga rolled in and destroyed a majority of the units, a lot of which had been constructed by Filipino laborers who had been paid pitiful wages for harmful work. Of course, the Filipino employees weren’t paid any extra constructing the units the second time round.
Unconcerned with these pay discrepancies, Coppola took benefit of Olga’s torrential downpour for a scene which was reduce from the theatrical launch. The scene has Willard, in a transfer that may be a bit out of character, consuming beer after promoting a couple of barrels of useful gasoline in alternate for a couple of hours of “intimacy” for his crew to share with the Playboy bunnies who seem earlier within the movie. The scene was finally restored in Coppola’s 2001 director’s reduce Apocalypse Now Redux. As movie critic Peter Biskind says in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls:
[Typhoon Olga] compelled manufacturing to close down… [Coppola] dismissed the solid, returned [home] to San Francisco with 90 hours of rushes, and solely eight minutes of usable, reduce movie. It was the top of Phase I. The manufacturing was six weeks not on time and $3 million over funds, hemorrhaging {dollars}… Many on the manufacturing who had been laid low with tropical illnesses, unique parasites of varied stripes, took the chance to get medical remedy. There was no physician on the set, and other people had merely poured diluted Clorox and vodka on their cuts and sores. Bottoms had hookworm, which wrecked his liver, Fred Forrest [who plays “Chef” in the film] had collapsed, his ears oozing blood. A Filipino development employee died of rabies, and was buried in his Apocalypse Now T-shirt.
As exhausting as the numerous months filming Phase I used to be on the solid and crew of Apocalypse Now, and as troublesome as it could be to consider, the issues that occurred whereas filming Phase II had been a lot worse. Coppola and his firm weren’t completed with the jungle. And the jungle wasn’t via with them.
A Real Water Buffalo Was Slaughtered On Camera
It was Coppola’s spouse Elanor who first took discover of the native Ifugao tribe’s ritual slaughter of water buffaloes. It took a bit of convincing to get her husband to test it out, however as soon as he noticed it along with his personal eyes he knew it needed to be included within the climax of the movie, operating parallel to Sheen’s Willard assassinating Brando’s Kurtz character.
Naturally, animal rights teams had been horrified by the actual life violence that Coppola had put up on the large display screen. The American Humane Association (AHA), which provides motion pictures the “No Animals Were Harmed In the Making Of This Film” certification, slapped Apocalypse Now an “Unacceptable” score for the scene the place the water buffalo was “hacked to pieces” with a machete.
Over the years Coppola has defended his inclusion of the water buffalo scene with the hands-off strategy of “cultural relativism,” an concept first coined by anthropologist Franz Boas in 1887 which primarily boils all the way down to the idiom “when in Rome.” Coppola figured that the Ifugao tribe was going to slaughter that water buffalo a technique or one other, with or with out cameras rolling. So he made positive the digicam was rolling, understanding there can be no second take.
Martin Sheen Suffered a Heart Attack at 36
Al Pacino could have dodged a bullet when he handed on Coppola’s supply to star in Apocalypse Now. Sheen didn’t make it out of the Philippines with out a few battle scars. He reduce his hand open after punching a mirror whereas he was drunk and filming an improvised scene at first of the movie. A pal of Sheen’s informed Biskind:
When Marty got here dwelling after the storm, he was actual scared. He mentioned, “I don’t know I am going to live through this. Those [expletive]s are crazy.” At the airport, he stored saying goodbye to everybody.
After months of consuming and filming within the jungle Sheen had a coronary heart assault on the age of 36. He was airlifted to a hospital in Manila in one of many many helicopters featured within the movie. Speaking to Yahoo! News in 2022, Sheen mentioned:
I hated getting in these helicopters as a result of we had so many shut calls, however… I may both go to Manila in a bus, which might take about 4 or 5 hours, or I could possibly be there in quarter-hour in a chopper. Under the circumstances, I took the chopper!
After Sheen’s coronary heart assault Coppola had a meltdown that might give Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019) a run for his cash. In the audio tapes from the set of Apocalypse Now, Coppola mentioned:
[So and so told so and so] that Marty had a coronary heart assault. What the [expletive] is that? You know that it’s gonna be throughout Hollywood in half an hour!… If Marty dies, I wanna hear that every part’s okay, till I say ‘Marty is dead.’ You obtained it? I’m actually scared guys.
What could possibly be worse than your lead actor virtually dying on set? Actual useless our bodies on set.
The Entire Crew Was Arrested to Investigate Human Corpses On Set
When she witnessed the state of the movie’s climactic temple set piece which was strewn with rubbish and useless rats, Sheen’s spouse was horrified. The place was identical to Sheen says in his monotone voice-over as Willard:
It smelled like sluggish demise in there. Malaria. And nightmares. This was the top of the river, alright.
Sheen’s spouse argued with co-producer Gary Frederickson, which despatched him into an argument with set designer Dean Tavourlis, who insisted the useless rats had been “intentional, it offers it actual environment.” At this level, a close-by prop assistant set free, “Wait until he hears in regards to the useless our bodies.” Frederickson heard rumors flying round about useless our bodies on set identical to everybody else. But now he determined he’d higher examine. And what ought to he discover behind the canteen however a pile of precise human corpses.
Frederickson was livid. But Tavourlis had gone out of his option to buy that pile of corpses from a provider whose traditional consumer was a close-by medical faculty, needing them to show autopsies. A little bit digging revealed that this provider was a grave robber. When Philippine police caught wind of the corpses they collected your complete crew’s passports.
Production was compelled to pause for seemingly the thousandth time for a police investigation as to simply how fictional or actual all of the insanity of this explosive Hollywood manufacturing actually was. And although they finally concluded that there have been no precise murders occurring on the set of Apocalypse Now, for many years that query of what the hell really occurred on the market within the jungle can be requested many times by filmmakers and moviegoers alike.