Godfather (29 page)

The other crucial revision Coppola made in Milius's screenplay concerned the film's conclusion. In Milius's conception of the film's finale, Willard is so mesmerized by the overpowering personality of Colonel Kurtz that he succumbs to the corrupting influence of this barbarous warlord. That is, Willard decides to join the native Cambodian tribesmen and the runaway American soldiers who make up Kurtz's army. Shortly afterward, the Vietcong attack Kurtz's compound, and Kurtz and Willard fight side by side until Kurtz is killed in battle. American helicopters, which are coming to rescue Willard, then appear in the sky over the compound, and Willard shoots wildly at them, as the film comes to an end.

Coppola was thoroughly dissatisfied with Milius's ending for the film. As Coppola describes this ending, Kurtz, “a battle-mad commander,” wearing two bands of machine gun bullets across his chest, takes Willard by the hand and leads him into battle against the North Vietnamese.
¹²
Elsewhere he adds that, thus, “Willard converts to Kurtz's side; in the end he's firing up at the helicopters that are coming to get him, crying out crazily.” Coppola dismissed Milius's ending as too macho and gung-ho, a “political comic strip.”
¹³

Needless to say, this finale of the film, as conceived by Milius, departs to a greater degree from Conrad's ending to the story than Coppola's ending for the film does. In Coppola's film Willard recoils from Kurtz's savage practices in the same manner that Marlow does in the book. Hence neither Marlow nor the film's Willard fall under Kurtz's sway as does Milius's Willard, who becomes another Kurtz.

For the record, “Heart of Darkness” does not appear in the screen credits of
Apocalypse Now
as the literary source of the film. As a matter of fact, a reference to Conrad's novella was originally listed in the screen credits, but Milius complained to the Screen Writers' Guild, and the reference to the book was removed. I asked Coppola if Milius vetoed the presence of Conrad's novella in the film's credits because he felt that citing Conrad's
book as the source of the movie would minimize the importance of the material contributed to the screenplay by the scriptwriters, and Coppola declined to answer.

At any rate, years later Milius felt differently about the matter. He freely conceded that “Heart of Darkness” is indeed the source story for the film. “It was my favorite Conrad book,” he said, and hence he wanted very much to bring it to the screen.
¹⁴
Significantly, the Academy Award nomination for the film's screenplay was in the category of best screenplay based on material from another medium—the only official acknowledgment that “Heart of Darkness” was the movie's literary source.

On the surface it seems that Conrad's novella is very different from Coppola's film. For instance, Conrad's story takes place in the Belgian Congo in the 1890s and focuses on Charles Marlow, a British sailor employed by a European trading firm as a captain of one of their steamboats. By contract, Coppola's film is set in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and centers on Benjamin Willard, an American Army officer. Yet, as film scholar Linda Cahir points out, although the settings and backgrounds of novella and film are quite different, the manner in which the story is narrated in each instance is “splendidly similar.” For example, “each tale-proper begins with the protagonist's explanation of how he got the appointment which necessitated his excursion up river,” Cahir points out. Marlow is dispatched to steam up the Congo in order to find Mr. Kurtz, an ivory trader who disappeared into the interior and never returned. Willard is mandated to journey up the Mekong River in a navy patrol boat to find Colonel Kurtz, who has recruited his own renegade army to fight the Vietcong. In addition, while Marlow and Willard each travel up a primeval river to fulfill their respective assignments, each speculates about the character of the man he is seeking, with the help of the information each has pieced together about him. Furthermore, the last stop for both Marlow and Willard, concludes Cahir, “is the soul-altering confrontation with the mysterious Kurtz.”
¹⁵

Moreover, one of the elements of Coppola's film that serves to bring it closer to the original story is the employment of Willard as the narrator of the film, just as Marlow is the narrator of the novella. Hence, the screenplay of
Apocalypse Now
remains most faithful to its source in its attempt to depict the action through flashback, with the narrator's comments on the action heard as voice-over on the sound track. Willard gives his personal reactions to his own experiences as he narrates them over the sound track.

Coppola's screenplay, dated December 3, 1975, is preserved in the Research Library at the University of California at Los Angeles. It begins and ends with scenes of Willard sitting on the deck of a cabin cruiser in the
harbor at Marina del Ray, a beach town in Southern California. He is the bodyguard of the wealthy man who is hosting a party for his friends on deck. These scenes, which were never filmed, introduce Willard as narrator of the story. One of the guests in the first scene asks him to tell some stories about Vietnam, but he declines. “There's no way I can tell them to these people,” he reflects in a voice-over. They wouldn't grasp what he had to say about the horrors of war.
¹⁶
Then the scene shifts to Saigon in 1968. The Marina del Ray scenes were to provide a framing device for the film. Consequently, in the final scene in the screenplay we return to Willard on the deck of the cabin cruiser, silently pondering all that has happened to him. There is no such framing device in the finished film.

Another scene in the script that Coppola did not film dramatizes how Willard returns to the United States and visits Kurtz's widow and son in a “scrubbed-clean California neighborhood.”
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Willard gently speaks of Kurtz's demise without suggesting that he killed Kurtz. When Mrs. Kurtz asks him what her husband's last words were, Willard cannot bring himself to inform her that Kurtz's final utterance was “the horror, the horror.” He rather tells her that Kurtz died speaking her name. Willard, after all, does not wish to destroy her fond memories of her deceased husband, which are all she has left of him.

Eleanor Coppola mentions in
Notes,
her diary of the making of
Apocalypse Now,
that during postproduction Coppola still talked of “shooting one last scene,” where Willard talks with Kurtz's widow and son, because he did not want the movie to end on a note of violence (i.e., with Willard's slaying of Kurtz). Coppola abandoned the idea on October 29, 1978.
¹⁸
Presumably Coppola discarded both the scenes with Kurtz's family, as well as the scenes aboard the cabin cruiser, because the expense of filming them did not justify their inclusion in a film that was going over length and over budget.

Coppola decided to shoot
Apocalypse Now
almost entirely on location in the Philippines because of the similarity of the terrain to Vietnam and because building and labor costs were in general lower there than in Hollywood. When Coppola approached the Pentagon in May 1975 for its cooperation in making the film there, he pointed out that Milius's initial script still needed considerable revision. Nevertheless, Army officials took one look at the screenplay and refused to cooperate with the film. They pointed to several objectionable passages, starting with the film's springboard incident, which has Captain Willard sent to assassinate the crazed, power-mad Colonel Kurtz. Coppola made no effort whatever to revise his screenplay according to Army specifications and dropped the matter. Once
he began shooting the picture in the Philippines, Coppola arranged with the regime of President Ferdinand Marcos to rent American-made surplus helicopters and vital military equipment for the production.

In order to ensure that he would be relatively free of studio interference while shooting the movie, Coppola decided to finance the production, insofar as possible, with his earnings from the first two
Godfather
films. He started by investing $2 million of his own capital in the movie and then obtained $7 million in exchange for American distribution rights. But Coppola insisted on retaining control over the film as an independent production made by American Zoetrope. The other backers agreed, so long as he was held responsible for any overruns on the budget, which at that point he fixed as $12 million.

Coppola had difficulty in casting the picture, because several actors, including Al Pacino, whom he wanted to play Willard, were not willing to spend several months filming in the jungle. He became so frustrated about his casting problems that he furiously hurled his Academy Awards out of the window of his San Francisco home. Eleanor picked up the pieces and had them repaired. For the role of Willard he finally settled on Harvey Keitel (
Taxi Driver
). Three veterans of earlier Coppola movies signed on: Marlon Brando as Kurtz; Robert Duvall as Lieutenant Colonel William Kilgore (whose real-life counterpart, Colonel John Stockton, had inspired Milius to write
Apocalypse Now
in the first place); and G. D. Spradlin as General Corman, named after Coppola's early mentor, Roger Corman. Some other veterans of previous Coppola films were also on hand: production designer Dean Tavoularis; supervising editor Richard Marks; sound specialist Walter Murch, who would double as a film editor as well; and composer Carmine Coppola. New to the team was Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (
The Spider's Stratagem
).

On March 1,1976, Coppola embarked with his family for the Philippine Islands, where he rented a house in Manila, the capital of Luzon, the chief island, and set up a production office. Eleanor not only kept a diary, which she later published with Francis's approval, but also, at his suggestion, planned to make a promotional film for the United Artists Publicity Department. The promo film was eventually abandoned, and she subsequently turned over the footage to Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper for their feature-length documentary,
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
(1991).

Principal photography began on March 20, with a scene of Willard and the crew of his river patrol boat (called a PBR in military parlance, rather than an RPB). As shooting progressed, Coppola began to feel that
Keitel was miscast. Willard is really “an observer” of events early in the movie, “an introspective character,” and Keitel found it difficult to play him as a “passive onlooker,” Coppola explains. Keitel was playing Willard too aggressively, “too feverishly.” Coppola huddled with his production team on April 16 and decided to replace Keitel with Martin Sheen, whom Coppola was confident could play Willard as the impassive individual the script called for.
¹⁹
Sheen took over the role on April 26.

Apocalypse Now
is the only one of his films in which Coppola makes a cameo appearance. As Willard stands on the beach during a battle scene, Coppola, in the role of a TV newsreel director, shouts at him, “Don't look at the camera! Just go by like you're fighting!”

Replacing the male lead, of course, had put the film behind schedule. On May 25, while the unit was shooting at Iba, a village near Subic Bay, a much worse calamity took place. Typhoon Olga struck with its full fury and demolished the sets. The resulting damage was estimated at $1.32 million. On June 8 Coppola announced that he was suspending production for six weeks. So most of the cast and crew returned to the United States, while Tavoularis built new sets from scratch in a different location on higher ground to prevent further flooding.

Coppola spent some of the time afforded by the hiatus making further revisions in the script in consultation with Murch at his home in the Napa Valley outside San Francisco. One incident he devised came neither from Milius's script nor from Conrad's novella. It was incorporated into the script on pages dated June 29, 1976. Willard's PBR intercepts a sampan manned by North Vietnamese refugees. His crew suspects, quite gratuitously, that the occupants are really civilian Vietcong resistance fighters and massacres them all. An innocent woman lies dying, and the skipper of the PBR urges Willard to take her to a nearby field hospital. But Willard instead shoots the hapless peasant point blank in the chest, putting her out of her misery. He cannot risk jeopardizing his secret mission by taking her to a hospital. His action is remorseless because he realizes that he must press on with his mission, which overshadows any human concerns. Incidentally, this episode also foreshadows Willard as capable of exterminating Kurtz when the time comes.

The production log, which was included in the souvenir program for the movie, records that on July 27 the film unit returned to the Philippines and relocated at Pagsanjan, a two-hour drive from Manila. Because of major setbacks the production was now six weeks behind schedule and $3 million over budget, which UA agreed to put up.

Assistant Director Jerry Ziesmer, in his memoirs, gives a detailed account
of the filming of
Apocalypse Now
. Ziesmer describes in great detail how the director encouraged Martin Sheen to get really drunk while shooting a scene early in the film. This scene was shot silently, so that Coppola talked Sheen through it as they improvised together. In the scene in question, Willard, who has already been missioned to assassinate various enemy agents in the field, is on a binge while awaiting his next assignment. “Francis wanted to see Willard come out of Martin Sheen, for Marty to reveal the assassin inside Willard,” Ziesmer explains. At one point Sheen glares at himself in a mirror in his hotel room, and then he drunkenly smashes his own image with his fist and bloodies his hand. Sheen says in the documentary
Hearts of Darkness
that “Francis wanted to stop filming, but I said, ‘No, let it go'. Willard was looking for the killer inside himself.” That would explain how he could commit another assassination.
²⁰
Ziesmer sagely adds a thought-provoking comment on the proceedings: “Should we have pushed and prodded Marty to the extent we did for a performance in a motion picture? Did the end justify the means?”
²¹