Apocalypse Now

Apocalypse Now on TCM

“Apocalypse Now is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam,” writer-director Francis Ford Coppola said of his infamous war epic in 1979, year of the film’s original release. “And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We had access to too much money, too much equipment; and little by little we went insane.”

After a trouble-plagued production described as a “nightmare” by its participants, and despite charges of overreaching self-indulgence on the part of its creator, Coppola’s film is considered by many to be one of the greatest — if not the greatest — of all anti-war movies. Inspired by Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness, it depicts war as a descent into madness, as the anguished Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is assigned to find and execute Lt. Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), an AWOL Special Forces officer who has set himself up as an all-powerful avenging angel among head-hunting villagers in a Cambodian jungle. As he heads upriver in his search, Willard encounters various horrors of combat, not the least of which is the supermacho, semi-psychotic Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall).

One of several movies about Vietnam released in the late 1970s, Apocalypse Now has a sense of extravagance and daring unusual even for that decade of dynamic filmmaking. In retrospect, its dark vision and polarizing effect among viewers make it one of the most emblematic works of its era.

The project began with George Lucas’s plans to direct a script written by John Milius in 1969 entitled The Psychedelic Soldier, with Coppola as executive producer. Lucas had planned to shoot his film as a faux documentary on location in South Vietnam while the war was still underway. But a production deal with Warner Bros. fell through, and Coppola moved on to co-write and direct The Godfather (1972). The huge success of this Oscar®-winning film gave him the clout to reintroduce the idea of Apocalypse Now, which would be filmed by Coppola’s own American Zoetrope Studios for United Artists, on location in the Philippines.

By this time Saigon had fallen, making the idea of a “documentary” approach obsolete and redefining the story as a reflection on what many saw as the futility and horror of the Vietnam War, as well as Coppola’s own conflicted emotions. Screenwriter Milius had no desire to direct the film himself, and Lucas, busy now with Star Wars (1977), gave Coppola his blessing to direct Apocalypse Now.