Trivia / Apocalypse Now

• Ability over Appearance: Francis Ford Coppola intended Col. Kilgore to be a Large and in Charge type, but Robert Duvall, who did not fit that description, eventually convinced Coppola to give him the part. It worked, as Duvall was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and Kilgore has become an icon of film.
• Actor-Shared Background: Like Martin Sheen, Willard is from Ohio.
• Backed by the Pentagon: Averted by the actual Pentagon, who refused to assist the production due to the film's unflattering portrayal of the US Armed Forces. The biggest sticking point was the military giving the order to kill Kurtz, a plot point that Coppola refused to change. Coppola got the assistance of the Filipino military, who provided the F-5s for the napalm sequence and the helicopters for the famous helicopter attack preceding it.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!:
  • Kurtz's final line ("The horror...the horror") is all too often misdelivered by people imitating or parodying it. He says it in a slow, soft tone, with very little actual horror, and more in the tone of a Shell-Shocked Veteran, which is of course exactly what Kurtz is. The novel also calls it “nothing more than a breath.”
  • Similarly, Colonel Kilgore's "I love the smell of napalm in the morning!" is almost always said with the wrong emphasis. Parodists tend to deliver the line as a Badass Boast, while Robert Duvall actually speaks it with the jaded voice of a man who has become Bored with Insanity — the delivery of the line is very nonchalant and not with the kind of relish that imitators use. In fact, the Blood Knight characteristic that Kilgore embodies makes the sad intone of "Someday this war is gonna end" the principle line in the quote: he's worried that the insane war will end. The quote is also gotten wrong, as Kilgore does not say, "I love the smell of napalm. It smells like victory." This is what he actually says:
    Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of them, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill? Smelled like...victory.
• Billing Displacement:
  • Lead actor Martin Sheen is third, behind Marlon Brando (even if he's the antagonist who drives the plot, it's flat-out amazing how little of Brando there actually is in this movie) and Robert Duvall (who doesn't get much more screentime than Brando).
  • On most DVD covers (for the Redux version at least) it lists off the cast members who became famous after the fact such as Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper and Harrison Ford, despite Ford's role being a very brief bit-part at the start.
• California Doubling: The Philippines for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
• Career Resurrection: Dennis Hopper had bottomed out with 1971's The Last Movie, which was fittingly the last time he directed or wrote a film. He barely had any more acting roles until 1979, when Francis Ford Coppola cast him in this film.
• Cast the Expert: R. Lee Ermey is casted as a helicopter pilot while working as the military advisor for the film.
• Cast the Runner-Up:
  • Frederic Forrest was considered for Willard before being cast as Chef.
  • Dennis Hopper recalled that he was originally going to play the role that became Captain Colby.
• Channel Hop: The film was originally distributed by United Artists. Since then, ownership has switched from United Artists to MGM/UA, then to Zoetrope Studios and to Paramount.
• Creator Breakdown: During production, Coppola lost over 100 pounds, was checked into the hospital for both malnutrition and dehydration, and attempted suicide three times.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Sheen named this as one of their favourite films of their own.
• The Danza: The civilian who sits in on General Corman's briefing, and who orders Willard to "terminate" Kurtz "with extreme prejudice", is addressed by Corman as "Jerry" and is played by the movie's assistant director, Jerry Ziesmer.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Marlon Brando shaved his head to play Col. Kurtz.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • Martin Sheen actually punched a mirror for real in his introductory scene where he has a psychotic break in his hotel room. So all that blood on the sheets? His. To shoot the scene, Francis Ford Coppola basically just gave Sheen as much whiskey as he could drink, put him in a room, and directed him to shadowbox at the mirror while he filmed. Sheen (as noted, very drunk) misjudged his aim and broke the glass. It didn't stop there: apparently, Sheen's drunken behavior was so disturbing to the camera crew that they wanted to stop the shoot, but Sheen insisted they press on.
  • Sheen also couldn't swim and was terrified while filming scenes on the boat.
  • Also, this was the case (albeit unintentionally) with Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando. According to Hopper, after Brando yelled at him over a simple misunderstanding he then decided to deliberately antagonize Brando whenever he could. This resulted in Brando refusing to share the set with him and the one scene they share together being shot on separate nights. So when Kurtz throws the book at Hopper's photojournalist character and calls him a "mutt" one can only assume that's Brando's genuine feelings about him.
  • The character of Kurtz was also supposed to be rail thin as he was in Heart of Darkness. The production and director were shocked to discover Brando had gained an enormous amount of weight, so they decided to shoot him in darkness to conceal his body and make him look more gigantic than obese (fortunately, the novel gives Kurtz's height as almost seven feet tall).
  • Notice, too, the books read by Kurtz: From Ritual to Romance and The Golden Bough. Both are identified by T. S. Eliot's notes to The Waste Land as key to the work, which was (prior to Ezra Pound's edit) to contain the epigraph "The Horror! The Horror!".
• Extremely Lengthy Creation: John Milius wrote the original script for Apocalypse Now in 1969 and he and George Lucas spent four years developing it, with principal photography expected to start in 1971 before it was shelved. Francis Ford Coppola came across the property in 1974 and started filming in 1976. What was supposed to be a four week shoot balloned into fourteen months before it was finally completed. In fact, it took so long to complete that it was dubbed Apocalypse When? and Apocalypse Never.
• Fake Shemp: Martin Sheen needed a double to do all his shots for a few weeks after he had a heart attack. Rather than shut down production until he recovered, the crew elected to film as much as possible with a double (Sheen's younger brother, Joe Estevez) standing in for Sheen (the double having his back turned to the camera) and then doing the close-ups after Sheen was well enough to return.
• Hostility on the Set: Marlon Brando refused to be onset with Dennis Hopper, so their scenes were filmed separately. As a result, Hopper constantly antagonised Brando.
• Inspiration for the Work: John Milius was inspired to write the screenplay because of his college English professor, Irwin Blacker of USC. Blacker challenged his class by saying, "No screenwriter has ever perfected a film adaption of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness".
  • Milius was influenced by an article written by Michael Herr titled, "The Battle for Khe Sanh", which referred to drugs, rock 'n' roll, and people calling airstrikes down on themselves. He was also inspired by such films as Dr. Strangelove.
• Looping Lines:
  • Kurtz's character was called Leighley in the original script. Worth noting that the reason for the change from Kurtz to Leighley was due to a conversation between Marlon Brando and Francis Ford Coppola when the latter was trying to describe the role to the actor. Brando, never having read Heart of Darkness, said that an American Colonel would never have a name like "Kurtz" and would instead have something more English. After reading the novella, and understanding the reference, Brando demanded that his character's name be changed BACK to Kurtz after the film's completion, so Harrison Ford's lines were dubbed.
  • The noise from the helicopters was so deafening that the dialogue was inaudible and had to be re-dubbed.
• On-Set Injury: Martin Sheen really cut his hand after punching the mirror. And that was before he had a heart attack.
• The Other Marty: Harvey Keitel was originally cast as Willard. After the first week of filming, Francis Ford Coppola felt that he wasn't right for the role and replaced him with Martin Sheen.
• Playing Against Type: Harrison Ford usually had big leading or major supporting roles, most of which have him as wiseass, a badass, or both. Here he has a fairly minor role in which he plays a pencil pusher who's not involved in active combat. He filmed this pre-Star Wars, but it was released after A New Hope.
• Production Posse: Brando, Duvall and Spradlin worked on Coppola's The Godfather saga a few years prior.
• Real-Life Relative: Martin Sheen's sons Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen had cameos (the former as a messenger boy, the latter as a boy under a lampost), both of which ended up on the cutting room floor. His brother Joe Estevez served as Sheen's stand-in and voice double.
• Spared by the Cut: The workprint saw the Photojournalist shot dead by Captain Colby (whose part was mostly cut, even in the Redux version), whom Willard kills via knife to the chest.
• Studio Hop: The film was originally distributed United Artists. Since then, ownership has switched from them, to MGM/UA, to Zoetrope Studios, to Paramount.
• Throw It In!:
  • The iconic opening sequence came about simply because Coppola happened to find some B-Roll of the napalm attack and was quite interested in the effect of the helicopters and smoke suddenly being interrupted by a huge explosion, plus a half-joking comment to the crew that it would be funny to start a movie with the song "The End".
  • Martin Sheen was really drunk in the hotel scene, so everything he does is unplanned, including punching the mirror and cutting his hand.
  • Marlon Brando ad-libbed the line "You're an errand boy, sent by grocery store clerks to get the bill".
• Troubled Production: You better believe it. This was a case so famous that it has its own documentary dedicated to it, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. Coppola himself summed it up by saying "My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam," and famously explained that "The way we made [the film] was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane." Where to even begin…
  • Like many projects here, Apocalypse Now was a modest idea subjected to development creep. John Milius and George Lucas conceived the film in 1969 as a low budget docudrama modeled on The Battle of Algiers. Gradually, Milius expanded his script into a surreal black comedy based on Heart of Darkness. As Lucas focused on other projects and Milius was reluctant to direct it himself, Coppola took over in the mid-'70s, toning down the story's humor while emphasizing its surreal qualities. Coppola, fresh off The Godfather Part II, convinced United Artists to back the project, and the tumultuous production began.
  • Filming in the Philippines went on for a year, going nine months behind schedule and $17-19 million over budget.^note The initial budget was projected at $12-14 million; it wound up coming in at $31.5 million. Among other setting-related problems, Typhoon Olga in May 1976, combined with constant rainfall, destroyed most of the sets and totally ground production to a halt for six weeks. The United States military refused to lend Coppola any military equipment, due to the film's unflattering portrayal of the Armed Force and the order to kill Colonel Kurtz. Coppola instead had to borrow local military equipment, and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos disrupted production by recalling the equipment he lent to Coppola to fight against the Communist insurgents in the South.
  • There were also many problems with the various cast members. Marlon Brando was cast as Colonel Kurtz, being his usual prima donna self. He showed up to the set morbidly obese rather than with the muscular physique that was called for, leading to the decision to film Kurtz solely from the shoulders up. Worse, when he arrived on set he had read neither the script nor Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness like he had been told to. ^note  Brando did end up reading the novella one week into shooting his scenes. And in one night too. The actors were disgruntled because Coppola forced them to sign term contracts with his production company. Unsurprisingly, many cast and crew members were drunk or stoned while filming; Dennis Hopper got a teenaged Laurence Fishburne addicted to heroin.
  • Meanwhile, settling on the actor who would play Captain Willard was its own ordeal. Steve McQueen was interested in the role and was involved early in production, but frequently clashed with Coppola over wanting to reinvent Willard's character into the cool badass he was accustomed to playing. The prospect of shooting in the Phillippines caused McQueen, and later Al Pacino, to pass on the project.^note Eventually the search got so frustrating for Coppola that he threw his five Oscars out of a window, breaking four of them. When his favorite pick, Martin Sheen, had to decline due to scheduling conflicts, Coppola turned to Harvey Keitel and cast him as Willard, but Keitel was fired after only a few weeks into filming because Coppola wasn't satisfied with his performance.
  • Coppola shaved his beard to disguse himself as he traveled back to the US to find a new lead, hoping to keep rumors of production troubles out of the press (it didn't work). Sheen, now available, took over the role of Willard and soon became dangerously immersed in the role as filming resumed. Filming the hotel scene, he drunkenly cut his hand open shattering a mirror, and begged the crew to keep filming rather than receive medical attention. He later suffered a heart attack in an unrelated incident and had to struggle a quarter-mile to get help. The heart attack meant that his brother, Joe Estevez, had to fill in as a body double filmed from the back until Sheen recovered enough to resume filming.
  • The corpses at Kurtz's compound were real and obtained from a man who turned out to be an illegal grave-robber. The cast and crew were grilled by the local authorities as the bodies were removed from the set. The ending had to be re-written on the fly and the script was frequently discarded for improvisation. Most notably, the ending was changed from its action-heavy original due to neither Sheen nor Brando being in any sort of state to film it.
  • Even post-production was no walk in the park. For one thing, the Philippines had no professional film laboratories at the time, meaning the raw camera negatives had to be shipped to the US to be processed. Coppola never saw a shot on film until after returning to California. The entire movie was shot blind. For another thing, Coppola had to edit several miles of film to create the final cut. The set piece on the French plantation, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to film, was thrown out.^note  It did later show up in the extended Redux cut, though. On top of that, Sheen was unavailable to provide the voice-over narration, so, once again, Coppola had to turn to Joe Estevez again, who was dealing with alcoholism and depression at the time and struggled with the Vietnamese words. All told, post-production took two years.
  • To put the film's disastrous shoot in perspective, Laurence Fishburne lied about his age to get cast as a 17-year old in the movie when he was actually 14. By the time the movie was released, he actually was 17 years old. The film took the heaviest toll on Coppola himself; he lost 100 pounds, threatened suicide several times, and attempted it once. The film also severely strained his relationship with wife Eleanor, not least when Coppola had an indiscreet affair with a production assistant.
• Underage Casting: Laurence Fishburne lied about his age to get the role, as he was only 14 years old at the time, but claiming that he was 17. In an odd way, it makes the film better, showcasing such a young man in such a horrible place. By the end of the long production, he was 17, the same age as his character.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The original director assigned this script? George Lucas. God knows what kind of film this almost became. Cracked.com also makes one interesting assumption. Considering how long this movie dragged on, it's possible that if Lucas made this, he never would have gotten around to making Star Wars. According to producer Gary Kurtz, Lucas' version would have been a dark comedy akin to M*A*S*H shot Mockumentary-style in 16mm in Southern California. Lucas also intended to hire a Japanese crew to sneak into Vietnam to shoot stock footage on location. While the Vietnam War was still going.
  • John Milius' early drafts had a less nihilistic ending, with Kurtz going out fighting against an overwhelming NVA attack, and Willard returning to America to take the news to Kurtz's wife and son. Willard's predecessors also played a larger role.
  • Harvey Keitel was cast as Willard first but was fired after two weeks. Steve McQueen (actor), Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Robert Redford and Burt Reynolds were considered but had the foresight to know how horrible the shoot would be. Clint Eastwood turned it down on the grounds that it was too dark.
  • Lynda Carter was cast as one of the Playboy Bunnies, but when the typhoon delayed production she had to go back to the States to continue with Wonder Woman and Colleen Camp was brought in to replace her. (There's a centerfold shot of Carter briefly visible in the movie and still floating around online, though some question its authenticity.)
  • Coppola first offered the role of Kurtz to Orson Welles (who had previously tried to adapt Heart of Darkness to the screen himself), but for some reason or another he declined. The documentary on the film includes the audio of a radio version that Welles did during his prime. Lee Marvin was also approached.
  • Gene Hackman was originally considered for Col. Kilgore.
  • James Caan was offered the role of Col. Lucas, but he wanted too much money for such a small part.
  • Tommy Lee Jones was considered for Captain Colby, a role that was largely deleted from the film.
  • In the special features on the "Complete Dossier" edition, it is said that Coppola wanted the film to be a special event by having it play in ONE theater somewhere in Kansas in the geographical center of the country built especially for the film with a specially made sound system where the film would run continuously for ten years and then hopefully anybody who wanted to show the film in their theaters would have to approach Coppola and exhibit it on his terms.^note This was Coppola getting a case of wannabe Richard Wagner, who had an entire opera house constructed to his own specifications in the provincial German town of Bayreuth, just to perform his epic opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. Wagner's original idea was that the cycle would be performed in the opera house over the course of four nights, and then the whole thing would be burned down including all the sheet music, so that nobody could ever do it again. Like Coppola, Wagner eventually came to his senses.
  • In the DVD Commentary, Coppola spoke of how the ending for the movie was not figured out for a long time. Originally he had intended for Kurtz and Willard to fight off a massive NVA invasion of Kurtz' base and have Kurtz go out in apocalyptic intensity. The phrase, "The horror..." would still be uttered by Kurtz nonetheless. Eventually Coppola decided upon letting Willard assassinate Kurtz as the plot had been implying was going to happen.
  • The original choice for the soundtrack was to be made by Isao Tomita, as Coppola liked his version of Holst's Planets. Tomita even traveled to the Philippines to see the filming. Because Tomita's contract was with RCA Records, and the film was released through United Artists, he couldn't compose the score.
  • Robert Englund auditioned for the role of Chef.
  • One ending Coppola considered was an air raid on the Kurtz compound, but ultimately decided that the film should end on a less destructive note. The Philippine government still wanted the temple set destroyed, so Coppola decided to blow up the set and shoot footage of the demolition as the end-credits backdrop for the 35mm version of the film (the 70mm roadshow version had no credits), only for audiences to take the demolition footage literally as an air raid (Coppola just thought the footage looked cool and felt there was no need for an interpretation) and subsequent edits had the end credits run on a black screen.
• Write Who You Know: John Milius based the character of Willard and some of Kurtz's on a friend of his, Fred Rexer, who claimed to have experienced, first-hand, the scene related by Brando's character wherein the arms of villagers are hacked off by the Viet Cong.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Befitting its chaotic production schedule, the film was made largely with this and Throw It In!. Francis Ford Coppola didn't even have an ending, as he'd considered John Milius's ending (Willard joins Kurtz, and the film ends with Kurtz shooting at American war planes bombing his temple while screaming about his erection) ridiculous.

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