The stories behind the chaotic making of this film are now the stuff of Hollywood legend. Books have been written. Documentaries have been made. I don't need to repeat it all here, but here's a bullet list of just a few of the catastrophes that beset the film's production:
• A massive typhoon wrecked the sets in the Philippines, causing a months-long delay.
• Star Harvey Keitel was fired after just a few days and replaced by Martin Sheen... who promptly had a heart attack.
• After pocketing a million dollars, co-star Marlon Brando showed up fat and out of shape, without having learned his lines. Production shut down for a week while Coppola worked with him.
• Dennis Hopper was... well, Dennis Hopper.
• The Philippine government allowed the use of their military and vehicles in the film, but constantly had to pull them away to fight an insurgency in another part of the islands.
Director/co-writer Francis Ford Coppola was spending his own money before the movie was finished. He had everything on the line. The film ultimately went months and millions of dollars over budget, and this was before Coppola had even managed to write the ending. The original script by John Milius (a loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" set in the midst of the Vietnam war) was too "rah rah America!" for Coppola's taste. Kurtz and Willard go down in a blaze of glory at the end, falling under a barrage of American bullets. That was not the story Coppola wanted to tell.
The problem was, Coppola didn't know what story he wanted to tell.
"My movie is not about Vietnam... my movie IS Vietnam," Coppola said at the film's Cannes premiere, in his typically grandiose way. "There were too many of us, we had access to too much equipment, too much money. And little by little we went insane."
I already mentioned in my "Taxi Driver" review the cataclysmic impact my high-school video productions teacher, Mrs. Duran, had on my movie-going tastes. It was in her class that I discovered all those great, gritty, and dark masterpieces of the 1970s New Hollywood. All those great directors plowed their way into my brain pain during a roughly six-month period when I was fifteen years old: Scorsese, Friedkin, Penn, Malick, Bogdanovich, Peckinpah... and, of course, Francis Ford Coppola.
I watched the "Hearts of Darkness" documentary before I actually saw "Apocalypse Now" (I'm trying to remember if Mrs. Duran showed it in her class). I remember thinking no way is that movie any good.
When I actually sat down to watch the movie, I couldn't even begin to wrap my head around it. But I knew I loved it, with a passion that became almost all consuming for the next few years. The sky cracked open for me with "Taxi Driver," but the lightning didn't hit until "Apocalypse Now." And it basically exploded my eyeballs and cooked my brain.
I watched that movie maybe six or seven times that year. And maybe ten the next year. And ten the year after that. All in, I've probably watched "Apocalypse Now" more than 50 times. There was a code in there I felt like I had to crack.
It's 20 years later, and I still don't think I've cracked it.
"Apocalypse Now" is number one on this list for a lot of reasons. It's definitely my favorite film, but let's establish right now that it is a deeply flawed piece of work. Given the sheer madness of the production, there's no way it could be otherwise. It's often referred to as a "fever dream" view of the Vietnam War, and as clichéd as that is it's pretty apt. I had pneumonia in college and my temperature spiked to about a hundred and five degrees. The delerium I felt then was roughly equivalent to my first experience watching this movie.
If you get on its wavelength, it'll change you.
My first feature, "Dead Billy" was almost exactly .0001 percent the budget of "Apocalypse Now." Still, for us, it was a pretty massive undertaking. And I was keenly aware going in that we were trying to do something fairly narratively ambitious. It was going to be a weird, personal movie that likely would not work for a lot of people. There was a very real chance that I would fail.
A month or so before we began shooting — after we had raised our money on Kickstarter and had put together the majority of our cast and crew — I began seriously second-guessing myself. Maybe I should have just written a horror movie, I thought. Something I knew I could sell. Vampires were still super popular, and I even have an idea for a vampire movie. Zombies were still huge, and I have a zombie script a wrote a few years ago. Maybe I should have just done one of those. It would have been a whole lot safer.
As we were hurtling toward our start date, I decided to clear my head by spending an evening rewatching both "Hearts of Darkness" and "Apocalypse Now" for the first time in a few years. And I realized something... if Coppola managed to wrestle that movie to the mat, there was absolutely nothing for me to be afraid of. "Apocalypse Now" is one of those works of singular, bizarro vision that existed simply because the filmmaker had to make it exist. Damn the consequences. Coppola was driven by something irrational and, for him at least, deeply profound. Some of it was ego, sure. Maybe even most of it. But the movie infected him in a way, and he needed to purge it.
That's what "Dead Billy" was for me.
Before you roll your eyes: no, I'm not comparing my movie to "Apocalypse Now." But watching Coppola almost lose everything to bring his vision to the screen made me realize that for me to back out then would have been an act of extreme, unforgivable cowardice. Coppola committed to his vision at all costs. The least I could do was commit to mine.
After all, I wasn't mortgaging my house and my vineyard to make it.
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