Godfather (30 page)

Coppola's predilection for improvisation is well known, and he allowed Dennis Hopper in particular to improvise during his scenes. Coppola cast Hopper as the weird, mercurial photojournalist, an amusing figure inspired in part by Sean Flynn (the son of swashbuckling superstar Errol Flynn), who was a marijuana-smoking photographer during the Vietnam War. It seems that Hopper, who had been on a downhill slide throughout the mid-1970s, was deep into drugs and had been in and out of rehabilitation centers. He himself comments laconically in the documentary, “I was not at the time in the greatest shape.” It was an open secret that Hopper was smoking grass while he was on location, and so he found it easy to play the photojournalist as a spacey, eccentric individual who goes around babbling mindlessly that Kurtz is a great man.
²²

Coppola beefed up Hopper's part during shooting with some additional dialogue. “Francis would come in with a small, white piece of paper, typed from top to bottom with suggested dialogue,” which he would give to Hopper a couple of days in advance of shooting the scene he had just revised. Hopper's key scene is the one in which the photographer welcomes Willard to Kurtz's fortress and rambles on about Kurtz's exploits with his renegade band of warriors. At this juncture Hopper seemed incapable of remembering his lines, and Coppola was irritated when Hopper kept wandering too far from the dialogue as written. “For God's sake,” he roared, “we've done thirty-seven takes, and you've done them all your way! Would you do just one for me, Hopper?” Hopper replied, “Alright. I'll do one for you!” and stuck essentially to Coppola's dialogue for once.
²³

A local tribe of 264 primitive Ifugao Philippine aborigines arrived in late August 1976 to play Kurtz's Montagnard followers, headhunters whom Kurtz has trained as part of his rebel army. Coppola thought that, rather than dress up Filipino extras as aborigines, it would be better to recruit authentic tribesmen. In the documentary Eleanor Coppola says that they actually lived on the Kurtz temple compound set while they worked in the film. The sacrifice of a
carabao,
which takes place during the Kurtz episode, was “a real ritual slaughter performed by the Ifugaos.” As a result,
Apocalypse Now
is one of the few mainstream Hollywood films not to carry a statement in the closing credits that no animal was harmed during the making of the picture. When some filmgoers subsequently complained about the butchering of this water buffalo, Coppola answered that, as with the horse's head scene in
The Godfather
, some people were once again more outraged by the killing of animals than of people in the film.

On September 3, Marlon Brando arrived to play Kurtz for $1 million a week for three weeks. Brando showed up overweight and unprepared. “He was already heavy when I hired him,” says Coppola in the documentary
Hearts of Darkness,
but by now he had ballooned to 250 pounds. “He had promised me he was going to get into shape, but he didn't. So he left me in a tough spot,” because Kurtz is supposed to be wasting away from malaria. Coppola therefore had cinematographer Vittorio Storaro shoot Brando immersed in the cavernous darkness of his murky quarters, where Brando's girth would not be obvious. Actually, Storaro thought it dramatically right to photograph Brando as a disembodied voice so that Kurtz materialized out of the black void. “The Marlon Brando character represents the dark side of civilization,” he explains. “[H] e had to appear as something of a pagan idol.” As a result, Storaro filmed Brando “in the shadows or partially lit” and that gave him an air of mystery.
²⁴

Brando had also promised Coppola that he would read Conrad's “Heart of Darkness,” but he admitted frankly that he had failed to do so. When Coppola remonstrated, “But you said you read it,” Brando answered, “I lied.” Coppola would work out a scene with Brando by improvising during rehearsals, then he would type up the dialogue in final form and shoot the scene the following day. When he attempted to steer the material back toward Conrad, “Brando resisted my doing so, saying it would never work.”
²⁵

One day, when the improvisations with the temperamental Brando were going nowhere, Coppola lamented, “This is like opening night; the curtain goes up and there's no show.” Coppola finally prevailed upon Brando to read “Heart of Darkness.” The next morning Brando announced that the role of Kurtz was now “perfectly clear” to him and that he would play Kurtz
closer to the way Conrad had written the character—which is what Coppola had been angling for all along.
²⁶

In the wake of the other woes that had dogged the production, Coppola suffered another unforeseen misfortune when his leading man suffered a severe heart attack on March 1,1977. Sheen, like Pacino during the shooting of
Godfather II,
had collapsed because of the strain of carrying a demanding role during a strenuous shoot. Moreover, Sheen was working in isolated locations and in stifling heat. In addition, Sheen confessed that he was “smoking and drinking too much,” and that had exacerbated his heart condition.
²⁷

Because of his serious condition, Sheen, an Irish Catholic, received the Last Rites from a Filipino Catholic priest, who did not speak English. A rumor quickly spread that Sheen was about to meet his Maker. The documentary
Hearts of Darkness
contains an excerpt from a taped phone conversation in which Coppola discusses the crisis with one of his staff. (The director of
The Conversation,
a film about wiretapping, had once more bugged himself.) Coppola is absolutely livid that his production assistant, Melissa Mathison, made an unauthorized statement to Barry Hirsch (Coppola's attorney back in Los Angeles) about the precarious state of Sheen's health, which could lead to rumors spreading all over Hollywood like wildfire. “Fucking gossip can ruin us!” he exclaims. Coppola informs his subordinate that he plans to announce that Sheen has been admitted to a Manila hospital suffering from “heat exhaustion.” In order to squelch the spread of further gossip that Sheen is near death, Coppola blurts out, “Marty is not dead … until I say so!”

Some commentators on the documentary have said that Coppola's last remark seems callous. He responds that his purpose was to avoid the panic that would ensue if rumors that Sheen could not finish the picture reached United Artists officials. They might just pull the plug on the production by pressuring Coppola into cutting the film, together with the footage that he had shot up to that point, which was not enough to make a coherent narrative. “The idea was not to tell anyone that the situation was more serious than it was,” he says. “If you view my statement out of context, it seems I didn't care about Marty.”
²⁸

In actual fact, Eleanor Coppola explains in the documentary, Francis was able to shoot around Sheen by filming master shots with Sheen's brother Joseph as a double, shooting over the double's shoulder. Then, when Sheen came back, Coppola shot the close-ups of him, which could be woven into the scenes. Sheen did return to work, groomed and rested, on April 19.

Ziesmer explains how the shooting period of
Apocalypse Now
lasted
an unprecedented 238 days, spread over fifteen months. He is quite candid in detailing how the shooting schedule and the budget of the film steadily got more and more out of hand: “All of us were at fault. First of all, there were too many of us in the Philippines making the movie. All of us worked to please Francis Coppola, the world's most respected film director. If he asked for a hundred explosives, we prepared five hundred … . To please him we felt we could never tell him ‘No,' and in order not to do that we all bought more, hired more, rented more. We got the bigger, the newer, the best.” For example, George Nelson, the Oscar-winning set decorator (
The Godfather
), rented some very expensive antiques for the colonial house in the French plantation sequence, which had to be imported from Paris. Ziesmer concludes ruefully, “No one told Francis about the cost.”
²⁹

When John Milius was not invited to visit the set, he joked that Coppola feared a coup. Actually, the worried UA executives had sent a delegation to check out Coppola's progress at one point, and he feared that UA might yet lobby to have Milius, himself a writer-director, replace him. Admittedly, some of the budget overages were not Coppola's fault, such as natural disasters and the outrageous fees President Marcos was assessing for the use of the Philippine Air Force helicopters. Be that as it may, the budget eventually soared to $31 million, and Coppola was responsible for $14 million in overruns when he film was completed. Just when the press had christened the movie “Apocalypse Never,” Coppola decided to drop some minor scenes from the shooting schedule, and the production wrapped.

The last shooting day was May 21,1977. According to the production log, Coppola addressed the cast and crew at day's end: “I've never in my life seen so many people so happy to be unemployed.”
³⁰
Shortly after, Coppola and company pulled up stakes and went home. Coppola still required an additional $10 million for postproduction. UA, which had by this time sunk $25 million into the production, was reluctant to invest any more. So he had to sink his personal assets into the film, which included mortgaging his home on Pacific Heights in San Francisco, to bring the picture to completion.

One journalist quipped that Coppola had virtually pawned his wedding ring just to finish his picture. Coppola was not amused. He recalls that he was crushed at the time when the press ridiculed
Apocalypse Now
because it seemed to be an out-of-control “financial boondoggle.” Why was it a crime, he wondered, for him to spend his own money on a serious war picture, when the studios were willing to bankroll movies “about a big gorilla (
King Kong
) or a jerk who flies across the sky (
Superman
)?”
³¹

Press reports about the turbulent shooting period continued to circulate long after the film wrapped. One dispatch concerned corpses of North
Vietnamese regulars killed by Kurtz's renegade army, which are strewn around the grounds of his temple compound. It was alleged that there were some real cadavers mixed in with the dummy corpses on the Kurtz compound set. The film's press office vigorously denied this news story. More precisely, Dean Tavoularis points out that he had obtained a lot of bones from a restaurant, which he piled up in Kurtz's courtyard. When the crew noticed the stench and the rats crawling over the bones, one of them surmised that they were human remains, which was decidedly not the case. (There is a close-up in the documentary of a pile of these bones with flies buzzing around them that is not in the finished film.)

The temple set was modeled on Angkor Wat, an ancient temple still preserved in Angkor, Cambodia. Tavoularis explains that Kurtz's macabre compound, complete with its decaying temple, was meant to reflect Kurtz's descent into madness and barbarism—and Conrad's vision of the depths of human depravity: there are altars covered with plastic skulls as well as heaps of bones scattered around the set, and an eerie mist that envelops the compound. “I was living in the house of death that I was making,” Tavoularis remembers, and growing depressed because of the grotesque atmosphere as time went on. The whole picture, he concluded, “was a nightmare.”
³²

A much more unsettling report in the press about the production stated that Coppola had had a nervous breakdown late in the shooting period. This news dispatch had been given some credence when Coppola himself introduced
Apocalypse Now
in a press conference at the Cannes International Film Festival in May 1979, which I was present to hear. He made the following declaration, which was widely quoted thereafter: “
Apocalypse Now
is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, had access to too much money, too much equipment; and little by little we went insane. After a while, I was a little frightened, because I was getting deeper in debt and no longer recognized the kind of movie I was making. The film was making itself, or the jungle was making it for me.” He seemed to be saying that the film had been made in just the kind of muddle that had doomed the U.S. Army in Vietnam.

Eleanor Coppola in her diary confirms the serious bout of depression Coppola experienced during filming. She records on March 14, 1977—almost a year to the day after principal photography had begun—that Coppola suffered what she termed “a sort of nervous breakdown.”
³³
He was rehearsing a scene on the set, when suddenly he sank to his knees and began to weep. Then he suffered an “epileptic seizure, thrashing about on the floor and foaming at the mouth.” He was delirious and was afraid he was going
to die. His final request was that George Lucas should finish
Apocalypse Now
.
³⁴
Two days later he was back on the set, as if nothing had happened.

In discussing this incident, Coppola states emphatically, “I am an epileptic,” and the seizure he suffered on the set of
Apocalypse Now
was genuine.
³⁵
He also admits that he pretended to have a fit while he argued with the studio brass about casting Brando in
The Godfather
. But that was a gag, he says, and the Paramount executives present knew it.

More recently, David Thomson has written that Coppola “ran into a ‘Heart of Darkness' of his own while making the picture: He was out of control … began to use drugs,” and became involved with another woman. Thomson quotes Brando as stating that during shooting Coppola was “alternately depressed, nervous, and frantic.”
³⁶

In addressing himself to Thomson's remarks, Coppola states, “To say I began using drugs” during production “is a great overstatement.” He confesses that he had begun chain-smoking cigarettes, which he had never done before. “At the worst I began smoking marijuana” during filming and postproduction, “but that was the extent of it.”
³⁷
In short, he never developed the sort of drug addiction that plagued Dennis Hopper in the mid-1970s.